Earlier than his shock Monday night time arrest, Sam Bankman-Fried had apologized for all the pieces he may consider, to everybody who would pay attention. In a leaked draft of his aborted Home testimony, he wrote that he was actually, for his complete grownup life, “unhappy.” He “f—– up,” he tweeted, and wrote, and stated.
He advised Bahamas regulators he was “deeply sorry for ending up on this place.” However when Bankman-Fried was escorted out of his penthouse condo in Nassau in handcuffs, it nonetheless wasn’t clear what he was apologizing for, having stridently denied committing fraud to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, ABC Information’ George Stephanopoulos, and throughout Twitter for weeks.
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However the day after his arrest, federal prosecutors and regulators unsealed dozens of pages of filings and expenses that accused Bankman-Fried of not simply having perpetrated a fraud, however having completed so “from the beginning,” in keeping with a submitting from the Securities Trade Fee
Removed from having “f—– up,” SEC and Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee regulators, alongside federal prosecutors from the USA Lawyer’s Workplace for the Southern District of New York, allege that Bankman-Fried was on the coronary heart — certainly, the driving force — of “one of many greatest monetary frauds in American historical past,” within the phrases of U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams. The allegations in opposition to Bankman-Fried have been assembled with gorgeous pace, however provide perception into one of many highest-profile fraud prosecutions since Enron.
Bankman-Fried based his crypto hedge fund Alameda Analysis in November 2017, renting workplace area in Berkeley, California. The scion of two Stanford legislation professors, Bankman-Fried had graduated from MIT, labored on the prestigious quantitative buying and selling agency Jane Road Capital, and had damaged into cryptocurrencies with a MIT classmate, Gary Wang.
Alameda Analysis was basically an arbitrage store, buying bitcoin at a lower cost from one alternate and promoting it for the next value at one other. Worth variations in South Korea versus the remainder of the world allowed Bankman-Fried and Wang to revenue tremendously from what was nicknamed “the kimchi swap.”
In April 2019, Bankman-Fried and Wang — together with U.C. Berkeley graduate Nishad Singh — based FTX.com, a global cryptocurrency alternate that provided prospects revolutionary buying and selling options, a responsive platform, and a dependable expertise.
Federal regulators on the CFTC say that only a month after founding FTX.com, Bankman-Fried, “unbeknownst to all however a small circle of insiders,” was leveraging buyer belongings — particularly, prospects’ private cryptocurrency deposits — for Alameda’s personal bets.
Rehypothecation is the time period for when companies legally use buyer belongings to take a position and make investments. However Bankman-Fried did not have permission from prospects to gamble with their funds. FTX’s personal phrases of use particularly forbade him, or Alameda, from utilizing buyer cash for something — until the client allowed it.
And from FTX’s inception, there was plenty of buyer cash. The CFTC cited 2019 stories from FTX which pegged the futures quantity alone as usually exceeding $100 million day by day.
Utilizing buyer cash for Alameda’s bets constituted fraud, the CFTC alleges. Within the Southern District of New York, the place Bankman-Fried was indicted by a grand jury, Bankman-Fried faces felony fraud expenses as effectively. From the very genesis of FTX, regulators allege, Bankman-Fried was utilizing buyer funds to bankroll his speculative investments.
It’s a swift fall from grace for the one-time king of crypto, who as just lately as two months in the past was hailed because the savior of the business. Now, Bankman-Fried heads to a Bahamian courtroom on Monday to give up himself to the U.S. extradition course of, in keeping with an individual accustomed to the matter. A felony trial awaits him as soon as he’s again on U.S. soil.
Attorneys for Bankman-Fried, and attorneys for his former corporations, didn’t instantly return requests for remark. A consultant for Bankman-Fried declined to remark.
The rise of the Alameda-FTX empire
FTX rapidly rose, launching its personal token, FTT, in July 2019 and snagging an fairness funding from Binance in November of that 12 months.
By 2021, in keeping with the CFTC submitting, FTX and its subsidiaries held roughly $15 billion price of belongings, and accounted for 10% of world digital transaction quantity, clearing $16 billion price of buyer trades day by day.
The agency’s “years-long” fraud did not simply prolong to enjoying with buyer cash, in keeping with the SEC.
FTX was in a position to function so successfully, clear such large quantity, and generate such curiosity as a result of it had a chosen market maker (DMM) of its personal. In conventional finance, a DMM is a agency that can purchase and promote securities to and from prospects, hoping to clear a revenue in any distinction in value, known as the unfold.
From FTX’s 2019 founding, Alameda was that market maker, snapping up and releasing cryptocurrencies on the alternate. Alameda and FTX’s symbiotic relationship proved advantageous for each ends of Bankman-Fried’s rising empire.
As FTX matured, different market makers got here on-line to supply liquidity. However Alameda was, and remained, FTX’s largest liquidity supplier, easing platform operate at “Bankman-Fried’s course,” the SEC alleges.
In contrast to these different market makers or energy customers, Alameda had a set of highly effective instruments at its disposal.
In August 2019, the SEC alleges, Bankman-Fried directed his workforce at FTX to program an exception into the alternate’s code, permitting Alameda to “preserve a damaging steadiness in its account, untethered from any collateral necessities.”
“No different buyer account at FTX was permitted to take care of a damaging steadiness,” the SEC submitting continues. The damaging steadiness meant that Alameda was allegedly successfully backstopped by buyer belongings whereas making trades.
Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison as soon as alluded to this in a broadly disseminated interview.
“We have a tendency to not have issues like cease losses,” Ellison stated.
In conventional finance, a stop-loss order helps merchants restrict publicity to a probably dropping commerce. When an asset (a inventory, for instance) reaches a pre-determined decrease restrict, the stop-loss order will routinely unload the asset to forestall losses from spiraling uncontrolled.
Not content material with what would ultimately grow to be a “just about limitless” line of credit score from buyers — his personal prospects — Bankman-Fried conspired to stack the deck in Alameda’s favor, regulators say.
FTX provided energy customers entry to an API — an interface that allowed the consumer to bypass FTX’s front-end platform and talk instantly with FTX’s back-end methods. Regular customers have been nonetheless subjected to common sense checks: verifying that they’d sufficient cash of their account, for instance.
Alameda merchants may entry a fast-lane which allow them to shunt previous different customers and shave “a number of milliseconds” off their commerce execution instances, in keeping with the CFTC. The form of high-frequency buying and selling that FTX customers engaged in made that invaluable.
A awful crypto hedge fund
Regardless of the deck being stacked in Alameda’s favor, the hedge fund provided horrible returns. A court filing indicated that Alameda lost over $3.7 billion over its lifetime, despite public statements by FTX leaders touting how profitable the trading arm was.
Alameda’s losses and lending structure were a critical component of FTX’s eventual collapse.
Alameda didn’t just play fast and loose with customer money. The hedge fund borrowed aggressively from multiple lenders, including Voyager Digital and BlockFi Lending. Both those companies entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings this year, and FTX targeted both for acquisition.
Alameda secured its loans from Voyager and BlockFi with FTT tokens, which FTX minted itself. Bankman-Fried’s empire controlled the vast majority of the available currency, with only a small amount of FTT actually circulating at any time.
Alameda should have acknowledged the fact that its tokens couldn’t be sold at the price that they claimed they were worth, the CFTC alleges in its complaint.
This was because any attempt by Alameda to sell off their FTT tokens would crater FTT’s price, given how much of the available supply Alameda controlled.
Instead of correctly marking its tokens to market, though, Alameda recorded their entire hoard of FTT as being worth the prevailing market price.
Alameda used this methodology with other coins as well, including Solana and Serum (a token created and promoted by FTX and Alameda), using them to collateralize billions in loans to other crypto players. Industry insiders even had a nickname for those tokens — “Sam coins.”
The tables turned after the collapse of Luna, a stablecoin whose implosion and subsequent crash devastated other lenders and crypto firms and sent crypto prices plunging. Major Alameda lenders, like Voyager, declared bankruptcy. Remaining lenders began to execute margin calls or liquidate open positions with customers, including Alameda.
The CFTC alleges that between May and June 2022, Alameda was subjected to “a large number of margin calls and loan recalls.”
Unbeknownst to investors, lenders, or regulators, Alameda lacked enough liquid assets to service its loan obligations.
But while Alameda was illiquid, FTX’s customers — who had been constantly reassured that the exchange, and Bankman-Fried, were determined to protect their interests — were not.
The fraud — exposed
Bankman-Fried stepped down from his leadership position at Alameda Research in Oct. 2021 in what CFTC regulators claim was a calculated bid to cultivate a false sense of separation between FTX and the hedge fund. But he continued to exercise control, regulators claim.
Bankman-Fried allegedly ordered Alameda to increase its use of customer assets, drawing down massively on its “unlimited” credit line at FTX.
“Alameda was able to rely on its undisclosed ordinary-course access to FTX credit and customer funds to facilitate these large withdrawals, which were several billion dollars in notional value,” the CFTC filing reads.
By the middle of 2022, Alameda owed FTX’s unwitting customers approximately $8 billion. Bankman-Fried had testified before the House that FTX boasted world-class risk management and compliance systems, but in reality, according to the firm’s own bankruptcy filings, it possessed almost nothing in the way of record-keeping.
Then, on Nov. 2, the first domino fell. Crypto trade publication CoinDesk publicized details on Alameda’s balance sheet which showed $14.6 billion in assets. Over $7 billion of those assets were either FTT tokens or Bankman-Fried-backed coins like Solana or Serum. Another $2 billion were locked away in equity investments.
For the first time ever, the secretive inner workings of Alameda Research were revealed to be a modern-day Potemkin village. Investors began to liquidate their FTT tokens and withdraw their holdings from FTX, a potentially calamitous situation for Bankman-Fried.
Alameda still had billions of collateralized loans outstanding — but if the value of their collateral, FTT, fell too far, their lenders would execute further margin calls, demanding full repayment of loans.
Allegedly, Alameda had already been unable to fulfill loan obligations over the summer without accessing customer funds. Now, with money flowing out of the exchange and FTT’s price slipping, Alameda and FTX faced a liquidity crunch.
In a now-deleted tweet, Bankman-Fried continued to claim FTX was fully funded and that customer assets were safe. But on Nov. 6, four days after the CoinDesk article, the crack widened into a chasm, thanks to an old investor-turned-rival, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.
Zhao founded Binance in 2017, and it was the first outside investor in FTX, funding a Series A round in 2019. It had exited the investment by July 2021, the same year that FTX raised $1 billion from big names like Sequoia Capital and Thoma Bravo.
FTX bought out Binance with a combination of BUSD, BNB, and FTT, according to Zhao.
BUSD is Binance’s exchange-issued stablecoin, pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. BNB is their exchange token, similar to FTX’s FTT, issued by Binance and used to pay transaction and trading fees on the exchange.
Zhao dropped the hammer with a tweet saying that due to “current revelations which have got here [sic] to gentle, we now have determined to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books.”
FTX executives scrambled to include potential injury. Ellison responded to Zhao providing to buy Binance’s remaining FTT place for $22 per token.
Privately, Bankman-Fried ordered Alameda merchants to liquidate Alameda’s investments and positions “to quickly liberate capital for FTT buybacks,” the CFTC submitting states. Bankman-Fried was making ready to wager the home in an effort to take care of Ellison’s public help degree of $22.
Alameda merchants managed to fend off outflows for 2 days, holding the value of FTT at round $22.
Publicly, Bankman-Fried continued to function as if all was effectively. “FTX is okay. Property are wonderful,” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 7 that has since been deleted. Bankman-Fried asserted that FTX didn’t make investments consumer belongings and that every one redemptions can be processed.
However on the similar time Bankman-Fried was tweeting reassurances, internally, executives have been rising increasingly alarmed on the rising shortfall, in keeping with prosecutors. It was “not merely a matter of getting enough liquid funds available to cowl buyer withdrawals,” the CFTC alleges.
Somewhat, Bankman-Fried and different executives admitted to one another that “FTX buyer funds have been irrevocably misplaced as a result of Alameda had appropriated them.”
It was an admission that flew within the face of all the pieces Bankman-Fried would declare publicly up by means of the day of his arrest, a month later.
By Nov. 8, the shortfall had grown from $1 billion to $8 billion. Bankman-Fried had been courting exterior buyers for a rescue bundle. “Quite a few events declined […] whatever the favorable phrases being provided,” the CFTC submitting alleges.
FTX issued a pause on all buyer withdrawals that day. FTT’s value plummeted by over 75%. Bankman-Fried was within the midst of a high-tech, decentralized run on the financial institution. Out of choices, he turned to Zhao, who introduced that he’d signed a “non-binding” letter of intent to accumulate FTX.com.
However only a day later, on Nov. 9, Binance stated it might not undergo with the acquisition, citing stories of “mishandled buyer funds” and federal investigations.
Two days later, Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX and related entities. FTX’s longtime attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell approached John J. Ray, who oversaw Enron by means of its chapter, to imagine Bankman-Fried’s former place.
FTX filed for chapter that very same day, on Nov. 11. A month later, Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities, pending extradition on expenses of fraud, conspiracy, and cash laundering.
Bankman-Fried, a devotee of a philosophy often called “efficient altruism,” was apparently pushed by an obsessive have to quantify the impression he had on this world, measured in {dollars} and tokens. He drafted a spreadsheet which measured the affect that Alameda had on the planet (and decided it was practically a internet wash).
Billions of {dollars} of buyer cash at the moment are floating in enterprise funds, political warfare chests and charitable coffers — cash now susceptible to being clawed again, because of Bankman-Fried’s alleged crimes.
Virtually a decade in the past, Bankman-Fried posed a hypothetical query to his family and friends on his private weblog: Waxing poetic on efficient altruism, he requested rhetorically, “Simply how a lot impression can a greenback have?”
“Properly, if you need a one-sentence reply, right here it’s: one two thousandth of a life,” he stated.
The CFTC alleges that over $8 billion {dollars} of buyer funds are lacking. Some prospects have probably misplaced their life financial savings, their child’s school funds, their future down funds. By Bankman-Fried’s personal math, his alleged misdeeds have been price 4 million lives.
