Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has indicated that he’s willing to testify at a United States Senate hearing into the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried controversially missed the deadline to respond to a Senate Banking Committee request to appear and testify during a hearing focused on FTX’s bankruptcy earlier this week. While the possibility of a congressional subpoena was on the table, the beleaguered former CEO has offered himself up in a series of Tweets published Dec. 9. 1) I still do not have access to much of my data -- professional or personal. So there is a limit …

The Japanese subsidiary of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX has received approval from local regulators to continue sorting out issues with withdrawals until next year. The Kanto Local Finance Bureau, a local financial regulator, running under the Ministry of Finance of Japan, has issued a statement regarding FTX Japan operations, Reuters reported. The Japanese authority has postponed FTX’s business suspension deadline until March 9, 2023, extending the original time limit by three months. In mid-November, Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) initially requested FTX Japan to suspend business orders by Dec. 9. According to the announcement, the Kanto Local Finance Bureau …

Shark Tank star and investor Kevin O’Leary, known in some circles as Mr. Wonderful, has claimed he has all but lost the $15 million FTX paid him to be its official spokesperson. Speaking at CNBC’s Squawk Box on Dec. 8, O’Leary outlined that after taxes, agents fees, a $1 equity investment into FTX, and buying a whole lot of crypto that's now stuck on the FTX exchange, he's got nothing left to show for his time with FTX. “Total deal was just under $15 million, [...] I put about $9.7 million into crypto. I think that’s what I’ve lost. It's …

The number of lawsuits against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been racking up since the fall of his crypto empire, with the former “white knight” of crypto finding himself a defendant in seven class action lawsuits filed since FTX’s bankruptcy. These lawsuits are separate from the numerous probes and investigations examining FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, such as a reported market manipulation probe by federal prosecutors and the Federal Election Commission’s likely investigation into Bankman-Frieds dark money donations to the Republican Party. Below is a summary of the class-action lawsuits brought against Sam Bankman-Fried since Nov. 11. Dec. 7: Podalsky …

Crypto’s public enemy number one, Sam Bankman-Fried has missed a crucial deadline to confirm his appearance at an upcoming Senate Committee hearing. The former FTX CEO missed a Thursday 5pm ET on Dec. 8, deadline for responding to a Senate Banking Committee request that he testify at the Committee meeting on Dec. 14. This has set up the possibility of a congressional subpoena. On Dec. 8, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Sherrod Brown, and ranking member of the Committee Senator Pat Toomey released a statement on the request. “FTX’s collapse has caused real …

A watchdog group has demanded an investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried's political donations, claiming the former FTX CEO “admitted” to donating tens of millions to Republicans under the table in violation of federal law. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Dec. 8, citing comments made by Bankman-Fried in a Nov. 16 interview with cryptocurrency vlogger Tiffany Fong which was released via Youtube on Nov. 29. CREW suggested in their complaint that wealthy donors often take advantage of the Citizen United ruling and evade federal disclosure laws by using …

In mid-November, as crypto markets reeled in the aftermath of FTX’s meltdown, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made use of his New York Times column to disparage crypto assets — again. Despite his unquestionable academic credentials, Krugman reiterated a common misunderstanding in his attempt to understand crypto assets — by conflating Bitcoin (BTC) with other cryptocurrencies. Despite being the oldest, most valuable and most well-known member of this emerging class of digital assets, Bitcoin has a unique use case that differs widely from all others. Therefore, in order to understand this asset class as a whole, it would make more …

While it’s undeniable that companies were significantly affected by the FTX debacle, retail investors like Jaime Zulueta – who recently just got married – also bore the burden of trusting a trading platform that ended up collapsing to oblivion. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Zulueta told the story of how he and his wife dealt with the challenge of losing some of their investments right after their wedding. According to the crypto investor, he first found out about the exchange because it was popular in Taiwan, his partner’s home country. “Prior to using the platform I also read the numerous media articles …

The ongoing FTX saga has injected more uncertainty into an already shaken market. If it was not clear already, even the biggest centralized exchanges can fail. The problem is multi-faceted. On the one hand, just like in traditional finance, centralized institutions are only as good as the people who run them. When investors use services like FTX, they are putting their trust in the people that run the service. Unfortunately, history is rife with examples of powerful people taking advantage of that trust. On the other hand, cryptocurrency is still very new. The vast majority of crypto users are not …

The FTX collapse highlighted many flaws in the crypto industry. Now, the effects of the FTX debacle have broken into the nonfungible token (NFT) space with users unable to view their FTX-hosted NFTs. In a tweet, Solana engineer jac0xb.sol pointed out how the metadata of FTX-hosted NFTs now points to a restructuring website that gives out information about bankruptcy proceedings. According to jac0xb.sol, the NFTs minted on FTX were hosted using a Web2 application programming interface (API), resulting in images not showing. After the FTX exchange filed for bankruptcy, the FTX.us domain was entirely redirected to the bankruptcy proceeding page. …

United States federal prosecutors have reportedly begun investigating whether the collapse of the Terra ecosystem was in fact triggered by market manipulation tactics by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. According to a Dec. 7 report from The New York Times (NYT), the prosecutors — as part of a broader inquiry into FTX’s own collapse — are investigating whether Bankman-Fried’s empire intentionally caused a flood of “sell” orders on Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin TerraClassicUSD, USTC (formerly UST). The sudden increase in UST sell orders were said to make it difficult to match them with corresponding “buy” orders, which in turn forced more …

The new management for bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has reportedly hired a team of financial forensic investigators to track down the billions of dollars worth of missing customer crypto. Financial advisory company AlixPartners was chosen for the task and is led by former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chief accountant, Matt Jacques, according to a Dec. 7 report from the Wall Street Journal. It is understood that the forensics firm will be tasked with conducting “asset-tracing” to identify and recover the missing digital assets and will complement the restructing work being undertaken by FTX. On Nov. 11 hackers drained wallets …