More from Crypto collapse: FTX’s fall is one piece of a long, cold, contagious crypto winter
I’m dying to know which QuickBooks accounting software plan FTX was subscribed to. “Simple start” for $15 a month, or did it splurge on “Advanced” for $100?
The House Financial Services Committee is staying the course and continuing on with its planned hearing on the collapse of the disgraced crypto exchange FTX today.
Founder and former chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested last night, so he won’t be joining us, but the Wall Street Journal just published a copy of everything he planned to say.
Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, won’t be teaching at Stanford next quarter.
The two taught at Stanford Law School. This news was first reported by the Stanford Daily, and Fried told those journalists that it has “nothing to do with anything else going on.” Just a normal retirement, sure.
[Intelligencer]
What happens when a story has impact?
Me, in May, writing about failed crypto: “Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, listed Luna and Terra on his exchange despite having a pretty good idea of what was going to happen.”
The New York Times, today: “Federal prosecutors are investigating whether FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies this past spring, leading to their collapse and creating a domino effect that eventually caused the implosion of his own cryptocurrency exchange last month, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.”
Man, if SBF cut the brakes of the car he was riding in, I am never going to stop laughing.
[The New York Times]
Incredible lede:
At a dazzling new hotspot in the center of Miami’s crypto scene, the remains of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed empire are stuffed in trash bags.
Hundreds of FTX Miami T-shirts. A framed FTX-branded Heat jersey. A poster signed by chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen in an FTX-sponsored tournament. Navy FTX bean bags, evoking where the now-bankrupt exchange’s whiz kid claims he slept.
You should click through for the photos alone, but the party reporting is top-notch, too.
Signature, a big name in crypto banking, is backing away from the sector after this year’s turmoil. Almost a quarter of its $103 billion in customer deposits was crypto-industry-related as of November, The Financial Times reports.
Despite recent bad news around crypto, some people still think it’s the next big thing.
Enter this $279 credit card-sized Ledger Stax crypto wallet, “a usable way for you to take control of cryptocurrency and digital collectibles.”
It has an E Ink screen that wraps around its spine and wireless Qi charging, but its most important attribute is name recognition — it’s designed by Tony Fadell, who led the team creating the iPod. That’s supposed to suggest that, like the iPod, this will also become popular. We’ll see!
Silvergate Capital, a famous crypto bank, has filed a letter with the SEC from its CEO, Alan Lane. Apparently, he is using it to correct what he terms “speculation — and misinformation — being spread by short sellers and other opportunists.”
Okay! Unfortunately for Lane, this question raises more questions than it answers, such as what his “extensive due diligence” on FTX and Alameda consisted of!
I loved this chewy piece by Zeke Faux at Bloomberg about Sam Bankman-Fried, crime, and media manipulation. Faux goes into detail about what he missed, what he noticed, and what he thinks happened at FTX. Here’s a taste:
Two people with knowledge of the matter told me that Ellison, by then the sole head of Alameda, had told her side of the story to her staff amid the crisis. Ellison said that she, Bankman-Fried and his two top lieutenants—Gary Wang and Nishad Singh—had discussed the shortfall. Instead of admitting Alameda’s failure, they decided to use FTX customer funds to cover it, according to the people. If that’s true, all four executives would’ve knowingly committed fraud.
As The Block points out, the fall of FTX has also caused a collapse in the now-defunct Serum DeFi exchange, a project backed by FTX, Alameda Research, and the Solana Foundation.
Update authority for its code was held by insiders at FTX, which has left developers unable to address known security risks.
Now the project is promoting a community fork called OpenBook, and says the future of its SRM token — which once had a market cap of over $1 billion but is now down to around $60 million — is “uncertain.”
Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures had a 19 percent stake in the now-bankrupt BlockFi, The Wall Street Journal reports. Another crypto bet from the venture capital firm also went bankrupt: Vauld Group. The last time I saw Thiel IRL, he was shilling Bitcoin at a Bitcoin conference.
To be honest, I want to know what DC has against California. Not only is the Senate doing a hearing on Thursday at 7AM PT, the House is doing one next week at the same time. Annoying! Rude! Anti-innovation!
The now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX raised $420 million in a big funding round in October 2021, but $300 million of it went to founder Sam Bankman-Fried, according to The Wall Street Journal.
He apparently sold some of his stake in FTX to get that much, but it still meant he got a lot of money that investors probably wanted to go directly into the company.