Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of the FTX exchange. Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, would swoop in with cash to keep the company afloat if it failed.
SBF seems to be getting a rescue of his own.
On Tuesday, the world's largest cryptocurrencies exchange, Binance, announced it had signed a non-binding agreement to acquire FTX.
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The acquisition is dependent on the results of a due diligence investigation. The exchange's non-U.S. operations are only accounted for by FTX.com's operations. The FTX.US exchange is run by Bankman- Fried.
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Over the weekend, SBF and CZ traded barbs on social media, as the latter announced that they would liquidate any holdings of the FTX's own token due to recent revelations. Over a period of 72 hours, FTX experienced $6 billion in user withdrawals and the Ftt token crashed in value.
Ian Allison, a reporter for coinDesk, and Mike Burgersberg, a journalist with the newsletter Dirty Bubble Media, were the two people who reported on those revelations. The majority of Alameda's assets were in FTX's own token and there were clear liquidity problems. Burgersberg questioned if SBF's empire was actually bankrupt.
The anonymous Burgersberg was one of the first to raise the alarm about the collapse of Celsius and Voyager, and he has gained a lot of attention in the past year. The founder saw Burgersberg's report and decided to cash out of FTT too.
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FTX was in talks to raise $1 billion just six weeks ago. In January, the exchange raised $400 million. It is being sold to its biggest competitor.
The news has caused a domino effect in the industry, as it has become the norm.
It's difficult to tell the story without mentioning that this is happening on election day in the U.S. He promised as much as $1 billion towards the elections in four years. SBF spent as much as $40 million on mostly Democratic campaigns, but that's less than $1 billion.
It's possible that Democrats won't count on the rest of SBF's $1 billion coming in any time soon.