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Investing.com – Crypto winter, large-scale hacker attacks and the crashing of entire ecosystems are straining the crypto community. It doesn’t help at all when two leaders clash and rock an already fragile system.
They are FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance CEO Changpen Zhao. Zhao announced that he is going to get rid of his FTX tokens worth over $500 million, as he does not want to support anyone who is lobbying against his competitors.
Meanwhile, it was revealed that the $14.6 billion balance sheet of FTX subsidiary Alameda is 40% FTX tokenized. At the same time, the tokens served as collateral for credits amounting to $7 billion, while the value of the circulating supply was only $3 billion at the time of the leak.
Both FTX and Alameda now have to deal with a loss of confidence, as shown by the collapse in the price of the FTX token.
Analytics firm Nansen reported that in the past 24 hours, $1.2 billion worth of tokens and ERC-20s were withdrawn from FTX. CryptoQuant found that its reserves had meanwhile fallen to zero.
The first signs of a shift in the mood. The collapse of the Celsius (NASDAQ:) credit platform and the blockchain recently showed how quickly such a situation can escalate.
It is especially the biggest players in the sector who put their capital under cover so as not to end up with nothing at the end. Julien Boutleoup of Curve Finance already announced yesterday that he had withdrawn over $100 million from FTX and Binance.
Larry Cermark found that Alameda reduced its portfolio of wallets by 47 percent last month and that a large portion of the funds went to FTX and Genesis. According to him, these funds were used to defend the bar of 22 dollars of FTT.
Yesterday, FTX withdrew $3 million worth of ETH from the Gearbox protocol, resulting in a fee of 20 ETH. Just a week later, that fee would have been waived, according to Cermark.
Along with this, there are growing reports on social media that FTX users can no longer make withdrawals over $1000.
All signs point to FTX appearing to be going through a major liquidity crunch.
By Marco Oehrl