What the hell is going on with FTX? What even is FTX, and why is it all over the news, suddenly?
Groucho Marx said, when the market is in the news, it’s time to get out of the market. For many investors in crypto currency exchange FTX, it’s already too late. FTX, founded by one Sam Bankman-Fried, rocketed to fame and fortune — and now, before you could say “Enron”, it’s collapsed into a black hole of billions of dollars of losses.
At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters.
A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.
Reuters
So, where did the billions go? Where did FTX’s money come from in the first place? Here’s where it gets really murky. Bankman-Fried was – was – supposedly worth $16bn. Now that’s vanished in what is being called “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth”.
The cue for the destruction was an apparent hack of the exchange, with nearly half a billion stolen. That triggered a run on its finances – but the rest of the $15.5bn was gone, too.
Reuters reported that between $1 billion and $2 billion in customer funds vanished from the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. The outlet also claimed that FTX secretly funneled $10 billion of customer funds into his trading company – Alameda Research. The Daily Mail claimed that SBF’s alleged girlfriend – Caroline Ellison – ran the sister trading company.
But it’s who Friedman-Banks was connected to that is really raising eyebrows – and fuelling whispers.
Before his cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, Bankman-Fried was a major financier of the Democratic Party.
MarketWatch reported, SBF contributed more than $5 million to Joe Biden [… and] nearly $37 million in the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets. SBF was the second-biggest individual donor to the Democrats, only to be surpassed by $128 million from George Soros.
In May, Bankman-Fried said he expected to donate “north of $100 million” to Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, but vowed to have a “soft ceiling” of political spending of $1 billion if former President Donald Trump ran again.
That sort of money buys a lot of access. Bankman-Fried visited the White House on multiple occasions. He also had his fingers in pandemic politics.
SBF largely funded the Democratic Protect Our Future PAC that only launched in May 2022. SBF’s brother said the PAC was formed to “stop the next pandemic”.
To really get the foil-hats rustling, Ukraine and WEF put up their hands.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) lists FTX as a partner, and provides a link to the exchange’s website […]
Curiously, the Ukrainian government launched a cryptocurrency donation website in March that was backed by FTX.
CoinDesk reported in March, “‘Aid for Ukraine,’ which has the backing of crypto exchange FTX, staking platform Everstake, and Ukraine’s Kuna exchange, will route donated crypto to the National Bank of Ukraine.
The Blaze
Where did it go from there? Who knows – we’re talking about “the most corrupt country in Europe”, don’t forget.
Remember, too, that the Biden family had their fingers in the Ukrainian pie for years, to the point that then VP Biden bragged about leaning on the country’s then-government to sack a prosecutor investigating a company tied to his son.
But, just as he did with Sri Lanka’s socialist experiment, Bond Villain Klaus Schwab is hurriedly scrubbing the embarrassing evidence.
Web archive sites show that the World Economic Forum – whose glitzy shindig in Davos, Switzerland, is a must-attend for billionaires and world leaders each year – had previously listed FTX as one of its “partners”, touting the Bahamas-based firm as a “cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders”.
Bankman-Fried also was a speaker at Davos last May alongside luminaries such as Google financial chief Ruth Porat and Bill Winters, CEO of the London-based financial giant Standard Chartered. Nevertheless, WEF has since scrubbed any mention of FTX from its website in the days after the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy […]
Photographs circulated online over the weekend showing former President Bill Clinton sitting next to Bankman-Fried on stage – along with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair – at an event in the Bahamas this past April.
NY Post
It’s like a Who’s Who of the Great Reset.
But I’m sure there’s nothing to see, here.
