Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, FTX, was an epic mess, and the unwinding is likely to last longer than the empire itself.
Crypto companies, investors and government officials who heard policy pitches and pocketed political donations from the FTX founder, known as SBF, are reeling. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan said Thursday that it was writing down a $95 million investment in FTX. Coinbase, the only publicly listed crypto exchange in the United States, has seen stock and bond prices descend as the digital asset industry struggles. And crypto values, which fell dramatically over the summer, dropped further.
FTX is not your average failed company. John Ray, who handled Enron’s bankruptcy and was named CEO of FTX when it filed for Chapter 11 protection, said that he had found very little documentation of finances and that what did exist couldn’t be trusted. He told the Bankruptcy Court that he had never seen a situation as chaotic as what he was running into at FTX.