> Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was?
I can speculate based on recently revealed facts.
SBF did grease politicians to the tune of 40 million USD in political donations. Several have described these donations as: "bribes" (I'll let you judge). (as a sidenote I wonder if these politicians are going to give these donations back to the people SBF scammed).
A US congressman, as reported here several times, wrote: "GaryGensler runs to the media while reports to my office allege he was helping SBF and FTX work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly. We're looking into this".
It's "allegedly" but it's a fact that a US congressman posted that.
It's also established that a colleague of the SEC's Garry Gensler happens to be the father of... Drumroll... The 28 years old woman CEO of Alameda.
So I'll speculate a TL;DR:
SBF was working hand in hand with corrupt politicians and corrupt officials to kick Binance out of the US through regulatory capture in order to grab Binance's insane market share (easily 10x the size of FTX).
SBF would then have continued the established FTX/Alameda scam through FTT. So he'd have then used FTX to pump the price of FTT (and, because why not, other manipulated shitcoins too) in order to keep pretending traders at Alameda were geniuses.
Alameda would have been fully legit and would have take shitloads of money from various pension funds and investment funds (knowing he already got some: why not think he would have gone for more?).
That's my speculation: why stop at 1/10th the size of Binance when you can donate tens of millions to politicians (which is pocket change when you're making billions) and work with the SEC to get a monopoly on crypto exchanges in the US, all the while pumping the value of your Alameda fund and all the while having covers of magazines and people everywhere (Bloomberg, Sequoia, JP Morgan, etc.) saying how big of a genius you are and how geniuses all people around you are.
The guy is a megalomaniac: no longer than a few weeks ago he was saying that companies worth tens of billions were "potential acquisition targets".
And I think that, had the overall markets not have been crashing hard, he may have succeeded at all that, creating a scam 10x or 100x bigger than the one he actually ran.
But the market crashed and CZ took the opportunity to reveal the FTT scam to get rid of a very dangerous competitor. No matter if Binance is legit or not: SBF was after Binance but Binance was too big for SBF too chew. Binance may be going down too (no clue about that) but Binance was never going to go down alone while letting SBF free to run his SEC-endorsed scam.
Binance leads the industry in proof of 1:1 reserves of custom holdings.
CZ knew about FTX's finances because he was the original investor in FTX. The reason he had FTT to dump in the first place is because of that initial investment in FTX.
No, you're thinking of Kraken, which has been doing this for years (not an endorsement!). Binance just did it, by revealing their wallet addresses, and promised more in future.
Two important points:
1. Generally Proof of Reserves is a term where all holders can validate cryptographically that their funds are accounted for. This is harder because it's natural and efficient for an exchange to co-mingle multiple customers.
2. Doesn't mean they're solvent! They might owe customers $100bn for all anyone knows.
It's still far better than nothing, but FWIW their history of lying about their home jurisdiction, and massive "out of nowhere" growth is a huge red flag that you should be aware of (FTX did the latter even faster, of course, being founded in 2019!).
Im 9-to-1 that Binance is shady asf but I don’t have much evidence - outside of the fact that they used to list tokens in exchange for a share of the pie, which in my eyes is super dodgy.
I can speculate based on recently revealed facts.
SBF did grease politicians to the tune of 40 million USD in political donations. Several have described these donations as: "bribes" (I'll let you judge). (as a sidenote I wonder if these politicians are going to give these donations back to the people SBF scammed).
A US congressman, as reported here several times, wrote: "GaryGensler runs to the media while reports to my office allege he was helping SBF and FTX work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly. We're looking into this".
It's "allegedly" but it's a fact that a US congressman posted that.
It's also established that a colleague of the SEC's Garry Gensler happens to be the father of... Drumroll... The 28 years old woman CEO of Alameda.
So I'll speculate a TL;DR:
SBF was working hand in hand with corrupt politicians and corrupt officials to kick Binance out of the US through regulatory capture in order to grab Binance's insane market share (easily 10x the size of FTX).
SBF would then have continued the established FTX/Alameda scam through FTT. So he'd have then used FTX to pump the price of FTT (and, because why not, other manipulated shitcoins too) in order to keep pretending traders at Alameda were geniuses.
Alameda would have been fully legit and would have take shitloads of money from various pension funds and investment funds (knowing he already got some: why not think he would have gone for more?).
That's my speculation: why stop at 1/10th the size of Binance when you can donate tens of millions to politicians (which is pocket change when you're making billions) and work with the SEC to get a monopoly on crypto exchanges in the US, all the while pumping the value of your Alameda fund and all the while having covers of magazines and people everywhere (Bloomberg, Sequoia, JP Morgan, etc.) saying how big of a genius you are and how geniuses all people around you are.
The guy is a megalomaniac: no longer than a few weeks ago he was saying that companies worth tens of billions were "potential acquisition targets".
And I think that, had the overall markets not have been crashing hard, he may have succeeded at all that, creating a scam 10x or 100x bigger than the one he actually ran.
But the market crashed and CZ took the opportunity to reveal the FTT scam to get rid of a very dangerous competitor. No matter if Binance is legit or not: SBF was after Binance but Binance was too big for SBF too chew. Binance may be going down too (no clue about that) but Binance was never going to go down alone while letting SBF free to run his SEC-endorsed scam.