FTX Agrees to Sell Itself to Binance Amid Liquidity Crunch
#FTX Agrees to Sell Itself to #Binance Amid #Liquidity Crunch. "Things have come full circle, and FTX.com’s first, and last, investors are the same: we have come to an agreement on a strategic transaction with Binance for FTX.com (pending DD etc.)," FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted Tuesday. Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao also tweeted to confirm the deal, saying the two exchanges signed a non-binding letter of intent. Balance sheet of FTX's corporate sibling, Alameda Research, was too heavily reliant on illiquid tokens including FTX's own FTT. Both FTX and Alameda were founded and are largely owned by Bankman-Fried. Also Read - Fidelity to Add Ethereum Trading For Institutional Clients Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" said He planned to sell his holdings of FTX's FTT token. "Liquidating our FTT is just post-exit risk management, learning from LUNA," he tweeted. CZ's decision brought down the price of FTT. Alameda's CEO, Caroline Ellison, then tweeted that she would buy all of Binance's FTT holdings for $22 each in order minimize the impact on prices. The situation became bad as FTX users struggled to withdraw money from FTX. In his tweets announcing the deal with Binance, Bankman-Fried noted that FTX.us and Binance.US are separate companies that are not part of the transaction, and tweeted that “FTX.us’s withdrawals are and have been live, is fully backed 1:1, and operating normally." Investors had withdrew large sum of assets from FTX, withdrawing bitcoin (BTC) over the last 24 hours, bringing the balance from about 20,000 bitcoins to just 1 on Tuesday morning, according to data from Coinglass. Read the full article
