The winners and losers from the FTX assassination (2024)

Where to begin? Crypto has experienced many crazy days but never anything like Tuesday, when FTX—the company everyone believed was the future—crumpled like a house of cards as its lionized founder, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), got exposed as just another huckster. If you want to understand what happened, Fortune Crypto has the details—plus a plain English Q&A for normies—but for now let’s look at who wins and who loses from the implosion of FTX.

The most obvious winner is Binance, which is poised to acquire the pieces of FTX and cement its role as the biggest crypto exchange in the world. In an act of ruthless domination, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao destroyed his rival by undercutting the value of FTX’s FTT tokens and pushing the company into insolvency. It was not a nice thing to do, and CZ did it as an act of vengeance after SBF allegedly bad-mouthed Binance to regulators—but it’s a safe bet no one will try to mess with CZ again. “If you come at the king, you best not miss,” and all that.

The other winners from this debacle are the likes of Coinbase and Circle, which resisted the urge to chase crypto riches through leverage and offshore shell games but instead pursued a boring and safe path to growth. This will burnish their reputation with regulators—another group you can count among the winners. The FTX catastrophe will only strengthen their hand as they ask governments for more money and power to police the crypto industry. A final winner is decentralized crypto platforms like Uniswap and Compound whose design ensures they are properly collateralized and can’t be destroyed by the greed or folly of a single individual. In 2023, centralized platforms failed, but they did not.

As for the losers, the biggest ones are everyday crypto users and honest entrepreneurs who just watched another massive scandal befall the industry, and who will pay the price for SBF’s behavior. Meanwhile, venture capitalists and big institutions like the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which bet on FTX as the prudent investment in crypto, just lost billions.

Other losers include Robinhood, which is partially owned by SBF and saw its already sickly share price crash further on Tuesday’s news. And then there are the holders of FTX’s token, which is down more than 75%, as well as those who bet heavily on Solana—an upstart blockchain that many saw as the hot new thing but is now tarnished since it’s heavily associated with SBF.

Keep in mind this is just a preliminary list since we don’t have all the details of the FTX collapse, and, if the past is any indication, the crypto industry is likely in for more unpleasant surprises as it evaluates the full extent of the carnage. Finally, let’s note that Tuesday was crypto’s darkest day but a bright one for the U.S., where voters rejected some of the worst conspiracy theory cranks and demagogues, suggesting that Donald Trump’s toxic personality cult may be fading—and that holding the powerful accountable still maintains great appeal.

Jeff John Roberts
[email protected]
@jeffjohnroberts

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

The Treasury Department leveled additional North Korea–related allegations against Tornado Cash, which is the subject of high-stakes litigation over who can be held liable for DeFi projects. (Coindesk)

Cathie Wood, who manages the hedge fund ARK Invest, doubled down—again—on Coinbase shares, which tanked after FTX’s collapse. (Bloomberg)

The industry’s hopes for Congress to pass stablecoin or similar legislation before the end of its term just went up in the smoke of the FTX dumpster fire. (Fortune)

A new PBS documentary titled Crypto Decoded received high praise from a normie film critic who called it “the last word in explaining the alternative money.” (WSJ)

SBF, who was worth $16 billion on Monday, abruptly fell off the Bloomberg Billionaires list, which showed his net worth at $991 million as of Tuesday evening. (Bloomberg)

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The winners and losers from the FTX assassination (1)

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The winners and losers from the FTX assassination (2024)

FAQs

Who lost money in FTX crash? ›

Billionaire oil baron Robert Belfer, who was once known as the heir to bankrupt gas company Enron, also reportedly lost millions with FTX's collapse.

What celebrity lost the most money in FTX? ›

Star NFL quarterback Tom Brady, who received a multimillion-dollar deal to be the leading FTX brand ambassador, was estimated to lose $30 million in the aftermath of the collapse. Companies and venture capital firms also saw their money vanish.

Will people who lost money in FTX get it back? ›

FTX customers will get their money back and more—but the biggest winners are bankruptcy traders. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, is serving a 25-year sentence. In a rare outcome for bankruptcy, customers of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX will recover all of their money—and then some.

Who are the big losers of FTX? ›

Quarterback Tom Brady, his former wife Giselle Bündchen and his former boss, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, are listed among the losers in the FTX Group's bankruptcy court papers.

Where did the missing FTX money go? ›

FTX now says that 98% of its creditors, including individual investors who had US$50,000 or less with FTX, will receive the funds they lost. Payments will be made in cash within 60 days of a reorganisation plan going into effect. However, this plan still needs to be approved by a US bankruptcy court and by creditors.

How much did FTX pay celebrities? ›

“He paid Tom Brady $55 million for 20 hours a year for three years,” Lewis told 60 Minutes. “He paid Steph Curry $35 million for same thing for three years.” Larry David, who starred in a popular 2022 Super Bowl ad for FTX, received $10 million, per Lewis.

What celebrities are scammed by FTX? ›

Bankman-Fried was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy — a dramatic fall from a crest of success that included a Super Bowl advertisem*nt, testimony before Congress and celebrity endorsem*nts from stars like quarterback Tom Brady, basketball point guard Stephen Curry and comedian Larry David.

What celebrities are tied to FTX? ›

Larry David starred in an FTX Super Bowl ad that framed crypto as a world-historical innovation on par with the wheel or the lightbulb. Shaquille O'Neal asked would-be investors: “I'm all in. Are you?” Other household names — Steph Curry, David Ortiz, Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, Kevin “Mr.

How many Americans lost money in FTX? ›

It's like your boss doesn't pay you. You can't live, can you?" Rees is one of more than an estimated 1 million customers potentially facing losses after FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges at the time, suddenly collapsed and filed for bankruptcy in November. It soon emerged that customer funds had gone missing.

Will Tom Brady get FTX money back? ›

FTX's shareholders — people like Tom Brady and private equity firms like Sequoia Capital — are almost certain to see their equity in the once high-flying crypto startup totally wiped out. Although FTX said it would have as much as $16 billion to disburse, customers and Uncle Sam get paid out first.

Who has returned FTX money? ›

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, left, arrives at a federal courthouse in Manhattan on Feb. 16, 2023. Nearly all customers of FTX will get their money back, plus interest, after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded 17 months ago.

Was all the FTX money recovered? ›

This covers about 98% of FTX customers. FTX said that it was able to recover funds by monetizing a collection of assets that mostly consisted of proprietary investments held by the Alameda or FTX Ventures businesses, or litigation claims.

What famous investors are in the FTX collapse? ›

  • Tom Brady. AP Photo/John Bazemore. ...
  • Robert Kraft. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. ...
  • Gisele Bündchen. FTX. ...
  • Kevin O'Leary. Kevin O'Leary is founder of O'Leary Ventures. ...
  • Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital. ( ...
  • Sequoia Capital. Getty. ...
  • Thoma Bravo. ...
  • Tiger Global.
Jan 11, 2023

Did people lose everything on FTX? ›

At Bankman-Fried's sentencing hearing, Kaplan agreed. He said FTX's customers had lost some $8bn and that its investors had lost $1.7bn.

Who was heavily invested in FTX? ›

FTX's venture backers included Patriots owner Robert Kraft and billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, new filings show. FTX's shareholders included entities connected to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones.

Who bankrupted FTX? ›

FTX filed bankruptcy in November 2022 after Bankman-Fried shut down the company's crypto-trading platform and handed control to insolvency experts. Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud. The case is FTX Trading Ltd., 22-11068, US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

How many people lost money in crypto? ›

Key findings. A higher percentage of cryptocurrency investors have lost money than made it. 38% of Americans who've held a form of the currency say they've sold it for less than when they bought it, versus 28% who say they made a profit. Only 13% say they broke even.

How did FTX recover $5 billion? ›

They tapped a wide range of sources, including digital currencies that FTX still owned when it filed for bankruptcy and company assets like shares in start-ups, which could be sold to bidders. The amount that FTX recovered is “in general pretty unheard of,” said Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.

Will Gemini Earn get money back? ›

Gemini Earn customers will finally get most of their funds back. People who participated in Gemini's lending program, which suspended withdrawals in the wake of the FTX collapse, will get “approximately 97 percent” of their money. Perhaps predictably, the Earn program also had some legal issues.

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