An account once used by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, posted a link to a document on X late Thursday arguing the company was never insolvent, echoing arguments raised at his trial years ago.
The 14-page document, which claims to be written by the disgraced wunderkind and his team, claims the exchange did not go bankrupt because of a sweeping scheme to commit fraud and misappropriate $10 billion in customers' funds, as a Manhattan jury found in 2023.
Instead, FTX faced a “liquidity crisis” that was “on track to be resolved by the end of the month,” purportedly disrupted by “FTX’s external counsel,” who seized control. The document goes on to say that “FTX was never bankrupt, even when its lawyers placed it into bankruptcy.”
The narrative echoed elements of an interview that Bankman-Fried gave behind bars in March, in which he told conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, “there was enough money” to pay back every creditor at the time that the exchange collapsed.
As FTX circled the drain in 2022, the company purportedly had $25 billion in assets, along with $16 billion in “FTX equity value,” against $13 billion in liabilities, the document claims.
The document argues that had lawyers not sold off assets that the company had invested in, FTX and sister firm Alameda Trading would have holdings worth an estimated $136 billion.
That would entail a $14.3 billion stake in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and a $7.6 billion investment in retail brokerage Robinhood, among 12 other assets.
That includes XRP-linked fintech Ripple and Bitcoin mining firm Genesis Digital Assets. The FTX Recovery Trust filed a lawsuit against Genesis in Digital Assets last month, seeking to recover $1.15 billion it claims was misappropriated by Bankman-Fried.
If FTX and Alameda still existed, the exchange’s FTT token would be worth nearly $22 billion, the document claims. Prosecutors said at Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial that FTT, among other assets, was used to prop up Alamada.
Two weeks ago, conservative activist Laura Loomer claimed on X that there’s a “massive and well-funded” effort to persuade U.S. President Donald Trump to pardon Bankman-Fried.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, a former rival of Bankman-Fried’s who helped spur FTT’s implosion, has since been pardoned by Trump after violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws at the world's largest crypto exchange.
Before sentencing Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison in 2024, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said, “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on his sentence.”
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