Nansen CEO Alex Svanjevic noted that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) would have become one of the most valuable portfolio companies in technology history to date if his company had completed the acquisition of FTX in November 2022.
A Forbes analysis released in May showed that Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal and FTX-related investments, including an 8% stake in Anthropic, 5% of Cursor, and exposure to SpaceX, would be worth $100 billion today.
What exactly did Czechoslovakia get away from?
Before the FTX collapse, the portfolio built by Bankman-Fried was surprisingly good. According to Forbes Other reports included an 8% stake in Anthropic, a 5% stake in Cursor, exposure to SpaceX, and other holdings such as Robinhood and Solana.
In November 2022, Binance pulled out of an acquisition deal with the company, and shortly after, The exchange collapsed.
If Binance had completed the FTX purchase, those investments would have moved to Binance’s balance sheet.
Instead, they ended up in bankruptcy court, where FTX sold them to pay off creditors. The Cursor stake was sold back to the founders for just $200,000 in 2023, but after SpaceX bought Cursor at a $60 billion valuation, that stake is now worth about $3 billion.
FTX has invested about $500 million in Anthropic. Today, the AI company’s value has risen to over $600 billion, and some estimates put it closer to $900 billion. That single share could be worth more than $70 billion today.
Bankman-Fried had raised about $60 million in SOL when it was around $8, with a peak value of about $21 billion.
Nansen CEO Alex Svanjevic Published portfolio breakdown to
Rory O’Driscoll, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, said Bankman-Fried had an amazing ability to pick winning companies before the AI boom.
Why did CZ walk away from the acquisition deal with FTX?
Chow’s memoirsThe book “Money Freedom,” published in April 2026, explains that Bankman-Fried called him in November 2022 and asked for billions of dollars “nonchalantly, as if he were ordering a bologna sandwich.”
Chow said he signed a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) but never planned to actually move forward with the deal because he was not interested in owning FTX or helping SBF. He said the letter of intent was “just a formality” so his team could look at FTX’s numbers and see if they could help protect customers.
The deal collapsed within 72 hours, and Binance publicly withdrew from the acquisition on November 9, 2022, citing “mishandling of customer funds and alleged US agency investigations.”
Zhao also wrote that when Carolyn Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, publicly offered to buy back Binance’s FTT token holdings at $22 each, she made a “huge mistake.”
By showing the market where the minimum price was, professional traders started selling the token and pushed it below that level. FTT dropped from $22 to $5 in three days, and about $6 billion in withdrawals were drained from FTX.
Zhao mentioned in a February 2026 appearance on the All-In Podcast that Bankman-Fried was lobbying against Binance in Washington, DC. Despite this, he stressed that his decision to sell Binance FTT holdings was not a planned attack.
Ironically, Binance’s holdings of FTT Labs, once worth $580 million, became “essentially worthless” after the collapse, Zhao wrote.
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