Alameda is a separate company from ftx, although sbf owns them also. They are a crypto hedge fund, and operated as a market maker on ftx, providing liquidity for the exchange. They also did a lot of VC stuff funding other crypto projects.
Looks like a few people responded already. Here's a youtube or podcast that will probably go into a bit more detail too. Nobody knows all of the details, but it's easy enough to make some educated guesses based on what we know so far. They were an exchange that wasn't content just making tons of money charging people for trades. Instead, they got into the game of issuing their own tokens, using those tokens as collateral, taking out leverage, etc. Best I can tell, CZ sniffed out that they had some serious balance sheet issues tied to their own FTT token (which he held some of), and he decided to announce a public sale (might as well be an attack) of that token. If they used that token as collateral, then the price dropping below certain thresholds really fucked them up. Combine that with people generally rushing to move money off FTX as this was happening, and they were in serious trouble. Put simply, their assets couldn't cover their liabilities.
Also btc people I follow have been talking about proof of reserves for exchanges for years so that customers don't have to worry about FTX being insolvent. Kraken does it. Maybe a few others too. And Binance threw its hat in the ring today.
He claimed they were completely separate entities, but that has clearly been revealed to not be the case the last couple days.
1. Buy drugs 2. Plant them 3. Bust people 4. Do some of the drugs 5. Repeat steps 2-4 until they run out 6. $$$$$$$$$$$
Really interested to see what kinda due diligence could’ve been done in that amount of time. Unless they just looked at financials and saw basic ratios for liquidity, working capital, and leverage. Must’ve been really ugly, or this was all just a publicity stunt for them to get the market to settle for a period of time while they got stuff in order.
Is this the 52 week low for btc? For some reason I thought it hit like 15k a few months ago but my 2 minutes of research in the google chart doesn’t correlate with that recollection