Sam Bankman-Fried gave his version of the scandal surrounding his exchange. He owes more than 3 billion dollars.
The founder of the cryptocurrency platform FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the youngest billionaires in the world with 22.5 billion dollars, apologized to his employees in a letter in which he assures that he will do everything possible so that things “go back to the way they were before”.
“I feel deeply sorry of what happened. I am sorry for everything that happened to them and what happened to our clients,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a text reproduced by the cryptocurrency website. CoinDesk and other specialized media.
FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11 and yesterday the company’s new managers appeared for the first time before the Delaware state bankruptcy court to begin the restructuring process.
Lawyers for the new board and the current chief executive officer, John Ray, maintain that a “substantial amount” of the company’s assets they could have been stolen or are missing.
The new managers also denounced the company as having a “complete absence of corporate controls” and a lack of “reliable financial information.”
The platform, which came to be valued at 32,000 million dollars, could have more than a million creditors around the world. So far, the company has admitted that owes more than 3,000 million dollars to its fifty main creditors.
However, in the letter to its employees, whom it describes as “family”, Bankman-Fried blames the bankruptcy in part on the massive sale of cryptocurrencies which occurred at the beginning of the year.
For the founder of FTX, said sale halved FTX’s guarantee, of about 30,000 million dollars.
At this point, Bankman-Fried explains, the sale of cryptocurrencies continued, combined with a credit crunch and a “flight on the bank,” which reduced the collateral to $9 billion before FTX filed for bankruptcy.
However, the letter does not refer to that disappearance or theft of assets, nor to the accusations that client funds were redirected to its associated investment firm, Alameda.
More than a million investors affected by the crypto crash
Claimants from around the world, from German banks to Chinese and Vietnamese investors, are part of the more than a million creditors caught up in the collapse of FTX Group, according to data from court documents filed with the courts in Delaware, United States, where the bankruptcy of the crypto company is pending.
The company, which until three weeks ago integrated the top 3 exchange platforms of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies, is now facing claims from hundreds of thousands of users who were never able to withdraw the funds or cryptocurrencies deposited on its platform, after it froze withdrawals on November 7 to, days later, file for bankruptcy .
The data on creditors of smaller amounts are among the most varied and involve more than 1 million companies and peopleso the case can take years to conclude.
Creditors attached screenshots of business accounts or emails they had received from FTX as proof of what was owed to them.
These include a Frankfurt-based German bank, which claims FTX owes it $2.3 million for deposits that include Bitcoin, Ethereum and dollars, according to filings; a creditor of Chinese origin, with a claim for just over US$21,000; and a large number of claims from Taiwan-based investors, the Bloomberg agency reported.
It is unclear how much money will be generated from the FTX liquidation, and many creditors may receive only fractions of what they are owed, if at all. The process can take months in smaller cases and years for larger multi-million dollar bankruptcies.
This is because alleged debts, which are generally unsecured, are subject to a process designed to eliminate any false, inflated or duplicate claims.
FTX is believed to have used billions of dollars from its clients to finance risky bets through its investment firm Alameda Research, which is why authorities in the Bahamas and the United States are investigating possible crimes committed by the firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.
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