Meltdown: Bitcoin crashes to $576

[inlinesix]

[Wt_know]

Pension fund also put close to $100M in FTX … really jit dong jeng

where is the due dilligence done … anyhow anyhow?

[Windwaver]

13 hours ago, Kb27 said:

Temasick stand to lose $200 mii. Need to increase GST and CPF again. 

We should make these smart people pay up from their own pockets , instead of gambling away taxpayers' money.

 

[Windwaver]

5 hours ago, Jp66 said:

Today's BT reported.....

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/garage/at-least-us1-billion-of-client-funds-missing-at-failed-crypto-firm-ftx-sources

At least US$1 billion of client funds missing at failed crypto firm FTX: sources

AT LEAST US$1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred US$10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters.

A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between US$1 billion and US$2 billion.

While it is known that FTX moved customer funds to Alameda, the missing funds are reported here for the first time.

The financial hole was revealed in records that Bankman-Fried shared with other senior executives last Sunday, according to the two sources. The records provided an up-to-date account of the situation at the time, they said. Both sources held senior FTX positions until this week and said they were briefed on the company’s finances by top staff.

Bahamas-based FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday (Nov 11) after a rush of customer withdrawals earlier this week. A rescue deal with rival exchange Binance fell through, precipitating crypto’s highest-profile collapse in recent years.

In text messages to Reuters, Bankman-Fried said he “disagreed with the characterization” of the US$10 billion transfer.

“We didn’t secretly transfer,” he said. “We had confusing internal labeling and misread it,” he added, without elaborating.

Asked about the missing funds, Bankman-Fried responded: “???“

FTX and Alameda did not respond to requests for comment.

In a tweet on Friday, Bankman-Fried said he was “piecing together” what had happened at FTX. “I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week,” he wrote. “I will, soon, write up a more complete post on the play by play.”

At the heart of FTX’s problems were losses at Alameda that most FTX executives did not know about, Reuters has previously reported.

Customer withdrawals had surged last Sunday after Changpeng Zhao, CEO of giant crypto exchange Binance, said Binance would sell its entire stake in FTX’s digital token, worth at least US$580 million, “due to recent revelations.” Four days before, news outlet CoinDesk reported that much of Alameda’s US$14.6 billion in assets were held in the token.

That Sunday, Bankman-Fried held a meeting with several executives in the Bahamas capital Nassau to calculate how much outside funding he needed to cover FTX’s shortfall, the two people with knowledge of FTX’s finances said.

Bankman-Fried confirmed with Reuters that the meeting took place.

Bankman-Fried showed several spreadsheets to the heads of the company’s regulatory and legal teams that revealed FTX had moved around US$10 billion in client funds from FTX to Alameda, the two people said. The spreadsheets displayed how much money FTX loaned to Alameda and what it was used for, they said.

The documents showed that between $1 billion and $2 billion of these funds were not accounted for among Alameda’s assets, the sources said. The spreadsheets did not indicate where this money was moved, and the sources said they don’t know what became of it.

In a subsequent examination, FTX legal and finance teams also learned that Bankman-Fried implemented what the two people described as a “backdoor” in FTX’s book-keeping system, which was built using bespoke software.

They said the “backdoor” allowed Bankman-Fried to execute commands that could alter the company’s financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors. This set-up meant that the movement of the $10 billion in funds to Alameda did not trigger internal compliance or accounting red flags at FTX, they said.

In his text message to Reuters, Bankman-Fried denied implementing a “backdoor”.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating FTX.com’s handling of customer funds, as well its crypto-lending activities, a source with knowledge of the inquiry told Reuters on Wednesday. The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are also investigating, the source said.

FTX’s bankruptcy marked a stunning reversal for Bankman-Fried. The 30-year-old had set up FTX in 2019 and led it to become one of the largest crypto exchanges, accumulating a personal fortune estimated at nearly US$17 billion. FTX was valued in January at US$32 billion, with investors including SoftBank and BlackRock.

The crisis has sent reverberations through the crypto world, with the price of major coins plummeting. And FTX’s collapse is drawing comparisons to earlier major business meltdowns.

On Friday, FTX said it had turned over control of the company to John J. Ray III, the restructuring specialist who handled the liquidation of Enron Corp – one of the largest bankruptcies in history. REUTERS.

 

[Windwaver]

13 hours ago, Kb27 said:

Temasick stand to lose $200 mii. Need to increase GST and CPF again. 

We should make these smart people pay up from their own pockets , instead of gambling away taxpayers' money.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2022/11/10/exclusive-these-investors-stand-to-lose-the-most-from-ftxs-implosion/

TEMASEK

Stake in FTX: 1%

Est. amount invested: $205 million

Value at January 2022 peak: $320 million

An investment company owned by the government of Singapore, Temasek is the second-largest outside investor on the capitalization table, with 7 million shares. The $297 billion (assets) business, which owns big stakes in Singapore’s DBS Group and Singapore Airlines, invested in all three of FTX’s major funding rounds. With its $320 million stake on the brink of being worthless, a Temasek spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that they were “aware of the developments” and were “engaging FTX in our capacity as shareholder."

 

[Windwaver]

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3199385/crypto-exchange-giant-ftx-collapses-files-bankruptcy-protection-global-digital-currency-market-posts

Crypto exchange giant FTX files for bankruptcy, hitting investors including SoftBank, Temasek as digital currency market loses US$150 billion in crash

• In its bankruptcy filing, FTX listed more than 130 affiliated companies, 100,00 creditors and assets valued between US$10 billion and US$50 billion
• FTX’s crash prompted some backers to write down their investments, while regulators ramped up calls for stricter oversight of the crypto industry

It took less than a week for FTX to go from the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world to bankruptcy court.

The embattled cryptocurrency exchange, short billions of dollars, sought bankruptcy protection after the exchange experienced the industry’s equivalent of a bank run.

FTX, the hedge fund Alameda Research and dozens of other affiliated companies filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in Delaware on Friday. FTX US, which originally was not expected to be included in any financial rescue, was also part of the company’s bankruptcy filing.

Founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned, the company said. Bankman-Fried was recently estimated to be worth US$23 billion and has been a prominent political donor to Democrats. His net worth has all but evaporated, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, which closely track the net worth of the world’s richest people.

FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the US on November 11 to fend off creditors. Photo: AFP

It took less than a week for FTX to go from the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world to bankruptcy court.

The embattled cryptocurrency exchange, short billions of dollars, sought bankruptcy protection after the exchange experienced the industry’s equivalent of a bank run.

FTX, the hedge fund Alameda Research and dozens of other affiliated companies filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in Delaware on Friday. FTX US, which originally was not expected to be included in any financial rescue, was also part of the company’s bankruptcy filing.

Founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned, the company said. Bankman-Fried was recently estimated to be worth US$23 billion and has been a prominent political donor to Democrats. His net worth has all but evaporated, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, which closely track the net worth of the world’s richest people.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO FTX, testifies during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 9, 2022. Photo: AFP

“I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier in the week,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a series of posts on Twitter. The firm was valued at nearly US$32 billion in a January financing.

A group that can be assumed to have lost nearly everything in the collapse are investors in FTX. They include blue-chip names like the SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the Singapore wealth fund Temasek Holdings, hedge fund Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Mom and pop dabblers are taking a simultaneous bath in the crypto market itself. Market bellwether bitcoin plunged about 20 per cent this week, bringing its decline from last year’s record high to about 75 per cent. Ether, the second largest token, and altcoins sunk alongside it. FTX’s FTT token has tumbled 85 per cent in the past week.

The bankrupt digital-asset exchange was hit by a mysterious outflow of about US$662 million in tokens in the past 24 hours, the latest twist in one of the darkest periods for the crypto industry. Customers were subsequently confronted with what Ryne Miller, the general counsel of its US arm, described as “abnormalities with wallet movements.”

FTX’s unravelling is causing ripple effects. Already, companies that backed FTX are writing down their investments. Politicians and regulators are ramping up calls for stricter oversight of the crypto industry.

This crisis has also put pressure on the prices of bitcoin and other digital currencies. The total market value of all digital currencies dropped by about US$150 billion in the last week, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

FTX’s failure goes beyond finance. The company had major sports sponsorships, including Formula One racing and a sponsorship deal with Major League Baseball.

Miami-Dade County decided on Friday to terminate its relationship with FTX, meaning the venue where the NBA team Miami Heat play will no longer be known as FTX Arena. The Mercedes Formula One team also said it would remove FTX from its racing cars starting this weekend.

FTX and Bankman-Fried, as well as his brother, were also early investors in Semafor, the high-profile news start-up run by former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief and New York Times columnist Ben Smith.

Bankman-Fried has other problems as well. The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission were looking into FTX to determine whether any criminal activity or securities offences were committed, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday. The person could not discuss details of the investigations publicly and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The investigation is centred on the possibility that FTX may have used customers’ deposits to fund bets at Alameda Research. In traditional markets, brokers are expected to separate client funds from other company assets. Violations can be punished by regulators. Financial company MF Global effectively failed for a similar practice roughly a decade ago when it intermingled client assets with its own bets.

In its bankruptcy filing, FTX listed more than 130 affiliated companies circled around the globe. The company valued its assets between US$10 billion and US$50 billion, with a similar estimate for its liabilities.

The company appointed as its new chief executive John Ray III, a long-time bankruptcy litigator who is best known for having to clean up the mess made after the collapse of Enron.

FTX’s bankruptcy is certainly to be one of the most complicated bankruptcy cases in years. The company listed more than 100,000 creditors on its filing, and with all of its customers effectively being creditors because they deposited their funds with FTX, it will take months to sort out who is owed what, bankruptcy lawyers said.

Cryptocurrencies have no protections under law, and politicians on both sides of the aisle issued statements opposing any Lehman Brothers-like bailout for crypto investors.

“Unlike a case where there’s (securities insurance in the failure of a brokerage) or where the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corp] steps in with a bank failure, these customers are totally exposed,” said Daniel Besikof, a partner at Loeb & Loeb who specialises in bankruptcy law.

FTX had agreed earlier this week to sell itself to bigger rival Binance Holdings after experiencing the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. Customers fled the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital.

The crypto world had hoped that Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, might be able to rescue FTX and its depositors. But after Binance took a look at FTX’s books, it concluded that the smaller exchange’s problems were too big to solve and backed out of the deal.

FTX is the latest in a series of cascading disasters that have shaken the crypto sector, now under intense pressure from collapsing prices and circling financial regulators. Its failure is already being felt throughout the crypto universe.

On Thursday, the venture capital fund Sequoia Capital said it was writing down its total investment of nearly US$215 million in FTX.

The cryptocurrency lender BlockFi has announced that it is “not able to do business as usual” and pausing client withdrawals as a result of FTX’s implosion. In a letter posted to its Twitter profile late on Thursday, BlockFi – which was bailed out by Bankman-Fried’s FTX early last summer – said it was “shocked and dismayed by the news regarding FTX and Alameda”.

The company ended by saying any future communications about its status “will be less frequent that what our clients and other stakeholders are used to”.

Bitcoin tumbled immediately after the letter was posted and is trading below US$17,000. The original cryptocurrency, bitcoin had been hovering around US$20,000 for months before FTX’s problems became public this week, sending it down briefly to around US$15,500.

Shares of the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the online trading platform Robinhood each rose nearly 12 per cent.

 

[Windwaver]

[inlinesix]

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[Wt_know]

hair style is important to succeed and be No. 1 in your field ....  

[Throttle2]

2 hours ago, Wt_know said:

Pension fund also put close to $100M in FTX … really jit dong jeng

where is the due dilligence done … anyhow anyhow?

Pension fund in Crypto? 
lai i clap for them.

asking for it. Really.

deserve to lose the money

[Kyrios]

Wow young FT who studied in NUS is the COO...

Chio? 😄

 

 

[Lala81]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/sam-bankman-fried-bankruptcy-crypto-ftx/672104/?utm_term=2022-11-12T00%3A11%3A59&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=edit-promo

[Lala81]

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/fintech-crypto-binance-zhao/

 

[BanCoe]

Now we know how to built “Castles in the Air” ………. Learn since in Preambree Skool wan ……. And No ABSD oso , no GST …… nutting absolutely 

Edited November 12, 2022 by BanCoe

[Wt_know]

want to cabut ... but not fast enough

must learn from the best like Do Kwan and Su Zhu hiding there song song gao Dubai