This 3-yr-old crypto firm recorded 1,000% surge in revenue to $1.02 bn in 2021

Riding the crypto boom during Covid-19, the three-year-old Bahamas-based crypto derivatives exchange FTX Trading Ltd. recorded a 1,000% rise in its revenue from $89 million to $1.02 billion in 2021, mainly driven by its innovative trading business and flurry of acquisitions done globally. The company's profit for the period also rose from just $17 million to $388 million.

In the first quarter of 2022, the U.S.-based Sam Bankman-Fried-led FTX recorded a revenue of $270 million and the crypto firm is also eying over $1 billion revenue in full fiscal year, leaked financials of the privately held company, accessed by a global business media platform, shows.

About 60% of FTX's revenue came from futures trading fees, and 16% from spot trading. Despite a blockbuster performance during 2021 and Q1 of 2022, it's unclear how the company performed during the second quarter of 2022, a period when crypto prices came down crashing to new lows.

Launched in May 2019, FTX is backed by Alameda Research, a $100 million AUM quantitative crypto trading that was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. The firm accounts for 6% of FTX's exchange volumes., trading over $600 million and $1 billion per day.

FTX offers products including industry-first derivatives, options, volatility products and leveraged tokens. The company was co-founded by MIT graduates Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. While Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk before founding FTX, Gary was a software engineer at Google prior to founding FTX.

The company has of late resorted to a lending spree, eying companies facing a liquidity crunch and acquiring distressed assets to build a fleet of global subsidiaries. Its recent acquisitions include Robinhood (7.6% stake), BlockFi, Digital Assets DA AG, Switzerland, and IFS Group and Hive, Australia. It has also bought around 15 smaller companies across Germany, Turkey, and UAE, among other countries.

The 30-year-old multibillionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, during an exclusive interview with Fortune global magazine, had recently said the crypto winter, a period of major downturns in the global crypto market, has already shown the worst part of it, and that it'll pass soon. His net worth is valued at $11.5 billion, as per Fortune data.

Meanwhile, the global crypto prices are in the negative territory today, with most cryptocurrencies trading in the red in the past 24 hours. The world's biggest cryptocurrency Bitcoin is down 0.51% to $21,273.80, while the Ethereum blockchain is down 2.99% to $1,571.94. USDT is 0.03%; Solana 3.34%; Dogecoin 3.74%; and Shiba Inu down by 0.76%.

This year, the carnage on the Wall Street impacted global cryptocurrencies the most, with a number of them seeing a price erosion between 85% to 100% from their all-time highs. Topping the chart is Internet Computer, whose price has eroded 99% after falling from $750 to $6. There are 34 currencies that saw values erode by more than 90%, while 26 currencies lost between 85% to 90%.