The bankrupt FTX exchange could have closed a year ago — Financial Times investigation

Journalists from the Financial Times have published a new investigation, which revealed that due to the sudden jump and collapse of the mobileCoin token, FTX could have gone bankrupt a year ago. The Financial Times also managed to prove the connection between FTX and the Alameda Research hedge fund owned by the founder and former head of FTX, Сем Бенкман-Фрід" href="https://noworries.media/biography/sem-benkman-frid/" data-bio-id="3697">Sam Bankman-Fried.

It turned out that in April 2021, there was an incident related to the sharp rise and fall of the mobileCoin cryptocurrency, which is used for payments in the Signal messenger. An FTX client opened an unusually large position in this token, and after mobileCoin rose in price, the investor took out a loan on the exchange. This could have been a scheme to withdraw fiat currency from FTX.

To protect the Benkman-Fried platform from collapse, Alameda intervened. Anonymous sources believe that the rescue action cost the company from several hundred million dollars to $ 1 billion. Because of this, Alameda lost a large share of its profits in 2021. Despite the fact that FTX and Alameda have been using client funds for a long time to carry out large-scale high-risk transactions, investors have only just learned about it.

The number of clients to whom FTX owes funds may be much higher than previously reported. The US Bankruptcy Court of Delaware published a document in late November in which FTX lawyers asked to change the standard rules of court proceedings. This was done in order to include a larger number of exchange clients who are due payments. The document states that more than 100,000 creditors are involved in the bankruptcy case, but in reality, there may be more than a million of them.