Bankruptcy of FTX: the lessons of a scandal

Correspondent in Washington,

The FTX affair, which wiped out the investments of more than a million investors and shook the world of cryptocurrencies, is easier to understand than it seems. It does not call into question the virtues of the blockchain, a decentralized digital network for recording transactions, which powers cryptocurrencies. Rather, the scandal stems from the fact that FTX, a crypto exchange platform, was stealing money from its customers in order to speculate for its own account on virtual assets that it had created itself, and which were backed by wind. .