Former FTX chief govt Sam Bankman-Fried (C) arrives to enter a plea earlier than US District Judge Lewis Kaplan within the Manhattan federal courtroom, New York, January 3, 2023.
Timothy A. Clary | AFP | Getty Images
His publish offers his perspective on the collapse of FTX and his hedge fund Alameda Research, and contains purported FTX and Alameda monetary metrics, caveated as “JUST AN ESTIMATE.”
In the start of 2022, for instance, Bankman-Fried says he estimated Alameda’s complete internet belongings at $99 billion. By October, he believed that his hedge fund’s internet belongings had fallen to $10 billion. He pinned the collapse on a broader market downturn, even evaluating his FTT token’s efficiency to that of Tesla, bitcoin and the Invesco QQQ, an ETF that tracks the Nasdaq 100.
Bankman-Fried in contrast the efficiency of his change’s token in opposition to the Invesco QQQ and different belongings in his Substack publish.
Bankruptcy legal professionals, federal prosecutors and regulators have contradicted most of the claims Bankman-Fried made in his publish.
Regulators and prosecutors allege that neither FTX nor Alameda had been wholly legit companies however had been devices of Bankman-Fried’s fraud.
FTX’s restructuring officers have stated the companies confronted important and inexplicable money shortfalls after FTX filed for chapter in November.
The case in opposition to Bankman-Fried was constructed with the assistance of his longtime executives Caroline Ellison and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, each of whom pleaded responsible to fees of fraud. Bankman-Fried’s publish didn’t acknowledge their cooperation with federal probes.
In his publish, Bankman-Fried additionally famous that different crypto corporations have been “blown out.” He didn’t acknowledge that three of these corporations — BlockFi, Genesis and Gemini —allegedly suffered due to FTX’s collapse.
Many of his claims had been ones he is made earlier than, together with that FTX US remained solvent, that Alameda’s liquidity disaster was not as a consequence of misconduct however due to broader market turbulence, and that FTX International and Alameda had been wholly legit, worthwhile companies.
The former FTX CEO additionally pointed to a Nov. 6 tweet from Binance’s Zhao because the fruits of an “extremely effective months-long PR campaign against FTX.”
Zhao has denied these claims. “FTX killed themselves […] because they stole billions of dollars,” the Binance CEO tweeted in December.
At the top of the publish, Bankman-Fried doubled down. “All of which is to say: no funds were stolen,” the 30-year-old wrote.