© via REUTERS
By Laura Sanchez
Investing.com – Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and now former CEO of FTX, which was once the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world (after Binance), is back in the spotlight.
In an interview with The New York Times, Bankman-Fried sought to distance himself from accusations of fraud and abandonment of FTX users with billions of dollars in losses.
Bankman-Fried denied using funds from the platform for his other business, Alameda Research.
“I never tried to commit fraud,” Bankman-Fried said in the NYT interview.
The liquidity crunch at FTX came after Bankman-Fried secretly moved $10 billion in client funds from FTX to Alameda Research, according to Reuters.
Bankman-Fried told Reuters in November that the company did not make a “secret transfer”, but rather erred in its “confusing internal labeling”.
“I mixed the funds without knowing it. I was frankly surprised at the magnitude of Alameda’s position, which indicates another lack of oversight on my part and the failure to appoint someone to be primarily responsible for it,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said in the interview.
The FTX crash continues to dent the cryptocurrency industry, whose image had already been tarnished after other cryptocurrency platforms went bankrupt last May.
, the largest cryptocurrency in the world, has tumbled in 1 year from a high of $69,000 to $17,000 today. , the second largest crypto in the world, also suffered heavy losses.
In fact, it is believed that much of the liquidity crisis was due to Alameda using customer funds to cover loans that were withdrawn due to the credit crunch caused by the LUNA collapse, note- they in Cointelegraph.
At the start of the year, the offshore exchange and the US subsidiary of Bankman-Fried had a combined valuation of $40 billion, according to Crunchbase data picked up by Yahoo Finance.
By the end of the first quarter, Bankman-Fried’s personal fortune had reached more than $25 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Less than 7 months later, Bankman-Fried declared FTX bankrupt and resigned as CEO. FTX and affiliates owe approximately $8 billion to over one million customers.