A few years after graduating from college, Sam Bankman-Fried grew worried he was not taking enough risks. So the son of two Stanford Law School professors quit his Wall Street job and in 2017 started a cryptocurrency hedge fund, setting off a sequence of events that culminated on Thursday with him being sentenced to 25 years in prison over what federal prosecutors called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Two years after launching a hedge fund, Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019, an exchange that let users buy and sell digital assets such as bitcoin. Cryptocurrency valuations surged, propelling Bankman-Fried to a net worth of $26 billion by October 2021, according to Forbes magazine, before he turned 30 – the 25th richest person in America. He parlayed that wealth into political clout, becoming one of the biggest donors to Democratic candidates and causes ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections – though he also donated to Republicans through straw donors to mask his involvement, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said on …