Sam Bankman-Fried Admits Responsibility for FTX Collapse

The founder of the beleaguered crypto exchange FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, has said he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” while admitting that he made mistakes as the chief executive.

“There are things I would do anything to do over again,” he said in a virtual appearance at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York.

Bankman-Fried, who resigned as CEO of FTX earlier last month, said he was shocked by the dramatic collapse of the company.  FTX and a number of companies affiliated to it filed for bankruptcy last month in what has been described as “one of the most stunning corporate implosions ever.”

Also Read: BlockFi Files for Bankruptcy Protection following FTX Collapse

“Almost overnight, customers around the world were left scrambling to recover billions of funds that they’d deposited on the platform. Bankman-Fried’s own multibillion-dollar personal wealth evaporated. And crypto firms with financial exposure to FTX began to buckle,” Allison Morrow reports.

Reacting to the question as to whether FTX, “misappropriated customer funds when it made loans to his hedge fund, Alameda,” Bankman-Fried said: “I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” he said. “I was frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position was.”

Bankman-Fried admitted that there was lack of “corporate controls and risk management within the businesses.”  

“There was no person who was chiefly in charge of positional risk of customers on FTX…And that feels pretty embarrassing in retrospect,” he told DealBook.

The authorities in the Bahamas, where FTX was based, and the federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, are investigating the collapse of the digital market