By Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, said that the exchange has “around a billion” dollars to invest in companies and projects.
In an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the crypto derivatives exchange FTX, said that the exchange has at least $1 billion to spend on acquisitions and bailouts.
Bankman-Fried said, “You get to definitional issues here, like how much we should really feel comfortable deploying.” Saying that there’s another billion or so that’s completely free will get you within two factors of the right answer.
FTX’s bailouts and acquisitions
During the market downturn, the exchange was a key player in buying crypto projects that were about to fail.
Bankman-Fried said that it wasn’t easy to decide to go ahead with bailouts and acquisitions. “We only had a few days to make some of these decisions,” he said, adding that the most important things were “backing up customers and making sure they’re safe” and “stopping the spread of contagion through the ecosystem.”
One example is how FTX helped Voyager Digital. Bankman-Fried said that they gave Voyager Digital “a kind of two-piece line of credit.” The first was for $70 million, which was money they could use right away without any conditions. We knew we could lose that, though. “
Bankman-Fried repeated what he said in an interview with Decrypt’s GM podcast, where he said that the bailout could cost FTX “$70 million down the drain,” and he added, “We’re not too sure we’ll get that back.”
The last lender for crypto?
Squawk Box asked Bankman-Fried about FTX’s “sense of responsibility” to keep crypto businesses going. He said that, in the long run, it’s important for the crypto ecosystem to try to find a solution. He said, “It won’t be great for anybody over the long haul assuming we have genuine agony and genuine victories.” “It’s somewhat absurd for clients, and it won’t assist with guidelines.” He additionally said that it was significant for individuals to have the option to work in the environment without being worried about the possibility that something they didn’t know would explode them. Bankman-Fried said earlier in the year on Decrypt’s GM podcast that FTX was saving insolvent crypto firms because “it doesn’t seem clear to me that others are stepping up and doing that.”
It was predicted that FTX would earn more than $1 billion in 2021, which is a 1,842.85% increase in its operating income.
