Takeaways from the FTX’s fiasco

Based on his own words, FTX’s CEO and founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, hoped that FTX would acquire Goldman Sachs and CME once it had beaten the competition from Binance and Coinbase. In mid-2022, FTX was ranked as the second-largest and fastest-growing crypto exchange. Three months later it was like a house of cards, having collapsed and been left with what would appear to be a substantial liability with $billions owed to one million creditors. Bankman-Fried disparaged Changpeng Zhao (CZ), CEO and founder of Binance, deciding to work  with regulators which fractured FTX and set them up against Binance, subsequently causing a leak of a copy of the 2022 second-quarter balance sheet of Alameda Research (a crypto hedge fund controlled by Bankman-Fried). This document revealed that FTX possessed numerous assets and liabilities locked up in many Bankman-Fried projects. The assets were worth $14.6 billion and the liabilities $8 billion, with more than half of these assets and liabilities being i…