According to sources, the once self-made billionaire is now down to his final 100k. While many are quick to say he caused his downfall, a recent interview with SBF on Tiffany Fong’s youtube channel reveals the once effective altruistic individual is now more of a remorseful one.
But of course, there is more than meets the eye; some things still don’t add up. Today we’ll run through a summary of SBF’s post-bankruptcy interview.
The “backdoor”
A backdoor allowed SBF to execute commands that altered company financial records without alerting others. This was allegedly targeted to SBF on him secretly moving money in the background.
Being the owner of two major crypto entities, FTX and Alameda Research, allowed SBF to borrow any amount of user deposits across the two “separate” entities.
It was an open secret that Alameda was FTX’s major market maker at the very beginning and played a pivotal role in the early stages of FTX. Honestly, it would be no surprise if those above was true.
“I can tell you that is definitely not true, and I don’t even know how to code is the honest, embarrassing answer.”
While he added that he used the system from a user interface perspective, he mentioned that he never coded for any of the entities.
While he denied the allegations of the backdoor, he brought up his failure to get Alameda’s balances accurately due to poorly labelled accounting. And he was wrong “by a fairly large number.”
$FTT as collateral
On the value of the $FTT token, “I think its value is more economically underpinned than the average token… it is not a token that does nothing, there is effectively some cash flow that goes through it, some utility.”
He then talked about Alameda’s FTT holdings and admitted that his venture arm held almost half of the entire supply, and the other half was just free floating in the market. This information alone crashed was what led to crashing crypto.
Liquidity did not cause the crash, but “what caused the FTT crash was the massive correlation of things.”
In the interview, SBF seemingly frames the entire situation as a mistake on the market’s fault while citing the whole series of events being “embarrassing.” The little responsibility he does take is mostly “we didn’t do things optimally the way we should.”
“It was problematic for us that FTT was such a large part of our margin position; I should have been way more worried about extreme downside cases.”
FTX Donations to political parties
“I donated about the same amount of money to both parties this year … I just didn’t disclose the Republican ones because the media would freak the f*** out.”
Since the start of FTX, SBF has been publicly supporting the Democratic party; he was one of the largest donors to the campaign of now-president Joe Biden.
All his donations were made in the dark, which refers to spending to influence elections where the source of the money is not disclosed to voters.
His decision to make a dark donation was to avoid public scrutiny after reports might take an overwhelming response labelling him as super liberal.
It seems like he never had a side, maybe just trying to pull enough strings to get enough people behind him, but all this was alleged.
FTX’s files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
From SBF’s point of view, it almost seems like he was coerced to file for Chapter 11, “I would give anything to unfile that right now.”
He further mentioned that FTX US was “so f***ing solvent that even after we lost $250M to a hack after the bankruptcy, we were $500M over.”
He was also confident, “if he did not file for bankruptcy, all users would be whole, and withdrawals would be on FTX right now.”
SBF also cited that he was able to get $4B in funding “8 minutes after signing the Chapter 11 papers,” which could have gone to make users whole but instead, had his trustees encourage him to sign the bankruptcy papers and burn down the entire operation out of shame instead of bringing more value back to customers.
“International needs about $4B of net asset value and $8B of liquidity. These are big numbers, but they’re not impossible numbers. If money were the biggest blocker, I’d be there right now. But the biggest blocker is the people now involved.”
Do you think things might be different if SBF did not file for bankruptcy? Even with SBF’s biggest regret of filing for bankruptcy, my take is the hole is too deep to salvage.
Using customer funds on Alameda
On customer funds, SBF said that he “should have been more cautious and careful as he was.” It was a combination of “accounting quirks”, the crash, which took down asset value “combined with a hyper correlated crash this month where we saw a 50% decline in relevant asset prices in two days combined with a run on the bank and a margin position in the several billion.”
SBF did not answer the question. Instead, he focused more on his miscalculation.
The $8B hole
Is there $8B of funds missing? While Sam did not specifically mention the hole, he went full circle on how “not enough liquid assets to be sold in a reasonable time scale for as many reasonable dollars we will be called in for.”
SBF’s remorse
“I committed a while ago to spend my life doing what I could for the world. And obviously, it hasn’t turned out how I’ve hoped.”
The people, though, are not looking for an apology, and right now, it is the people who are biting the bullet.
If SBF does mean his remorse, he’d admit that he was always way over his head and probably never have been allowed to run billions under his name.
Instead, he admits that he would have allowed a bankrupt company to proceed in silence, giving hope by talking about FTX US being solvent and the back door not being possible because he could barely use the system.
I don’t think we can trust people at the top right now. The only alternative is trusting the code. Long live DeFi.
Also read Is KuCoin insolvent?
[Editor’s Note: This article does not represent financial advice. Please do your research before investing.]
Featured Image Credit: Chain Debrief
