The downfall of FTX is still in mid-flight, with the former CEO and co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange discussing his version of the events on his Twitter account.
The face of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), has been caught in a whirlwind of his own creation by being accused of mishandling customer assets through FTX's sister company called Alameda Research, who was purportedly using FTX customer money to make poorly placed trades. Additionally, reports have surfaced that Alameda Research routinely engaged in frontrunning, which is the act of making investment decisions based on insider knowledge.
In the case this case, Alameda Research is accused of making investment decisions with its insider knowledge of which new cryptocurrency tokens were being listed on the FTX exchange. Over the course of the last two days of the fallout following the declared bankruptcy by SBF, the former CEO has taken to his Twitter account to post "what happened" over two days, followed up by a few posts on what his goals are, with one of them being "is to do right by customers" and that "I'm meeting in-person with regulators and working with the teams to do what we can for customers. And after that, investors. But first, customers."
On November 16, SBF tweeted that his goal is to "clean up and focus on transparency," which was followed by a longer tweet posted a few hours later that claimed FTX was "handling ~$10b/day of volume and billions of transfers. But there was too much leverage--more than I realized. A run on the bank and market crash exhausted liquidity. So what can I try to do? Raise liquidity, make customers whole, and restart."
Followed by, "Maybe I'll fail. Maybe I won't get anything more for customers than what's already there. I've certainly failed before. You all know that now, all too well. But all I can do is to try. I've failed enough for the month. And part of me thinks I might get somewhere."