Half a Billion in Crypto Goes Missing from FTX Exchange
Nearly half a billion dollars has been taken out of the now failed FTX exchange, and nobody really seems to know where the money went.
Money Is Missing from FTX
Spokespeople for the crypto exchange claim that “unauthorized transactions” are what caused the money to disappear, and it is being said that the company might have been hacked and the money stolen. The question is, “By who?”
At the time of writing, the company has moved whatever funds it still had into cold storage to ensure no further illicit transactions could occur. FTX is also working with law enforcement agents and regulators to figure out what might have happened.
Frances Coppola – an independent financial and economic commentator – explained in a recent interview:
We’ll have to wait and see what the fallout is, but I think we are going to see more dominoes falling and an awful lot of people stand to lose their money and their savings, and that is just tragic, really.
FTX is likely to go down in history as one of the biggest embarrassments to ever occur within the digital currency space. Founded in 2019, the company was relatively new still at the time of its collapse. By some miracle, the firm rose to prominence rather easily during the three years that it was fully alive, and many credited its founder Sam Bankman-Fried as something of a genius.
They wondered how he could make a company get so big in so little time, but clearly, things weren’t done well enough to ensure the firm could remain afloat.
Trouble for the firm began in mid-November when it was announced that FTX was experiencing something of a “liquidity crunch.” Apparently, the firm didn’t have enough money on hand due to mismanaged financial accounts and the FTT token, which is the native cryptocurrency of the exchange, saw massive dips in its price.
The company went to Binance for help and for a while, it was being reported that the larger firm was potentially going to buy the smaller one, but within 24 hours or so, Binance announced on social media that it was dropping out of the deal, saying that FTX’s problems were simply too big to handle.
From there, the enterprise became the latest big name in crypto to undergo bankruptcy proceedings, and Sam Bankman-Fried has since resigned from the company, claiming in a recent message that he had “f*cked up.”
Many Want Regulation
The incident is causing many members of Congress to (unsurprisingly) revoice their desires for hardcore crypto regulation.
Not long ago, Congressman Brad Sherman – a known crypto skeptic – cited FTX as the reason as to why he was now looking to establish serious regulation as a means of preventing something like this from ever happening again.
The post Half a Billion in Crypto Goes Missing from FTX Exchange appeared first on Live Bitcoin News.
Filed under: Bitcoin - @ December 17, 2022 5:00 pm