FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted Thursday morning that he is “sorry,” admitting that he “f—ed up” and “should have done better.” Also, he stated that he will be shutting down Alameda Research which was a trading firm that he co-founded along with FTX.
He is trying to escape bankruptcy as the company had a fall this week. Earlier this year, the exchange was valued at $32 billion, but now Bankman-Fried’s rival, Binance has extended a deal to acquire FTX.
“I also should have been communicating more very recently,” wrote Bankman-Fried. “Transparently–my hands were tied during the duration of the possible Binance deal; I wasn’t particularly allowed to say much publicly. But of course, it’s on me that we ended up there in the first place.”
“The full story here is one I’m still fleshing out every detail of, but at a very high level, I f—ed up twice,” wrote Bankman-Fried.
The FTX CEO admitted that his first mistake was below-par internal labeling of bank-related accounts, which meant that he was “substantially off” on his understanding of users’ margins. “I thought it was way lower.”
He said that on Sunday the exchange saw roughly $5 billion of withdrawals, which he called “the largest by a huge margin.”
Bankman-Fried also said he’s working on finding out what the smart way to go forward would be.
The company announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with the Tron network to allow holders of certain tokens to exchange their assets from FTX to external wallets at a 1:1 value.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced his company was offloading the FTT on its books, leading to a run on the popular FTX exchange and a liquidity crisis.
“The fact that FTT is such a big part of their collateral that they use in order to get loans on other platforms, those are all really questionable things,” Carter said.