FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been talking the ears off of journalists, but up until now, he has avoided speaking to Congressional investigators.
That has changed.
Today, Bankman-Fried tweeted that he would appear before the House Committee on Financial Services this coming Tuesday.
SBF will presumably be under oath, so it’s probably a good thing that he has hired a high-profile lawyer to represent him. (This same advocate recently represented Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in pedophilia.)
Still, Bankman-Fried will have a lot of splainin’ to do.
The former crypto wunderkind will inevitably be asked whether he transferred customer deposits to Alameda Research, a hedge fund that he controlled. FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray, III, a man who has been hired to clean up the mess at FTX, has stated that SBF used “special software to conceal the misuse of customer funds,” which Bankman-Fried has denied
It would also not be unreasonable to think that SBF will face questioning about the $1 billion that he borrowed from Alameda as well as the $2.3 billion that an Alameda affiliate loaned Paper Bird, another company that he controlled.
And he will surely face questioning about the money he put to work with both the Democratic and Republican parties as well as news organizations such as the crypto news publication The Block, which, according to a report in today’s Axios, received some $43 million in loans from Alameda. Was this all part of a cynical and manipulative game that the former billionaire was playing as he intimated to a Vox reporter in a series of late night DMs?
For what it’s worth, if the House Committee is open to suggestions, I would like to know more about the Signal conversations that SBF had with Binance CEO Changpeng (CZ) Zhao in the days leading up to FTX’s bankruptcy and what they reveal about the state of the cryptocurrency market. In a fascinating article in today’s Times, reporters David Yaffe-Bellany and Emily Flitter write about one such conversation in which CZ accuses Bankman-Fried of trying to tank Tether, a USD stablecoin, with a $250,000 trade. SBF retorts that there is no way such a small trade could ever undermine Tether, but the fact that Zhao was so concerned about Tether’s stability does not speak well for stablecoins or the crypto industry in general.
So we will be watching on Tuesday and looking to see in particular if committee members will be able to poke any holes in SBF’s defense, namely that he was a terrible CEO and lost sight of FTX’s risk exposure.
One thing is certain: whatever SBF’s lawyer is getting paid, it’s not enough.