Sam Bankman-Fried told the court in testimony on Friday that when FTX was in its infancy, he planned to sell the company to Binance, in part because he was worried that he would not be able to recruit customers.
SBF believes that FTX can be built as a place specifically to provide services for margin traders, and there are basically no companies in the industry doing this business at the time, so he expects exchanges like Binance may be interested in buying FTX.
SBF told jurors he was ultimately convinced he could grow FTX well, even though he believed the exchange had only a 20% chance of success.
“Considering that the largest exchanges at the time were multi-billion dollar companies, even a 20% chance was a huge opportunity,” he said.