FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried said he couldn’t explain what happened to billions of dollars that customers of his failed cryptocurrency exchange sent to the bank accounts of his trading firm, Alameda Research, the Wall Street Journal reported. And he said that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that money deposited by FTX customers who were told their money was theirs alone was in fact lent to Alameda. Bankman-Fried distanced himself from Alameda, saying that he had stepped back from running the firm and had little insight into its workings even though he owned 90% of it. Some FTX customers made deposits by wiring money to Alameda-controlled bank accounts, with the intention that the money be used to fund their FTX accounts. That was a legacy of the exchange’s early days when FTX didn’t have its own bank account, Bankman-Fried said. Over time, FTX customers deposited more than $5 billion in those Alameda accounts, he said. Now those funds are gone. “They were wired to Alameda, and … I can only speculate about what happened after that,” Bankman-Fried said. “Dollars are fungible with each other. And so it’s not like there’s this $1 bill over here that you can trace through from start to finish. What you get is more just omnibus, you know, pots of assets of various forms,” he added.
