I learned how they fucked it up so badly. The FTX CEO- the one who was trying to put a trustworthy face on crypto! - used the capital held by FTX to cover trades on a crypto trading company also owned by the CEO.
The FTX debacle started earlier this month, when Ian Allison at CoinDesk published a story showing that the main asset on the books at Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, was a digital token issued by FTX; market watchers took this as evidence that Alameda might be using FTX assets to cover its trades. A drop in the value of the token would imperil both firms, and that drop soon materialized. The chief executive of Binance, one of FTX’s main rivals, announced that Binance was liquidating its holdings of the FTX token. Others followed suit. FTX investors began to pull their money from the exchange, causing a kind of bank run. Binance considered stepping in to support FTX, but pulled out after doing due diligence on the embattled company. After that, the exchange behemoth did not so much collapse as evaporate into thin air.
Bolding for emphasis.
I've been reading a bit more on this (my unhealthy fascination with crap must be sated), and there's something that I sort of knew, but didn't really think about it too hard... A lot of news outlets have been calling this "a run on the bank," but FTX wasn't a bank. It explicitly promised the users that their funds were theirs and would not be used for speculation, and that's exactly what FTX did. This was a criminal enterprise from the start.
They do not (or should not) do bank-style lending, so even a very acute surge of withdrawals should not create a liquidity strain. FTX had specifically promised customers it would never lend out or otherwise use the crypto they entrusted to the exchange.
[...]
In reality, the funds were sent to the intimately linked trading firm Alameda Research, where they were, it seems, simply gambled away. This is, in the simplest terms, theft at a nearly unprecedented scale.
"He dwelt at length on how doctors erroneously claimed in the early days of the railways that the rattling of trains was likely to cause sexual excitement, and something about nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners."
After FTX declared bankruptcy, the entire FTX.us domain was redirected to a page providing information on the bankruptcy proceedings.
However, NFTs that had been minted on the FTX platform relied on metadata from an API at that domain, meaning that the NFTs are now pointing to broken links. Owners of these NFTs can still see that the NFT exists, but images no longer work—even when viewing the NFTs in their own wallets, or when listing them for sale on other platforms.
The former CEO of failed cryptocurrency firm FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the U.S. government, U.S. and Bahamian authorities said Monday.
The arrest was made Monday after the U.S. filed criminal charges that are expected to be unsealed Tuesday, according to U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. Bankman-Fried had been under criminal investigation by U.S. and Bahamian authorities following the collapse last month of FTX.
Whatever he thought he was doing by going on so many interviews didn't work, or at least didn't keep him from being arrested.
This is pretty incredible. Sort of awe-inspiring in its awfulness. He is trying mightily to contort himself into the Trump/Kavanaugh/Rittenhouse mold of the whining white man, but fails. I wish he'd actually given this testimony, but being arrested before he was able to do so might turn out to be better for him in the long run.
Oh my, the phrase “Why ask for permission when you can ask for forgiveness.” comes to mind when reading that. He seems to want cop to lesser crimes under the idea that he’s just some kid in over his head and he’s sorry about that.
It's pretty incredible. There's this through-line of "I had people still willing to invest in FTX, and they totally would have given us liquidity and saved the company. I never should have let this go to Chapter 11." I have trouble believing this is actually true, I think, if these investors are real, their interest would evaporate as soon as they saw the books.
There's also this petulant child thing as pointed out by previous posters. He wants to make John Ray some sort of bad guy. Bankman-Fried recalls how he left messages, "I have information, call me back," and Ray never did. If he was so interested in helping the company and providing this information, he should have just handed it over.
I'm also not surprised he didn't bother to respond. Ray's job isn't to find new angel investors and rebuild FTX. His job is unwind the company's assets and return as much as he can back to the stakeholders. Bankman-Fried is still trying to sell the con.
Bankman-Fried allowed Bahamian people to withdraw from FTX in the 24 hours between the bankruptcy and him losing his position as CEO. I wonder if he did this for self-preservation reasons.
Bankman-Fried allowed Bahamian people to withdraw from FTX in the 24 hours between the bankruptcy and him losing his position as CEO. I wonder if he did this for self-preservation reasons.
I’ve been devouring youtube videos on the subject, and one thing not being talked about enough in the news is Alameda Research, a group of ten people including Fried in the Bahamas that had one way backdoor access to FTX to manipulate things. AR is both pretty complex and quite disorganized in a manner that makes me think they left the exchange open longer specifically to give AR more time.
I’m also leaning towards the ‘hack’ that lost a bunch of money right before the shutdown being someone from Alameda Research that was purposefully sitting on or developed an exploit.
You know what they say: if you do something wrong, delete all the evidence as quickly as possible. Or, if you have one, get your assistant to do it, as we imagine someone as rich, famous, and probably embarrassed as forcibly retired FTX ambassador and un-forcibly un-retired NFL quarterback Tom Brady probably would.
Gawker has confirmed that in the wake of the FTX implosion, the decorated athlete has deleted all Twitter evidence of his partnership with the embattled cryptocurrency exchange, for whom he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen, were public — and equity-paid — faces.
Brady is a piece of shit but lots of athletes and other famous people pushed the Ponzi coins as well.
I saw a short/reel/tiktok/whocankeeptrack yesterday of Shark Tank's "Mr. Wonderful" testifying that it is his belief that Binance engineered FTXs downfall and I haven't been following closely enough to evaluate the claim but I feel like it has been vastly underreported/advertised that Mr. Shark Tank seems to have been so deeply involved in this clusterfuck.
So I don’t know what you saw, of course, but I looked about and found a story about it.
Quote:
Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, played an early part in the collapse of mega exchange FTX last month. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced that he would be selling the exchanges holdings of FTX’s native token, a move that triggered a liquidity crisis. Days later, FTX filed for bankruptcy.
If that’s his reasoning then I’d say the claim is garbage.
Exchanges aren’t banks and it was only possible to have a liquidity crisis because of all the Ponzi scheming/fraud they were doing as specious reasons talks about upthread.
I mean if your competition fucked you over because they realized you were frauding, Im not sure it’s their fault.
Also, Zhao has fucking scoreboard. He thought FTX was a shit asset and was correct.
Shark Tank guy might also be doing some light xenophobia.
It’s possible, even likely, that Binance was doing things that may have been anti-competitive to put FTX in trouble. If they were, it appears to be with the intent of acquiring the business. FTX was such a fraudulent company that Binance backed out of their offer.
At most, Binance was the gust of wind that finally knocked down the house of cards.
Interesting. It sounds like a lie, also a bit of xenophobia.
How does a ~20% shareholder have an ability to block FTX's ability to comply with regulations? Whose funds did Bankman-Fried use to buy out Zhao/Binance?
If any of this was true, Bankman-Fried for all his "genius" was out-maneuvered by Zhao. I'll bet he was initially super excited to sell FTT to Zhao because that brought real cash into FTX and kept the con going. His own (probably fraudulent) business practices made the company illiquid after Zhao sold off his FTT holdings.
One thing I think O'Leary is correct on: regulation is the holy grail for these crypto companies. Most institutionalized investors can't even consider investment in crypto because it's an unregulated market. But based on everything we know, FTX wasn't even close to being in any kind of compliance.
Essentially FTX’s value was looking like it was backed by Alemeda Research, who in turn was backed by FTX’s token. It’s possible CZ had other hints things were going south, but once it looked like the company was built on a foundation of circular logic he pulled his money, which then created a bank run that FTX should have been able to handle if it was the stable platform it claimed.
Frankly the only smart looking person here (besides all those that chose not to play) is CZ who seems to be the first one to act to protect his money as soon as things got fishy, while also dealing a potential blow to the competition, everyone else really believed FTX was taking them to the moon on empty promises, case in point,
Outflows from Binance accelerated to $6bn in the first half of this week, while accounting firm Mazars has halted its work on crucial “proof of reserves” reporting, as the crypto exchange battles to avert a crisis of confidence.
From Hacker News:
Quote:
and
Quote:
All of the above and:
5) Binance does significant money laundering for Iran and Russia, so any complete picture of their balance sheet would invite sanctions and international retribution.
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Re: Blockchain, NFTs, and Web 3.0
If he was so interested in helping the company and providing this information, he should have just handed it over.
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