Market Analysis Report (01 Dec 2022)

The former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has said at a conference in New York that he “screwed up” but maintained that he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” and was shocked by the collapse of the exchange.

Bankman-Fried, who was visibly shaking at times, appeared via a video conference from a nondescript room in the Bahamas. Speaking to the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, he said he was “deeply sorry about what happened,” but argued he did not have a full picture of what was going on at FTX’s various branches.

SBF resigned as head of the exchange when it declared bankruptcy earlier this month, and true fallout of what happened is still emerging. FTX owes $3.1 billion to its largest creditors and some assets have disappeared, while contagion is affecting other crypto firms.

Questioned on whether FTX misappropriated customer funds, FTX’s former CEO shifted the blame to the hedge fund he founded, Alameda Research, saying he “didn’t knowingly comingle funds” and “was frankly surprised by ow big Alameda’s position was.”

Bankman-Fried insisted he was not running Alameda and was surprised by its position, and attributed the situation to an accounting mistake, saying there was a “substantial discrepancy” between the company’s legitimate audited financials and the figures displayed on the exchange’s dashboards.