This shouldn’t be surprising at all after seeing their balance sheet with round numbers like $5,000,000,000 in assets and $12,000,000,000 in liabilities. It looked like SBF made it in Excel while his LoL game was loading.
That's exactly the kind of financial detail I like to see from a multi-billion dollar company.
It seems all $8B of deposits to this account were double credited to both FTX and Alameda
Indeed, from John J. Ray III’s declaration[0]:
> The Dotcom Silo Debtors may have significant liabilities to customers through the FTX.com platform. However, such liabilities are not reflected in the financial statements prepared by these companies while they were under the control of Mr. Bankman-Fried
And from SBF[1]:
> it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub accounts that corresponded to that and so it was never delivered to FTX
[0]: https://pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/33/188450/042020648...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...
So, this case may be the first high-profile exercise in cryptocurrency-forensic-accounting. Let the paperclips fly.
Banks are insured against runs, that's kind of the definition and point of a bank in modern times.
Also, this supposed "theft" by an "ex employee" is obvious bullshit also. No way they made it possible for even the most compromised ex employee to keep the crypto keys, and if they had, they would have taken the money before FTX crashed. He's not dumb enough to believe that story, so the only possible explanation is that the thief is SBF himself.
1. "FTX is very well capitalized" - given that August 2021 was in the middle of the crypto bull market, that statement was probably true at the time. Sure, it became poorly capitalized later, but that wouldn't make the comment age poorly, any more than a statement like "the fed has inflation under control" in 2019 would age poorly.
2. "Can you show me even napkin math that shows FTX going under if USDT blows up in a realistic scenario" - FTX blew up for an entirely different reason
The vast majority of their business was based in the Bahamas and Antigua to avoid US regulators
Maybe HN will be finally wrong about crypto one day too
I would have gotten an F if I had done that in my first Accounting 101 quiz.
Just to see it describing the financial situation of a company holding millions is just unbelievable.