Report: Happy Endings ‘Mixed’ for FTX Bailout of Crypto Firms

Putting up $1 billion for rescues and acquisitions of cryptocurrency firms as the sector started further collapsing following plummeting bitcoin and other prices, FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried expects some of the investments will bring about profits, while others likely will be disappointing.

“Mixed is basically the answer. I think some were going to turn out to be profitable, some won’t be,” Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of digital asset exchange FTX said in an interview on Bloomberg’s “David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.”

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“I mean, with Voyager, I think there’s $70 million there that we put in that I’m not sure we’re ever seeing again,” he added.

Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July despite being offered a $485 million loan from Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried.

FTX US, the American affiliate of FTX, struck a $400 million revolving credit deal with BlockFi with the option to purchase the platform outright at a variable price of up to $240 million. That deal has some hope, Bankman-Fried said.

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As far as regulation of the industry and the debates about whether it should be handled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg it doesn’t really make a difference.

“What we’ve tried really hard to do over the last year is get the industry to a place where it is happy to accept sensible regulation,” he said.

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Bankman-Fried, like others in the cryptocurrency sector, regularly heads to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on behalf of the industry. He was singled out with three other exchanges on Tuesday (Aug. 30) by a congressional committee demanding information about what was being done to protect consumers against fraud, PYMNTS reported.

FTX is one of the largest crypto exchanges, with the majority coming from the non-U.S. exchange. FTX.US, for example, only had $290 million in 24-hour volume on Aug. 31, compared to the non-U.S. exchange’s $2.2 billion.