On Sunday (13 November 2022), Ethereum Foundation Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin shared his thoughts on Sam Bankman-Fried (aka “SBF”), Co-Founder and CEO of insolvent crypto exchange FTX.
As you probably know, on 10 November 2022, SBF took to Twitter to talk about how he had “f*ucked up” at FTX International:
He went on to say:
“FTX International currently has a total market value of assets/collateral higher than client deposits (moves with prices!). But that’s different from liquidity for delivery–as you can tell from the state of withdrawals. The liquidity varies widely, from very to very little… The full story here is one I’m still fleshing out every detail of, but as a very high level, I fucked up twice. The first time, a poor internal labeling of bank-related accounts meant that I was substantially off on my sense of users’ margin. I thought it was way lower…
“My sense before: Leverage: 0x USD liquidity ready to deliver: 24x average daily withdrawals Actual: Leverage: 1.7x Liquidity: 0.8x Sunday’s withdrawals Because, of course, when it rains, it pours. We saw roughly $5b of withdrawals on Sunday–the largest by a huge margin…
“And so I was off twice. Which tells me a lot of things, both specifically and generally, that I was shit at. And a third time, in not communicating enough. I should have said more. I’m sorry–I was slammed with things to do and didn’t give updates to you all… And so we are where we are. Which sucks, and that’s on me. I’m sorry…“
FTX issued the following press release on Friday (11 November 2022):
And here is how SBF announced the collapse of the FTX empire:
Crypto exchange Bybit has created a nice summary of the history of the FTX empire from its rise in November 2017 (the founding of Alameda Research) to its fall in November 2022 (FTX Group companies commencing Chapter 11 Proceedings in the U.S.):
Anyway, on 11 November 2022, here is how Vitalik compared the collapse of Mt. Gox with that of FTX:
Well, earlier today, Steve Randy Waldman tweeted that “a sad problem with being a zillionaire is the mistakes you make can have such catastrophic impact that people’s default sympathy — you’re only human we all fuck up — gets withheld, becomes untenable, callous to offer or give”, which prompted Buterin to say that we should separate SBF the public figure from Sam the human being:
Unsurprisingly, the crypto community on Twitter seems to mostly think that Sam the human being deserves a lot less sympathy than Buterin believes. Here are a few reactions:
