The 30-year-old had set up Bahamas-based FTX in 2019 and led it to become one of the largest exchanges, accumulating a near $17bn fortune. Zhao’s unveiling of the planned takeover capped a stunning reversal for Bankman-Fried. He didn’t respond to further messages.īinance earlier said it decided to pull out of the deal as a result of its due diligence on FTX and news reports about US investigations into the company. Bankman-Fried told Reuters on Tuesday that “I’ll probably be too swamped” to do interviews. Neither Binance nor FTX responded to requests for comment. After Binance pulled out, he told FTX staff in a message that Binance had not previously told them of any reservations about the deal and he was “exploring all options”.
Stuck without a buyer, Bankman-Fried was now searching for alternative backers, two people close to him said. It culminated on Wednesday, with Binance pulling out of its deal and throwing FTX’s future into uncertainty. The interviews and messages also shine new light on the bitter rivalry between the two billionaires, who in recent months competed for market share and publicly accused each other of seeking to hurt each other’s business. Some of those deals involving Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, led to a series of losses that eventually became his undoing, according to three people familiar with the company’s operations. The seeds of FTX's downfall were sown months earlier, stemming from mistakes Bankman-Fried made after he stepped in to save other crypto firms as the crypto market collapsed amid rising interest rates, according to interviews with several people close to Bankman-Fried and communications from both companies that have not been previously reported. Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, whom the billionaire had accused of sabotage, would now be his White Knight. The reason for the mea culpa: his announcement half an hour earlier that FTX’s arch-rival, Binance, planned to mount a shock takeover of its main trading platform to save it from a “liquidity crunch”. New York/London - On Tuesday morning, Sam Bankman-Fried, owner of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, caught his employees off-guard with a sombre message.
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