If you want good financial journalism, you need to look at what short sellers are saying. That was how WireCard came to light. That is what did for FTX: Binance found the truth, not the NYT or Twitter.
Coindesk found the truth [1]. Binance reacted to it [2] in a way that made people notice.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/divisions-in-sa...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/cz_binance/status/158928342170429...
How is coindesk funded? Rare to see a journalism entity that is so close to crypto be so critical without having to accept ads from the industry.
But twitter user @Bitfinex'ed (someone who's on a crusade against Tether/Bitfinex since years) described the very scam Alameda and FTX were running before FTX even launched, years ago.
@Bitfinex'ed noticed that SBF had ties with tether from day one. He warned about hundreds of millions of frozen funds (by authorities) on FTX right before FTX raised a billion dollar.
He was warning people not months but years ago.
Anybody who believe this whole Alameda/FTX scam wasn't planned from day one is an useful idiot. The very type of idiot the media is needing right now to sell the "leverage gone wrong for SBF" angle.
There are records of SBF describing the very mechanism he was running with Alameda and FTX before he launched FTX.
Sorting out the “good” short sellers from the “bad” is a tough job. One that good financial journalists do as a matter of course.
There are multiple libel and defamation cases in play in almost every competent jurisdiction at any given time.
Defamation and libel cases against journalists regularly pay out. (They pay out infrequently against public figures, in part because the threshold is higher and in part because journalists are more careful with them.)
I believe... Unless you profit by it, you can say what you want to cause share prices to go up or down and it is not a crime.
Is that incorrect?
Activist funds do this every day.
Find the proof, short BUSD, go public, become a millionaire and do a public service!
Binance saw the real game that SBF was planning: regulatory capture of the crypto exchanges market to get rid of Binance. When evidence impossible to deny came up to light, Binance decided to strike Alameda/FTX to death.
Funnily enough the regulation the ex-CFTC commissioner working for SBF was working on alongside officials may still pass and so Binance may still be totally screwed. But CZ was not going to go down alone and let SBF pull his incredible feat.
CZ wrote stuff like: "Sam isn't a team player", "He's working behind our back to pass legislation that'd prevent us from operate".
In other words: SBF wasn't just a scammer like tether/bitfinex/binance/justin sun etc. SBF was also working, not even in the shadows, to get rid of all of these guys.
No honor among thieves.
So CZ screwed him, very hard.
It made perfect sense to me for Binance to eliminate a rival just for its own sake. But if there is a more specific reason please enlighten me!