The rumors about the possible liquidity crisis for the world’s third-largest crypto exchange turned out to be true. Just a day after assuring funds are fine, and they have the assets to back customer’s funds, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) announced on Tuesday that Binance has shown intent to acquire the global crypto platform to help with the liquidity crisis.

The liquidity crunch came as a surprise to many, given FTX bailed out numerous firms during the crypto contagion caused by the downfall of Terra and the insolvency of 3AC.

Even as the crypto community process the events of the past 24 hours, the focus has now shifted toward other SBF-owned entities, especially Alameda Research, a leading principal trading firm. Alameda and FTX merged their venture capital operations in August 2022. Speculation mills are rife that Alameda reportedly faced a crisis itself during the crypto contagion in the second quarter and FTX bailed it out, which eventually came to bite it back.

Lucas Nuzzi, the head of the crypto analytic firm Coinmetric, took to Twitter to point out the FTT market cap increased 124.3% on September 28 when 173 million FTX Token (FTT), worth over $4 billion at the time, became active on-chain. Nuzzi pointed out that on the same day, a total of $8.6 billion worth of FTT tokens were moved on-chain.

Related: SBF tumbles off Bloomberg’s billionaire index after trouble at FTX

Tracking the fund transfers of the day, Nuzzi found 173 million FTT from a 2019 initial coin offering (ICO)-era contract and the recipient of the $4 billion mint was reportedly Alameda Research.

4/ The recipient of the $4.19 B USD worth of FTT tokens was no one but Alameda Research!So what? Alameda and FTX were intrinsically connected from day 1 and