TGIW! Dan DeFrancesco checking in for this quasi-Friday ahead of the long holiday weekend. (If you have to work on Friday, apologies.)
Quick programming note: The newsletter will be off on Thursday and Friday, returning (most likely a few pounds heavier) on Monday.
Lots of interesting stories today, including why a top Wall Street firm got a rare "sell" rating, KKR cancels its plans for a new office, and a fun "Where are they now?" for our first set of rising stars.
But first, where do we go from here?
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1. Trust me, I'm in crypto
FTX's list of creditors is a seemingly bottomless pit, growing from over 100,000 to more than a million to now "millions," according to a recent bankruptcy hearing.
It will take months, or even years, to sort through the wreckage and win back some of the billions of dollars that have gone missing, but there is one debt that is already long gone.
Trust in the crypto industry — be it with Wall Street firms, politicians, venture capitalists, or the general public — is destroyed thanks to FTX's downfall.
It's a bitter pill to swallow when one considers the hard-fought progress crypto had made on Wall Street in recent years.
But can one incident — albeit a big one — evaporate goodwill built up over all those years?
Insider's Morgan Chittum, Bianca Chan, Carter Johnson, Rebecca Ungarino, and Hayley Cuccinello (talk about a dream team!) canvassed more than a dozen Wall Street insiders to get a sense of where traditional firms stand on their crypto plans.
Their story, which you can read here, is an indication of how even those not financially impacted by the FTX blowup have still been battered and bruised.
Meanwhile, firms hoping to bridge the gap between Wall Street and crypto have been put in an impossible spot, answering for another's sins.
"Crypto has now fallen into what I would call a crisis of trust, a crisis of confidence. And that's directly because who was arguably ... the next J.P. Morgan, turned out to be an entire fraud. And so that has then had this unfortunate contagion that of course everybody else in crypto has to also be doing something nefarious, something untoward, etcetera," one crypto executive whose firm regularly deals with Wall Street recently told me.
It's a difficult position to be in, as crypto skeptics have been given the ultimate trump card. Like a toddler constantly asking their parent "Why?" those opposed to crypto have a simple rebuttal to any potential plans in the space.
"What about SBF and FTX?"