Sam Bankman-Fried has been called to testify before the US Congress
A class action lawsuit has already been filed in an attempt to recover the recoverable: very little, it seems.
Sam Bankman-Fried is due to testify before the United States Congress. The disgraced former billionaire will have to explain to American legislators the causes that led to the disastrous bankruptcy of FTX, which until a few weeks ago was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Since the collapse of FTX, SBF has proved strangely talkative: clients of his exchange accuse him of fraud, yet (against the advice of his lawyers) he has chosen to give a large number of interviews. During a recent host (albeit virtual) on the New York Times’ DealBook’s, the former billionaire explained that he had lost practically everything and was left with only one credit card with about $ 100,000. At the beginning of November, Forbes attributed to him assets of over 17 billion dollars.
Among other things, Bankman-Fried is accused of having had a backdoor installed within the computer systems of the exchange, in order to be able to rig accounts in the event of a check by the authorities. Furthermore, he is also suspected of having stolen part of the exchange’s cryptocurrency funds. He made accusations that he promptly denied and which, moreover – at the moment – do not come from the authorities, but from the community of bloggers and youtubers who are responsible for denouncing the ‘misdeeds’ within the cryptocurrency industry.
According to a WSJ article released in late November, FTX owes at least $3 billion to about 50 different creditors. A class action lawsuit has already been filed in an attempt to recover the recoverable: very little, it seems. John Ray, the new CEO of FTX in charge of picking up the pieces left by the SBF gang, claims to have managed to identify only an infinitesimal fraction of the assets formally declared by the exchange. “I don’t think this situation is unprecedented in American corporate history,” he added.
The hearing before Congress is set for December 13, but it is not certain that Bankman-Fried will decide to actually appear. In the meantime, American politics has already targeted the FTX crack: the issue has already been the subject of several questions, as well as a meeting held last week.
And in the meantime the insiders are trembling. The FTX crack is the smoking gun long sought by cryptocurrency detractors: it is proof that the sector is immature, corrupt and incapable of self-regulation. In short, all this could be the pretext for intervening with new extremely stringent regulations.
In the meantime, the case of FTX and SBF has already conquered Hollywood, generating a race between production companies to win the rights to the story of the barely thirty-year-old nerd who became king of cryptocurrencies only to then lose (and make others lose) everything.
