Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, elaborated in a phone interview about why the platform only allowed withdrawals in the Bahamas region right before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In his 22-minute phone call with crypto vlogger Tiffany Fong, SBF said he did not want to put himself not FTX to be “with a lot of angry people in it.”
Despite the company being situated in the Bahamas, SBF claimed he did not like having the exchange be “incorporated” with a nation full of anger. He said he told the Bahamian regulator he gave a “heads up” just a day before filing for bankruptcy. He allowed withdrawals on his own decision when the regulators did not provide a confirmation or disapproval.
What Went On During the Halted Withdrawals
During its pressure in the first week of November and when FTT – the exchange’s native token – slowly deteriorated in value, FTX halted all withdrawals on November 8. This caused users to get trapped during the exchange’s meltdown. According to reports, FTX had to stop all transactions due to liquidity issues.
On November 10, the exchange announced that they reactivated withdrawals for the Bahamas. It claimed it had the approval of the country’s regulators, which resulted in millions of dollars leaving FTX. The next day, it filed for bankruptcy, and SBF stepped down as CEO.
Yet, after the money pullout and the inevitable bankruptcy filing, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) stated that it never allowed or rejected the proposal from FTX to withdraw the money. The SCB also warned that the funds would return to the exchange to proceed with its troubled liquidation process.
SBF on the FTX Hacker and Company Assets
In his November 16 interview with Tiffany Fong, Bankman-Fried said he was gathering pieces of the FTX hacker’s identity. He detailed that the anonymous hacker stole around $450 million right after the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.
He also claimed that he has eight people that fit the role of the mysterious hacker but had limited access when he was “exploring it.” He believed that the culprit used to work for FTX or that someone had planted malware in a former employee’s computer.
When interviewed about what caused the FTX crash, he said it was not illiquidity that caused it but rather “the massive correlation of things during market moves, especially when they are triggered by fear over the position itself.”
As for details about Alameda Research using customer funds for trades, he did not speak about it other than nobody monitoring the “risk positions” in the company.
When Fong asked about FTT’s actual value, he said it had a real use case despite a “few” problems. He said it was more helpful than many tokens and was “economically underpinned” than other competing altcoins like Binance’s BUSD, BNB, and Coinbase’s USDC.
To this day, he looks back at the downfall of his creation, filled with regrets and reflecting on the things he should have done when things were stable back then. In a separate interview, when asked about his bank account, he said he only had $100,000 left the last time he saw it.
