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Update Thursday, 10:44 a.m. ET:
Sam Bankman-Fried has issued an apology for the financial implosion of FTX that has rocked the crypto community this past week.
In the Twitter thread, SBF took responsibility for making two grave miscalculations that led FTX to falsely believe that it was more fortified against a bank run than it was.
Bankman-Fried also apologized for not being transparent about the trouble that FTX was facing. “I should have said more. I’m sorry–I was slammed with things to do and didn’t give updates to you all,” he wrote.
According to Bankman-Fried, with the Binance deal scuttled, FTX will spend the rest of the week trying to raise liquidity. According to an FTX staff memo, reported by Reuters, SBF has been in talks with crypto magnate Justin Sun, founder of crypto token Tron.
But it will be an uphill battle. FTX’s investors have already begun to jump ship: On Wednesday, major venture firm Sequoia Capital said it was marking its $214 million investment in FTX down to zero.
Update Wednesday, 4:19 p.m. ET:
Just one day after Binance signed a tentative agreement to take over rival exchange FTX—and just hours into the due diligence process—Binance said it will walk away from the deal.
“Our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help,” Binance said in a statement, which also cited “reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations” among the reasons for bailing on FTX.
The move did not come as a huge surprise: Earlier today, Binance’s chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, shared a memo sent to global staffers noting that the takeover was “not a win for us.” FTX has been facing a liquidity crunch since Sunday, when a leaked balance sheet kicked off a bank run. Its crypto token, FTT, has lost roughly 3 billion in market capitalization within the past few days.
Binance’s reversal now leaves FTX in dire straits. Prior to the deal, FTX reportedly approached another exchange, OKCoin, about discussing an acquisition, which OKCoin declined.
Update Tuesday, 12:40 p.m. ET:
A day after Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted that “FTX is fine” in response to rumors of insolvency, news broke that Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has reached a tentative deal to acquire FTX.com amid an apparent liquidity crisis. Bankman-Fried confirmed the deal in a tweet on Tuesday, along with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, or CZ. You can read their full statements here and here.
Original story:
On Monday morning, Sam Bankman-Fried, the whiz behind the curtain at crypto trading firm Alameda Research and the founder of the world’s second-biggest crypto exchange platform, FTX, tweeted out to his followers: “A competitor is trying to go after us with false rumors. FTX is fine. Assets are fine.”
It didn’t exactly inspire confidence among followers, who replied in memes:
What’s going on? Why was SBF—as he’s nicknamed—on the defensive?
In short, back-to-back bits of bad news for FTX have sparked rumors that the crypto giant—which has become larger than life somewhere between endorsements from Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, and Larry David—might be teetering on the brink of insolvency.
The story traces back to Alameda Research, which is the sister company to FTX that is technically run independently. However, a leaked balance sheet from Alameda, which was reported by CoinDesk last Tuesday, showed a suspiciously close relationship with FTX: In particular, the trading firm owned heaps of FTX’s own crypto token, FTT. While there’s nothing in the rulebook outlawing such an arrangement, it signaled to investors that Alameda was banked heavily on a coin its own sister company had created—as opposed to a truly independent asset, such as fiat currency or another crypto token—raising concerns that the firm was built on a house of cards.
According to the balance sheet, as of June 30, Alameda’s assets totaled a massive $14.6 billion, with the lion’s share of $3.7 billion made up of “unlocked FTT” (FTT tokens that can be spent), and another $2.16 billion in “FTT collateral.”
Additionally, it had $8 billion in liabilities, with $7.4 billion of that in loans.
“It’s fascinating to see that the majority of the net equity in the Alameda business is actually FTX’s own centrally controlled and printed-out-of-thin-air token,” Cory Klippsten, a crypto CEO and Bitcoin proponent, told CoinDesk at the time of the leak.
On Sunday, Alameda Research chief executive Caroline Ellison responded by tweeting that the balance sheet paints only half the picture, and that Alameda has another “>$10b of assets that aren’t reflected there.” Furthermore, she said that “given the tightening in the crypto credit space this year, we’ve returned most of our loans by now.”
Still, that didn’t stop crypto-Twitter from drawing comparisons to Three Arrows Capital, the crypto hedge fund that crashed and burned in June after disastrous bets on the ill-fated Terra-Luna cryptocurrency and the doomed Celsius network. (Meanwhile, another report from a Substack investigator, published on Halloween, suggested that Bankman-Fried’s FTX had close ties to Celsius as well.) Others flashed back to Terra-Luna itself—another system that relied on synergy between two mutually successful enterprises.
But far more damagingly, another high-profile tweeter seemed to have taken note of the balance sheet: Changpeng Zhao—or “CZ”—the chief executive of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. On Sunday, CZ tweeted that Binance would begin liquidating all of its FTT “due to recent revelations.”
In no world is that good for FTX, but its vanguard claims it can hold steady through the storm. Ellison tweeted that Alameda would buy back any FTT that Binance would sell at $22 per coin (roughly its current price, according to CoinGecko), thus keeping the coin’s value afloat. Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried added that “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings” and has been “processing all withdrawals.” The downfall of Terra-Luna and Celsius, of course, bled from their inability to cash out customers during a bank run.
While SBF implied that Binance was a “competitor trying to go after us”—presumably in fanning flames of fire by publicly declaring its liquidation of FTX’s FTT while alluding to the leaked balance sheet in the same breath—CZ denied any such scheme. “Regarding speculation as to whether this is a move against a competitor, it is not,” he wrote on Twitter. “Our industry is in [its] nascency and every time a project publicly fails, it hurts every user and every platform.”
We’ve reached out to FTX for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
Since the leaked balance sheet surfaced, FTT has lost $400 million in market capitalization as traders sold the token.
What’s next? Stay tuned . . .
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