FTX exchange sent Alameda Research 173 million FTT tokens on Sept. 28, worth US$4.1 billion at the time, according to Etherscan data.
See related article: Binance agrees to acquire FTX following liquidity crunch
Fast facts
- The funds came from the FTT ICO contract, which automatically released the 173 million tokens from FTT’s initial coin offering.
- The 173 million FTT tokens were sent to Alameda’s crypto address on Sept. 28, Etherscan data showed. An hour after the transaction, Alameda sent the 173 million tokens to the FTX Deployer address, which is the creator of the ERC-20 FTT tokens.
- On the day of the transactions, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried wrote that the company was “rotating a few FTX wallets,” which they do periodically, and that it “won’t have any effect.”
- Lucas Nuzzi, head of R&D at crypto intelligence firm CoinMetrics, wrote that Alameda survived the crypto crash by securing the 173 million FTT tokens as collateral, which came back to haunt FTX. “The Alameda bailout likely put a dent on FTXs balance sheet to the point where it was no longer solvent,” he wrote.
- Nuzzi added that the bailout “would have been fine if the price of FTT didn’t collapse and a bank run ensued.”
- FTT lost 71% of its value in the past 24 hours to trade at US$4.77 at 8.45 p.m. in Hong Kong, according to CoinGecko data.
See related article: Binance’s Changpeng Zhao emerges as big winner ‘on all fronts’ of FTX acquisition