Crypto exchange FTX is undergoing significant liquidity issues, and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried “asked for help” from rival exchange Binance this week.
Binance elected not to participate, and Bankman-Fried addressed the situation and the overall state of FTX in a viral Thursday morning thread on Twitter. “I fucked up, and should have done better,” said the crypto maven, who is personally set to lose billions in net worth to FTX’s financial issues.
Bankman-Fried said he had messed up multiple times, including a misreading of the use of margin on the platform.
He went on to say that he is trying to raise capital and to protect customers and investors. Many FTX customers have not been able to make crypto or fiat-currency withdrawals in recent days.
He also stated that his is digital-asset trading house Alameda Research will be “winding down trading.”
FTX, he suggested, may continue to seek partners to help ease the company’s liquidity problems.
FTX’s U.S. arm was never involved in this most recent attempt to find a solution through M&A, something Bankman-Fried reiterated in the thread. It is unclear how much impact any takeover deal would have on the valuation of FTX.US.
(He’d said, in capital letters, earlier in the thread that “THIS IS ALL ABOUT FTX INTERNATIONAL, THE NON-US EXCHANGE. FTX US USERS ARE FINE!”)
Representatives of FTX did not immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment for this story.
Venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital had, prior to Bank-Fried’s thread on Twitter, said it now values its FTX stake at $0 in anticipation of a bankruptcy filing by the exchange.
The news around FTX comes after prices for headliner cryptos have plummeted. Bitcoin
BTCUSD,
dropped to its lowest level in two years this week, and ether
ETHUSD,
is now down 72.92% over the past year.
See also: Crypto and tech are the first dominoes to fall as stimulus liquidity dries up, says this money manager. Here’s what could happen next.
