According to a story from Bloomberg on Tuesday, the United States and the Bahamas may be interested in sending FTX founder Bankman-Fried on a plane to talk with Uncle Sam about the now-infamous failure of his cryptocurrency exchange. The 30-year-old crypto entrepreneur who goes by the handle SBF has reportedly been in contact with Bahamian authorities regarding the likelihood of extradition, according to three anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, and he seems to be cooperating.
In connection with fraud charges surrounding FTX’s collapse, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York are conducting an investigation. The United States Attorney’s Office has not publically commented on where the process is at. Atlas News has also contacted the DOJ for clarification, but we did not receive a response right away.
Notably, the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a separate investigation into whether the shuttered crypto exchange illegally sold securities in the form of cryptocurrency.
The House Committee on Financial Services revealed on Wednesday that it would summon Bankman-Fried to testify in a cross-party hearing on FTX’s demise in December. The bipartisan meeting, according to committee chairwoman Maxine Waters of California, will help move legislation regulating cryptocurrency forward. Notably, the committee is also interested in hearing from fellow cryptocurrency company Binance, which has been attempting to distance itself from the FTX collapse over the previous few weeks.
Along with the former CEO, FTX’s Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, the director of engineering, are still in the Bahamas and are still “under surveillance” by regional authorities. There were speculations over the weekend that Bankman-Fried and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison planned to leave for Dubai.
Tuesday night, SBF published a series of tweets in which he claimed that “to the best of [his] knowledge,” Alameda had more (illiquid) assets than liabilities marked to market, Alameda held a margin position in FTX International, and FTX.US still had enough cash on hand to pay all of its clients. “Not everyone necessarily agrees with this,” he wrote.
In addition, Bankman-Fried stated that he was working to “raise cash, make customers whole, and restart,” although he did not elaborate on how he would do this after stepping down as CEO on November 11 and while both FTX and Alameda are presently involved in bankruptcy proceedings.
Vox Senior Writer Kelsey Piper had a lengthy Twitter DM conversation with SBF last night that gets into his mind on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way. He covers how he is to blame, but how there is a lot of smoke and mirrors within the crypto space, and how Chapter 11 bankruptcy may have destroyed him. Check out Kelsey’s conversation with SBF here.
