The FTX estate, the frozen wreckage of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed empire, still holds significant positions in Solana, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, alongside a surprisingly valuable stake in AI firm Anthropic. What is clear is that buried inside the bankruptcy proceedings is an accidental case study: some of SBF highest-conviction non-crypto bets actually survived, and even thrived, after the collapse. The problem was never the assets. It was everything built around them.

If you strip away the fraud, the commingling of customer funds, and the reckless use of FTT as fake collateral, what remains looks a lot like the skeleton of a genuinely strong crypto portfolio strategy, one that we can actually learn.

DISCOVER: 15+ Upcoming Listings to Watch in 2025

What Would SBF Portfolio Look Like If He’d Played Crypto Straight?

The FTX estate’s surviving assets tell a clear story. SOL, BTC, and ETH held value through the collapse and recovered. The tokens SBF actually launched, the so-called “Sam coins” like MAPS, OXY, and SERUM, went to near zero. Over 90% of Alameda Research’s book was concentrated in illiquid, self-issued tokens used as collateral for leveraged bets.

Market Cap

A responsible version of this conviction set looks completely different. Analysis of the estate’s holdings suggests a rehabilitated allocation would have looked something like this: 60% BTC and ETH as the structural backbone, 20% SOL as the high-conviction infrastructure bet, and 20% liquid cash or stablecoins held in reserve to buy dips without forced selling.

If that structure had been in place in 2022, the portfolio would have weathered the crypto downturn badly but survivably. SOL dropped over 95% from its peak but has since staged a significant recovery.

The Anthropic stake drives that point home even harder. The FTX estate’s investment in Anthropic has proven more valuable than most of the crypto projects SBF personally championed. Diversifying outside a single ecosystem isn’t just good advice. It’s what actually survived.

DISCOVER: 10+ Next Crypto to 100X In 2025

What the FTX Estate Teaches Us About Risk Management

The three-tier logic holds at any scale. Bitcoin is the foundation, the deepest liquidity, and the clearest institutional adoption. It’s the safety tier.

Ethereum is the second pillar. It’s the credibility tier, the smart contract layer that every serious developer builds on, with real revenue, real usage, and real network effects. If BTC is the digital gold argument, ETH is the digital infrastructure argument. Both belong in a beginner’s portfolio before anything else gets considered.

Market Cap

SOL is the high-conviction bet. It carries more risk than BTC or ETH, moves faster in both directions, and requires you to genuinely believe in its long-term positioning as a fast, low-cost chain.

Then allow 5% of your portfolio for a moonbag, it’s the kind of coin you pick that has the chance to do 100-200X in a short period of time, but also the one you are willing to lose, it’s a gamble that can be predicted with some on-chain knowledge.

The risk management principle is simple: speculative assets should never exceed what you can afford to lose entirely without changing your financial situation.

Liquid Bet of The Day

Bitcoin is safe, Ethereum is the second pillar, and Solana is a high conviction bet. Where is the moonbag? Institutional buyers like FTX have all these in their risk management.

LiquidChain ($LIQUID) is currently in presale at $0.01451, having raised close to $700k to date. The project is building a Layer 3 cross-chain liquidity infrastructure that fuses Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity into a single execution environment, essentially allowing developers to deploy once and tap all three ecosystems simultaneously.

Its Unified Liquidity Layer and Single-Step Execution architecture address one of DeFi’s most persistent headaches: fragmented liquidity across chains.

If the thesis interests you, research LiquidChain here.

Exclusive for 99Bitcoin’s Readers: Earn $10 USDC When you Sign Up for Binance

Follow 99Bitcoins on X (Twitter) For the Latest Market Updates and Subscribe on YouTube For Daily Expert Market Analysis.

Why you can trust 99Bitcoins

10+ Years

Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.

90hr+

Weekly Research

100k+

Monthly readers

50+

Expert contributors

2000+

Crypto Projects Reviewed

Google News Icon
Follow 99Bitcoins on your Google News Feed
Get the latest updates, trends, and insights delivered straight to your fingertips. Subscribe now!
Subscribe now
Akiyama Felix
Akiyama Felix
Crypto Journalist

Felix Akiyama is a True Veteran, Originating From the Crypto Class of 2018. A former visual effect artist turned to onchain degen and Vitalik Loving ETH maxi. Felix is notable in the VFX world for being one of the few... Read More

Free Bitcoin Crash Course

  • Enjoyed by over 100,000 students.
  • One email a day, 7 days in a row.
  • Short and educational, guaranteed!

The World’s #1 Crypto Exchange

  • Up to 150x leverage for major coins
  • Various staking options for hundreds of coins
  • Frequent events, promotions, and airdrops
The World’s #1 Crypto Exchange
Back to top