FTX and Binance’s ongoing saga: Everything that’s happened until now
All dates are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
The saga kicked off on Nov. 2 after reports that a leaked balance sheet from the Sam Bankman-Fried-founded trading firm Alameda Research suggested the company held a significant amount of FTX Token (FTT), the native token of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
A large trading firm holding so much of one asset concerned the crypto community and brought questions regarding the relationship between Alameda and FTX.
On Nov. 5 the Twitter account Whale Alert, which tracks significant on-chain crypto movements, notified its users that nearly 23 million FTT worth over $584.5 million moved onto Binance.
22,999,999 #FTT (584,818,174 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Binancehttps://t.co/Nm2jz9MKW0
At the time, the amount was worth around 17% of the FTT circulating supply.
Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison tried to quell any panic in a Nov. 6 tweet saying the leaked balance sheet wasn’t reflective of the whole story and noted that sheet, in particular, was only for “a subset of our corporate entities” and other assets worth over $10 billion “aren’t reflected there.”
- the balance sheet breaks out a few of our biggest long positions; we obviously have hedges that aren’t listed- given the tightening in the crypto credit space this year we’ve returned most of our loans by now
Later on Nov. 6, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said his exchange would liquidate its entire FTT holdings citing “recent revelations that have come to light” believed to be in reference to the Alameda balance sheet.
Zhao said Binance held around $2.1 billion equivalent in Binance USD (BUSD) and FTT due to its FTX divestment last year but didn’t clarify Binance’s current FTT holdings.
He added it would sell the tokens in a
Read more on cointelegraph.com
