Binance to Keep its FTT Holdings on the Free Market
- Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao appears to have denied Alameda’s offer to buy the exchange’s FTT tokens at $22 a piece, noting they will “stay in the free market”.
- FTX assured users today that their withdrawal requests will be processed, and that the withdrawal queue was “getting back to more reasonable levels” as nodes and banks were catching up.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. CoinDesk
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao appears to have denied Alameda Research’s offer to buy the exchange’s FTX Token (FTT) holdings at $22 a piece, tweeting on 7 October “I think we will stay in the free market”.
On Sunday, CZ revealed that Binance would be liquidating its FTT position dye to “recent revelations that have came to light”, most likely referring to a recently leaked Alameda balance sheet that showed a big portion of its assets were tied to the FTX native token. The CEO of Alameda, Caroline Ellison, fired back on Twitter by saying that the balance sheet in question did not show all of the company’s assets — claiming that more than $10 billion worth of assets were not reflected on it — and also made an offer to buy all of Binance’s FTT tokens at $22 a piece. This offer, however, appears to have been rejected by CZ on Monday, when the CEO said Binance’s FTT holdings “will stay in the free market”.
The growing concerns about FTX’s liquidity — which have caused the price of FTT to drop by 23% in the last 24 hours — were addressed by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) on Monday, when he noted that the exchange had enough assets to cover all of its clients holdings. He further said FTX does not invest client assets, and that the exchange had GAAP audits that showed more than $1 billion in excess cash.
Clients of FTX had also expressed concerns over delays on fiat currency withdrawals at the time, though an update from the company assured users everything was running smoothly but there was a backlog of requests due to node throughput limits and banks not working on Sunday. Today the exchange noted that the withdrawal queue was “getting back to more reasonable levels”, and that nodes and banks were catching up. SBF tweeted on Monday:
- The New York Jurors took 4 fours of deliberating before pronouncing the former FTX CEO guilty of all seven charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.
- Bankman-Fried will now have to appear in court on 28 March, 2024, where he will face a potential maximum sentence of 115 years in prison.
Former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried leaves the Federal Court in New York after pleading not guilty, 3 January, 2022.
lev radin/Shutterstock
- A little over $13 million in altcoins were sent to crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase in the past 24 hours, which is in accordance with a September court order.
- The court ordered a phased liquidation process, which allows the bankruptcy estate to sell $3.4 billion worth of digital assets over a certain period of time.
- Joseph Pimbley, a member of litigation consulting firm PF2 Securities, will try to rebuff testimonies from Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, and Adam Yedidia.
- During his testimony Pimbley will try to establish a timeline for the FTX-Alameda line of credit, and convince the jury it fluctuated between $1 billion and $3 billion between 2021 and 2022.