FTX Fraud: Who Are Sam Bankman-Fried’s Biggest Victims?

FTX and its affiliate trading firm Alameda Research have been exposed. A 2 Nov CoinDesk article revealing Alameda’s troubled finances set off a chain of events that eventually revealed FTX to be insolvent.

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried secretly used client money to bail out FTX’s sister company Alameda Research, resulting in an estimated $10 billion hole in the exchange’s books. To make matters worse, Bankman-Fried covered up its fraudulent activities for months, leaving investors, customers and even its own employees in limbo until FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 10.

In the wake of perhaps the most earth-shattering deception in crypto history, Crypto Briefing takes a look at who lost the most to Sam Bankman-Fried’s monumental grievances.

venture capital

During his In its heyday, FTX attracted massive investment from some of the most prominent and well-funded venture capital firms in the world.

In July 2021, the exchange raised $900 million at an $18 billion valuation from more than 60 investors, including crypto heavyweights such as Coinbase Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and others. Many of these investors also doubled down on FTX in its latest funding round in January 2022, valuing the company at an eye-watering $32 billion.

FTX’s raises were differentiated from those of other crypto companies by the participation of high ranking non-crypto companies. Softbank, VanEck and Temasek all bought FTX stock during one of the company’s many rounds of funding. According to Crunchbase facts, FTX sold equity capital totaling approximately $1.8 billion over its three years of operation. With the company out of business, FTX stock is almost certainly worthless.

At the time of the collapse, the top three FTX shareholders were Sequoia Capital with 1.1% and Temasek and Paradigm, each with 1%. In total, these three venture companies have collectively invested $620 million in FTX.

Moreover, many venture companies investing in FTX also used its services to hold cash and crypto assets. However, only a handful of these companies have publicly disclosed their additional FTX exposure. On November 9, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz announced told CNBC that his company had deposited $76.8 million in cash and digital assets on FTX at the time of the collapse, though he stated that his company was in the process of withdrawing $47.5 million of that amount. However, in light of the corruption exposed during the last days of the exchange, it seems unlikely that FTX will honor this withdrawal.

Multicoin Capital, another prominent FTX stock investor, reported that it had tied 10% of its total assets under management to FTX before the exchange went bankrupt. Crunchbase data shows that Multicoin had raised $605 million through three separate funds, implying it lost at least $60 million from its exposure to FTX.

Since many venture firms are not required to disclose the exact amounts of their investments and losses, it is difficult to know how much they have collectively lost from the FTX meltdown. However, with the available evidence, VC losses across the board appear to be in the billions.

The Solana ecosystem

Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire was heavily intertwined with the Solana ecosystem, and the high-throughput blockchain suffers greatly as a result.

When Solana experienced a boom in August 2021 due to the alternate Layer 1 story, the value of the native SOL token rose, along with many Solana ecosystem tokens. One such project was Serum, a Solana-based central limit order book exchange, in which Bankman-Fried was a co-founder and Alameda Research was an investor.

While Serum initially rose in value, the predatory tokenomics, which gave massive amounts of its own SRM token to early investors like Alameda, caused its value to bleed over time. Despite dumping massive amounts of SRM into the market during the 2021 bull run, Alameda still held more than two billion tokens as collateral for loans at the time of the bankruptcy. In addition, Alameda and FTX both had large SOL positions, which will also be liquidated. With FTX and Alameda out of business, these tokens will almost certainly be sold on the open market, driving prices down further.

FTX’s involvement with Solana went beyond promoting the blockchain and investing in its protocols. To help kick-start DeFi adoption, FTX has also created Solana-based packaged Bitcoin and Ethereum tokens backed by its reserves.

Both wrapped tokens were widely used in the Solana DeFi ecosystem. However, when it became clear that FTX was facing a liquidity crisis, FTX-backed packaged Bitcoin and Ethereum began to decouple. After FTX voluntarily went bankrupt on November 11, these tokens plummeted as it was clear that FTX no longer had real Bitcoin and Ethereum in reserve. In the past week, Solana Wrapped Bitcoin is down 93% to $1,363 and Ethereum is down 83% to $257. At present, there seems to be little hope that either asset will be paired again.

One final way FTX has damaged Solana is through Alameda Research’s investment in ecosystem projects. Several confirmatory reports indicate that under the terms of investment, protocols were required or heavily incentivized to keep their treasury on FTX. Not only did this practice leave many projects high and dry after FTX’s bankruptcy, but it also contributed to the wider fraud that took place on the exchange. By requiring projects to keep their money on FTX, Alameda can partially invest in a project, but get back the total amount of the project revenue. As it was revealed when FTX went bankrupt, these client funds deposited on the exchange were used by Alameda for investments.

The customers

While venture capital firms and FTX-backed projects have suffered from Sam Bankman-Fried’s years of scams, in the end the common client is the biggest loser in the entire debacle. Many FTX users lost their savings, believing the exchange was safe. Recommendations from Shark Tanks Kevin O’Leary and Jim Cramer comparing Bankman-Fried to JP Morgan also helped instill confidence in the stock market as a legitimate and trustworthy entity.

It is difficult to estimate how many customers who held money on FTX have lost reports vary, but the number is probably in the billions. The figure will almost certainly have been worsened by Bankman-Fried’s since-deleted tweets leading up to FTX’s bankruptcy. The former CEO of FTX assured users that the assets held on the exchange were fully backed 1:1, thus discouraging users from withdrawing funds. In retrospect, these tweets turned out to be bald lies.

But it wasn’t just Bankman-Fried and his “inner circle” of FTX employees who betrayed clients – US regulators who worked closely with the exchange and showed leniency are also guilty. Gary Gensler, chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, devoted his organization’s resources to chasing more small, minor DeFi protocols for enforcement action, while the biggest fraud in recent crypto history operated right under his nose. Most likely, Bankman-Fried’s status as a major political donor and his active involvement in drafting crypto regulations helped him scare the hell out of the SEC.

The lack of regulatory clarity from regulators like the SEC also helped push US crypto users to unregulated overseas exchanges like FTX.com. If instead the SEC had worked with US crypto industry stakeholders to create fair, comprehensive legislation early on, this whole situation could have been avoided or at least mitigated in severity.

Just like the Mt. Gox hack before it, the FTX fraud is likely to tarnish the industry’s reputation among the current cohort of crypto-curious investors. Many who have been burned will not return. But it’s also important to look for a silver lining in times of darkness. It is better that the rot in the crypto industry be exposed now than in the future when the stakes are higher. While it may seem bleak right now, crypto will be stronger in the long run as scammers like Bankman-Fried are eradicated early, even if the fees are high.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, BTC, SOL, and several other crypto assets.