Finance
FTX Was an Empty Black Box All Along
Sam Bankman-Fried made crypto charming—and only now is the frightening scope of this fiasco becoming clear for everyday investors.
This article is for subscribers only.
Sign up for our Crypto newsletter and follow @crypto on Twitter for the latest news.
The epic unraveling of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.com has delivered many shocks: The $8 billion in liabilities it couldn’t pay, its huge exposure to its own magic-bean digital tokens, the apparent misuse of customer funds and the mysterious unauthorized withdrawal that drained off a chunk of the money that remained. Even so, it could have been a lot worse: Founder Sam Bankman-Fried had been trying to expand beyond crypto enthusiasts to capture the assets of everyday savers and investors in stocks and funds. The music stopped before he could get there.