Sam Bankman-Fried: Founder of bankrupt crypto firm FTX breaks his silence, with thousands left without savings

A crypto entrepreneur says his net worth fell from $26.5 billion to $100,000 after his business implosion.

Sam Bankman-Fried admitted it had been a “bad month” after FTX went bankrupt, leaving thousands of people frozen from their savings.

The 30-year-old – who once positioned himself as a savior for struggling businesses – has been accused of embezzling client funds and withdrawing $10 billion from the company in secret.

To make matters worse, reports suggest at least $1 billion is missing.

But speaking at the New York Times DealBook summit, he insisted he had never attempted to commit fraud and said he was “shocked” by the way things turned out.

FTX now has new management as it navigates bankruptcy, with its new CEO saying he has never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls” in his 40-year career.

It was claimed that funds belonging to FTX users were mixed with funds from Alameda Research, a trading company that Bankman-Fried also ran.

FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that operated around the world, collapsed when panicked traders withdrew $6 billion from the company in just three days after a series of explosive allegations.

Speaking via video link from the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried said he now had ‘almost nothing’ from the failure of his business – and only had one credit card left in working order.

He admitted his companies “completely failed” when it came to risk management, and said it was “pretty embarrassing in retrospect”.

“Whatever happened, why it happened, I had a duty to our stakeholders, our customers, our investors, the regulators of the world, to do the right thing,” added Bankman Fried. .

While the beleaguered entrepreneur believes US users should be able to get their money back in full, Bankman-Fried has warned in other interviews that international customers could only get 20-25% of the money they blocked. in FTX.

A number of companies in the cryptocurrency industry have collapsed in recent months, coinciding with a sharp drop in the value of Bitcoin.

Some companies have been accused of offering interest rates on savings that are just too good to be true, while others have been branded as ‘Ponzi schemes’.

The Bahamas has now launched a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding FTX’s disappearance.