With the collapse of FTX and possibly similar fate of Binance, financial experts are now warning everyone to immediately withdraw their investment from crypto sector a this is heading towards extinction.
According to media reports, with the massive pullback in cryptocurrency prices and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, the term “crypto winter” is now making headlines.
But Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist at Euro Pacific Capital, doesn’t believe that’s an accurate term to describe the situation.
“This is not a #crypto winter. That implies spring is coming. This is also not a crypto ice age, as even that came to an end after a couple of million years,” he writes in a tweet. “This is crypto extinction”.
Meanwhile, it is learnt that FTX executives have hidden US$8 billion in liabilities in customer account that Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) referred to as “our Korean friend’s account”.
It is also learnt, Caroline Ellison, the Chief Executive Officer of Alameda Research has borrowed billions of dollars of customer fund from FTX exchange. The firm’s liabilities were then masked under a pseudonym account on FTX.
November 11, the exchange’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for FTX and about 130 of its affiliated companies. The decision came after a scurry of withdrawals left the exchange illiquid.
On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried arrived on US soil after he was extradited from the Bahamas. On Friday the Associated Press reported that a US judge had kept secret that two of his former associates, Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda and Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were cooperating with the feds. Prosecutors feared Bankman-Fried would fight extradition if he knew his partners had turned on him.
Alameda Research, a trading and investment fund started by Bankman-Fried, had borrowed billions of dollars from the exchange, losing it to a series of bad deals and trades. It was later revealed that that money came from customer deposits.
A lawsuit filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on December 13 states that Bankman-Fried directed FTX executives to move Alameda’s approximately US$8 billion in liabilities to an unknown customer account on FTX’s systems.
The lawsuit also claimed that Bankman-Fried would later refer to that account as “our Korean friend’s account” and/or “the weird Korean account”.
It added that although it was a sub-account of Alameda, it did not have the typical investment firm’s email identifier “@alameda-research.com.” Notes tied to the account labeled it as “FTX fiat old”.
The suit claims that this helped mask Alameda’s negative balance on FTX. However, the account had the same privileges as those of Alameda accounts, including exemption from liquidation characteristics.
A day later, on December 14, Bloomberg reported that a GitHub account under the name Nishad Singh, FTX’s former engineering director, created a code that would conceal Alameda’s ballooning liabilities on the exchange.
The implosion of FTX sent shockwaves throughout the crypto community. A few months before its downfall, Bankman-Fried had assured investors that the worst of the crypto market’s liquidity crunch had likely passed. He added that he still had a “few billion” on hand to shore up struggling firms that could further destabilize the digital asset industry.
