🥘 A Dish Best Served Cold

It seems justice really is a dish best served cold as the law is finally catching up with Sam-Bankman Fried (SBF) and Co who worked together to lose more than $7 billion worth of customer funds.

• On December 12th SBF was arrested in the Bahamas just 24 hours before he was to testify before US congress. Nine days later on December 21st Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research and Zixaio (Gary) Wang, former CTO of FTX Trading Ltd, have been charged by the SEC with defrauding investors.
• SBF has allegedly signed the documents for his extradition to the U.S. He may arrive in the US to be arraigned on eight federal charges of fraud, conspiracy, and campaign finance violations.
• Now led by new CEO John Ray FTX plans to wind down the exchange and work with a court-appointed trustee to share assets amongst creditors. According to a court hearing on Tuesday, FTX has unearthed $1 billion worth of assets including $720 million in cash stored in hundreds of bank accounts. This cash is stored in various U.S. financial institutions but FTX has access to an additional $500 million.
• Mary Cilia, FTX’s new CFO said they “are reaching out to all of those banks and changing the signatories on the accounts so that we can get access to the accounts and move the cash as much as we can to authorised depositary institutions.”
• A statement of assets or financial status, which is necessary under US bankruptcy law, has not yet been submitted by FTX. Cilia predicted that the company would be able to submit the documentation in April.

Due to the size of FTX, its collapse has brought on catastrophic contagion risk. However, with justice being served and the new management team at FTX, things are looking somewhat more positive.