NBC NEWS
Sam Bankman-Fried published an extensive blog post Thursday morning attempting to explain the collapse of FTX, the crypto platform he co-founded, and denying allegations that he stole any funds.
The blog post is also notable for what allegations it doesn’t touch on, including how FTX customer funds ended up in Alameda Research, the hedge fund he co-founded, and whether funds were misappropriated in the form of loans used to buy property and make political donations.
“I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away,” Bankman-Fried wrote in the blog post.
He faces a series of charges including defrauding FTX customers and money laundering connected to the platform’s dramatic collapse last year that culminated in its bankruptcy filing in November.
Bankman-Fried has made a series of public statements and given a variety of interviews since the start of FTX’s troubles, with Thursday’s blog post echoing many of those statements. He has continued to claim that users of the U.S. crypto platform he oversaw, FTX US, should be repaid immediately, arguing that the company was solvent and not financially linked to FTX, which served customers outside the United States.
Unlike previous statements in which he admitted he had made mistakes and took responsibility for the company’s collapse, Bankman-Fried used Thursday’s blog post to lay the blame on a rival crypto scion, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. Binance has pushed back on claims that it sought to harm FTX.
Bankman-Fried also reiterated that he believes FTX could have survived and still has a chance to become solvent if he were allowed to continue to run the company. NBC News has not verified any of the various balance sheets Bankman-Fried published in the blog post. John Ray, FTX’s new CEO who also oversaw the unwinding of Enron after its fraud-induced collapse, said shortly after taking over that he had little confidence in the veracity of any of the company’s financial statements.
