Step 1, finding the cash that's left and putting it into big banks with tight controls on authorizing withdrawals, seems to be going OK.
Step 2, finding the employees, not so much.
"At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment. Repeated attempts to locate certain presumed employees to confirm their status have been unsuccessful to date.
They thank some of the employees who stayed on trying to clean up the mess.
Step 3, "Digital Asset Custody", is not going well.
"Unacceptable
management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to
access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies
around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of
software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain
aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, and the absence of independent governance as
between Alameda (owned 90% by Mr. Bankman-Fried and 10% by Mr. Wang) and the Dotcom
Silo (in which third parties had invested).
The Debtors have located and secured only a fraction of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope to recover in these Chapter 11 Cases."
A few little prison-term sized problems:
(a) at least $372 million of unauthorized transfers
initiated on the Petition Date, during which time the Debtors immediately began moving
cryptocurrency into cold storage to mitigate the risk to the remaining cryptocurrency that was
accessible at the time,
(b) the dilutive ‘minting’ of approximately $300 million in FTT tokens by
an unauthorized source after the Petition Date and
(c) the failure of the co-founders and
potentially others to identify additional wallets believed to contain Debtor assets.
They're working the problem. Chainalysis has been retained to find where those coins went.
"...investigators to
begin the process of identifying what may be very substantial transfers of Debtor property in the
days, weeks and months prior to the Petition"."
That's preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone. Anything in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy gets looked at hard, and the bankruptcy can go back further where fraud is involved. The Madoff Recovery operation used clawback heavily. Which is why the Madoff recovery took so long, but got a sizable fraction of the money back. Lots of lawsuits against people who thought they got out in time. Expect that here.
"Finally, and critically, the Debtors have made clear to employees and the
public that Mr. Bankman-Fried is not employed by the Debtors and does not speak for them. Mr.
Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public
statements. Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas
remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F### regulators they make
everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs.
Delaware”.
Some news reports indicated that Bankman-Fried was still somehow involved, or "assisting", or something. He's not.
He has zero authority at this point.
> Some news reports indicated that Bankman-Fried was still somehow involved, or "assisting", or something. He's not. He has zero authority at this point.
Given that so few of FTX Group's digital assets have been secured, per the OP... it would seem to be unknown how much ability he continues to have to access the company's digital assets.
> In addition, in connection with investigating a hack on Sunday, November 13,
Mr. Bankman-Fried and Mr. Wang stated in recorded and verified texts that “Bahamas regulators”
instructed that certain post-petition transfers of Debtor assets be made by Mr. Wang and Mr.
Bankman-Fried (who the Debtors understand were both effectively in the custody of Bahamas
authorities) and that such assets were “custodied on FireBlocks under control of Bahamian gov’t”. The Debtors thus have credible evidence that the Bahamian government is
responsible for directing unauthorized access to the Debtors’ systems for the purpose of obtaining
digital assets of the Debtors—that took place after the commencement of these cases.
Oh, that's a new filing from yesterday. Hadn't seen that one yet.
Here's the view from the Bahamas.[1][2] Apparently the government of the Bahamas did attempt, per a court decision there, in getting custody of some digital assets of FTX. The Bahamas have appointed a liquidator.
The Bahamas are tougher on bankruptcy than the US is. They are going straight to liquidation, while the US bankruptcy in Delaware is chapter 11, "debtor-in-possession / protection from creditors". This whole thing is likely to go to liquidation soon, since there is no ongoing business worth preserving.
There are organized ways of handling international bankruptcies. The Bahamas does not seem to be a party to the main treaty on that. There is, though, an extradition treaty between the Bahamas and the US.
Same goes in reverse. The govt/debtors should connect with ex-employees/investors and get them to try and gossip, commiserate, provide black-hat advice, etc with existing employees in DMs and proxy any discoveries to the govt/debtors in exchange for a "consulting fee".
Almost everything here is an unmitigated disaster. However,
> the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol
— barring the part where this is secret — this seems like it would make some sense?
Alameda was, by my understanding, meant to be a market maker for the markets that FTX allowed its customers to trade in. You probably don’t want to apply the same auto-liquidation protocol to the market maker as you would regular traders.
Of course, I’m not a finance person, so I’d be happy to be enlightened here.
If market makers are getting liquidated with any consistency frequent enough to require exceptions, they are in deep trouble.
Market makers almost universally remain delta-neutral (that is, their goal is to be hedged against almost any market movement). Sure they sometimes get off balance and lose some money, but the margins for makers are typically so thin that liquidation is basically equivalent to total failure.
Hypothetically, if a market maker had the ability to create lots of little accounts, trade as those accounts, let some go negative, and continue to do this, some very positive expected value strategies should be available based on allowing some accounts to go negative, keeping the average profit only slightly negative over time, and walking away from the negative balances.
Making money on average requires actual competence. Creating a large profit variance with a small expected loss is much more straightforward and is normally a losing proposition.
My fund was also a market maker at FTX. We signed two contracts that modified the typical agreement with the venue. One of them stipulated that we had less access to leverage than normal (i.e. we could be liquidated earlier than we otherwise would be, but these terms were vague and apparently never had any effect) and enabled parallel risk checks on our account. The other was a line of credit from the venue which would allow us not to be liquidated when we otherwise would be in exchange for interest when the LOC was preventing liquidation. Our actual use of the LOC was entirely as collateral for open orders, so we never paid any interest on it.
It is not normal to allow market makers to take on arbitrarily large risk or arbitrarily large negative balances.
> preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone
Will be very interesting to see how the $5bn sent to users before FTX collapsed will be handled. If I had any recent withdrawals from them, I'd keep the money segregated for now.
> That's preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone. Anything in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy gets looked at hard, and the bankruptcy can go back further where fraud is involved. The Madoff Recovery operation used clawback heavily. Which is why the Madoff recovery took so long, but got a sizable fraction of the money back. Lots of lawsuits against people who thought they got out in time. Expect that here.
This clears up some questions I had before about employees potentially taking their own funds. Although, are customers in the clear here? As in, if you were a customer but were able to take your money out in time, is that money safe, or is some of it returned and then divided up?
If you withdrew funds in the 90 days before the bankruptcy, even if you're not at all involved with FTX's operations, you might be considered to be a creditor of the bankruptcy and face clawback. Nobody will bother for the little guys, but anybody who got out 7 figures or above will get some attention. In which case you'll need an attorney. This is complicated.
For a guide to how this goes, see the Madoff recovery.[1] That took a long time, with payouts along the way. The big question was whether the amount owed was what customers had deposited with Madoff, or what customer's listed balances were with Madoff after years of fake gains. With the Madoff scam lasting decades, the fake yields were substantial. That was settled with a court decision that the amount deposited was what mattered. This controversy stalled payouts for some time.
Then, over the years, there were some big clawbacks, followed by distributions to victims. Many of the clawbacks involved people who were insiders in some sense, and they were deemed to have profited from the scam. The Madoff recovery got back about 75% of what people had put in. That's unusually good. Most of that was from clawbacks.
Madoff, though, was a regulated broker. The Security Investor Protection Act applied. Small investor losses (up to $500,000) were fully covered by SIPC insurance and paid out early. The SIPC ran the recovery process.
There was an accelerated process for hardship cases. In crypto, there's none of that.
No one will ever see the inside of a prison off of this matter. FTX was deeply involved with powerful political contributors and those people can't be allowed to be subjected to depositions or other legal discovery. Key figures are on the lam and no one with the power to capture them will be tasked with doing so.
While the amounts involved are eye watering they are not large enough to destabilize to the US financial system, so the people involved need only resolve their various financial entanglements and wait for the story to expire out of the news cycle.
Who do you figure can’t be allowed to get deposed and by whom?
Madoff was politically well connected and it didn’t save him in the end. Donating money in one cycle will not save SBF. Your idea that Democratic electeds and regulators are consistently loyal (to anyone, including large one hit wonder donors) doesn’t square with my experience. If anything Dem politicos have an opportunity to show their independence by pursuing Senate hearings and similar public fora of investigation because they have nothing to lose going after this broke man.
First, the Madoff Ponzi was an order of magnitude larger than FTX; large enough to actually matter to important institutions. Second, Madoff could be trusted not to name names and understood that no one really wanted him to and he would, therefore, not be asked to do so. Thus, he could be safely prosecuted. The chuckleheads of FTX are not made of the same material; no one knows what species of insects are under those rocks and no one wants to know.
One of the enduring myths SBF crafted was that of his political connections. I have barely any D.C. connections. SBF has none. He was paid attention to. But walking into D.C. with tens of millions to spend is far from unprecedented, and it's not the sort of behavior that buys secrets. (Meetings? Sure.)
Do you think FTX working with the SEC team on drafting new crypto regulations was all a lie then? No one else was allowed that access, as far as we know, and Coinbase has been complaining about being stonewalled by Gensler for even basic questions.
Kevin O'leary was saying how he was trying to raise the bailout funds from sovereign wealth funds, but that evaporated once it looked like FTX lost the support (or at least the blind eye) of the SEC.
> Do you think FTX working with the SEC team on drafting new crypto regulations was all a lie then? No one else was allowed that access
I'm not familiar with their claims. That said, the SEC is generally quite receptive to input when it comes to rule making.
> Coinbase has been complaining about being stonewalled by Gensler for even basic questions
Enforcement versus rule making. Also, tweeting angry things at your regulator while publicly trying to yank their jurisdiction is a poor way to solicit discretionary feedback.
Madoff was at one time being considered for a job at SEC, and regularly worked with them on issues unrelated to his business.[1] That probably postponed investigations that should have happened earlier. After the crash, it didn't help. Madoff went to jail and the SEC was investigated by Congress and its own inspector general.
“While examiners and investigators discovered suspicious information and evidence and caught Madoff in contradictions and inconsistencies, they either disregarded these concerns or relied inappropriately upon Madoff’s representations and documentation in dismissing them.” - SEC inspector general
A few SEC employees were disciplined internally, but none were fired.
> FTX was deeply involved with powerful political contributors and those people can't be allowed to be subjected to depositions or other legal discovery.
I disagree, he was undoubtedly buying connections and influence, and a lot of the SEC/CFTC/Gensler stuff reeks of corruption, but I don't think he's been around long enough or acquired enough influence to stop heads from rolling.
My money is on him and maybe a few others eventually serving a few years. He'll then try to restore his image and start a new business with a promise of extreme transparency and altruistic purpose, but this time "with adult supervision". I honestly wouldn't be shocked if Sequoia invests in him again.
Page 22 is exciting: "The Debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for a business enterprise. For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis."
.. and: "In the Bahamas, I understand that corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas."
> employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis
This seems like a totally legit approach to me -- ChatOps for expenses, essentially. The usability of "an on-line 'chat' platform" (presumably Teams / Slack / Discord / equivalent) is much better for the employees than most finance tools, and most chat apps these days should have pretty great auditability capabilities.
(Of course, the rest of this FTX fiasco is a total disaster.)
I suppose it would be fine if you had a Slack integration that was a front-end to a proper piece of accounting software.
But a completely ad-hoc system where accounting and auditors have to grep a giant chat log for an emoji is going to get you sent to some special level of finance hell. Nobody will have any transparency into why a request was approved, who approved it, and why. How do you possibly hand off the history of reimbursements to someone who is hired later, and how do you possibly create a structured report for auditors?
And I’ll even object to your supposition that finance software is hard to use. We use Brex for a corporate card, and it’s a totally smooth process, with a great app and website.
An example of a Slack integration front-end to proper software: Ramp[0] has a decent Slack integration for in-Slack reimbursement approvals. It's easier than navigating their web app.
Also, Brex is pretty polished today but even they started out as a junk show. Stripe started out as total chaos. Many of the neobanks... Most fintech startups out there started as three engineers in a trench coat 1) hustling for traction then 2) scrambling to get a scalable (and auditable, and reconciling...) system in place before user growth crushed them.
Oh, sure, to be fair, I only just started with Brex.
And I am comparing their website to consumer-facing Chase—was just superficially impressed how much nicer Brex’s UI looks, and also feels more performant.
It is not legit when you are a business of this magnitude in finance.
Chatops for TechOps? Totally, no one cares if you’re down, there’s little regulatory impact. Accounting and finance? Not even once. (Caveat around TechOps is IAM privs as it relates to SOX, GLBA, etc)
(a component of my work is providing guidance to fintechs on governance and controls with respect to various nation state regulatory frameworks)
Nope! That is never going to pass muster with the auditors. You have actual legal responsibilities in corporate accounting, you can’t just make it up as you go along doing whatever seems easiest without ending up in prison.
Yeah, I'm sure EY will be totally nonplussed and have no further questions. Oh, you used ephemeral messaging for requests and approvals with no audit trail? Totally compliant, ok, now, let's look at dual approvals...
Agreed. It's certainly possible to build way more robust controls using chatops than email or some internal "enterprise" app. FTX may not have implemented it this way, but one could envision the chatops automatically requiring approvals from the correct people based on dollar amount and expense type. And requiring those people to 2FA with their approval.
Assuming I was talking about SAP when saying accounting systems, for what is basically banking, shows a certain lack in understanding either of those systems.
My finance colleagues (Fortune 100 company) who spend all day updating the general ledger in SAP will be interested to learn SAP doesn’t make accounting systems.
That's not really how auditing works though. If there is a legal requirement to keep records of communications between senior managers (and there is for financial institutions), then "we purposely used an app that deletes such communications to hide our actions from the auditors" is in itself a crime.
This is actually standard within financial institutions and big corps. It's not implemented as "signal with auto-delete turned on", but rather as retention policies on emails or whatever.
Except the retention on emails, for instance, is usually 7 years. Not exactly the same as auto delete after read... It's an apples to oranges comparison.
And the relevant transactions and approvals get recorded in other media for even longer periods in auditable forms.
A slack exchange saying, "Hey, would you approve this expense?" "Sure" isn't a problem. It's the lack of formal follow ups in an auditable medium that is.
Noooope. Slack isn’t providing the kind of financial controls or guarantees necessary. There’s no reporting. Presumably any admin can manipulate or delete messages, etc.
ChatOps for expenses through Apple's iMessage Finance plumbing tool can tighten up on the formal regulatory oversight and grow new profit centers for Warren Buffet, TSMC, G20 business ambitions.
> For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.
Honestly having had to deal with the hell that is a purchasing request in large corporations I think I'd rather go with a discord bot than have to spend 6 months justifying why I need to purchase a $50 piece of software to do my job.
Similar. The best reimbursement system I’ve worked with was for a company that just automatically approved everything under a few thousand dollars (never states a hard threshold) based on individual professional judgement to spend funds to advance company goals. And they audited every purchase ever made when you went for partner.
It was both liberating and terrifying to have that much freedom. The audits weren’t widely available so it’s hard to know how effective this was, but it was pretty rare to hear about people not making partner because of it and they were super thorough about every charge, frequently asking for detail.
I liked one of my old bosses for this. He'd notice a meeting with 5 engineers about licensing some software and would swoop in.
"How much is the license for this software?" Upon hearing an answer, "The company bills your time out at $250/hr - this meeting has cost us the licensing fee of this software. Next time, just buy it. If I have a problem with that, I'll change the policy then."
Sometimes corporate greed is why systems are so hard.
My previous company had a very rigid repayment system and i swear it was designed to deny expenses.
Once i submitted an expense for $3.25 for a train and they wanted receipts. I didn't have one and they wanted me to sign an affidavit that i would not find the receipt and resubmit my expense.
This is for $3.25 and the amount of time spent trying to get my money back exceeded the expense amount.
The obvious common sense question should have been : If my plane landed in X, and the office is located at Y, how did i get there?
Somehow. That's not their business. But they don't want you claiming a train ticket, a bus ticket, and mileage all for the same trip.
Every seemingly stupid rule has an equally stupid person behind it.
It would be nice if we could just trust people, but there are a class of people who then abuse that trust. Systems are in place to thwart them at the expense of everyone else.
If you claimed all three of those, you would have to claim all three of them, at which point you would have claimed all three of them, and someone could easily see that.
Someone could easily see that if you have an actual reimbursement system in place.
If it's based on the honor system, I could claim the train ticket, then claim a bus ticket and say that the ticket was for something else, you were mistaken. Then claim mileage and say the bus ticket wasn't that trip, you made a mistake. Again, just like the train ticket.
So, yes, the claim needs to be backed by proof of trip or by a deliberate action on your part saying that you are claiming this right here on this date for this trip.
One of the biggest mistakes in this whole fiasco is from the people who enabled this - how (why?) on Earth were they given such ridiculous sums of money… with 0 oversight!
It's interesting that, under every silo's balance sheet shown in that document, there is a footnote saying that customer crypto deposits are not represented in the balance.
Is that his way of saying that they haven't been able to figure out where the customer crypto deposits were represented in the ledgers?
As a security engineer and advisor that has had access to the internal practices of dozens of crypto-asset companies, I can assure everyone this level of negligence is -so- normal that if you actually behaved responsibly in this space it would be very hard to compete with those that are not.
Almost no one bothers with even the most basic of security controls, often connecting to production systems containing billions of dollars with compromised personal use laptops.
There are several more MtGox, QuadrigaCX, and FTX style events cooking right now.
Also, here is your daily reminder that decentralized assets stored in centralized third party systems are not yours, and will probably be abused or stolen.
Learn to use a hardware wallet or stick with low-tech asset classes like precious metals.
I'm surprised anyone is surprised. The selling point of crypto always seemed to be the ability to elude regulation, and so they did, and so the obvious temptations were tempting...
A vocal community has been calling out the blatant scams and corruption for years. The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence.
The thing that shocks me is that anyone still trusts any of these exchanges except maybe Coinbase. I just heard the Kraken CEO in an interview touting his "partial balance sheet audit" for 2021. The interviewer asked if Kraken would have a full balance sheet audit (proving reserves) this year.
The CEO couldn't commit to a timeline for a full audit (ie not in 2022) but pointed out reserves were just "one component" of protecting customer's assets. That's like a captain saying that he wasn't going to check if there is a hole in the boat because hull integrity is just one component of a ship's voyage.
And on Reddit people seem to think Kraken is very dependable.
I don't expect the Coinbase CEO to secretly leave the country with gold bars. But I do expect Coinbase to either go bankrupt or to face major lawsuits for years and to have very poor stock performance.
And yet I imagine people will be surprised when they find out that Coinbase insiders have only been selling (and have sold almost $4B worth of) their stocks every since the direct listing (not even IPO). [0] Chances are, Coinbase was more of your garden variety pump and dump where you hype your useless startup up, and dump it on retail at a hugely inflated "market price".
Q2 2021 is when it was listed, and when insiders bagged $3.9B. Compare that with the scale of $82M or $47M. After Q3 2021, crypto started crashing and so did COIN stock, so I imagine insiders who knew what's up and wanted to dump got out already.
They were sitting on large illiquid unrealized gains until the IPO. I can't imagine that's strange behavior in companies going public. Some funds will sell into the IPO as a rule in order to redeploy capital to other early stage investments. For early employees and founders who could have had up to 99% of their wealth tied up in Coinbase stock, some diversification is hardly odd.
Management selling is pretty typical. You'd have to dig into Coinbase specifically, but if a big part of your pay is stock/options, you will generally constantly sell a portion of that. Obviously, a big spike in management sales can be a red flag.
Crypto tokens have no fundamental value, but as long as people are interested in it, Coinbase has fundamental value offering a service to get money in and out without the apparent BS and scams. It crashed hard- I think coinbase is actually a good investment right now, a solid business with underpriced stock.
Edit: HOOD is probably a good buy too for the same reasons.
COIN and HOOD both have an opportunity to make major changes and become profitable businesses. But just looking at their cash/debt/stock comp/revenue growth/expenses, it doesn't look great.
I see what you're saying, but I remember reading on here months ago that Coinbase's debt was unimaginably huge. Doesn't matter if they have a good business selling shovels if they can't dig themselves out of the impossibly deep hole they're in.
Just looking at the stock perf. They have high trading fees and still lose quite a bit every quarter. They need to figure out their business plan when trading activity is lower, or figure out some way to drive trading activity.
I think they have an excellent chance of being the last one standing. Unless we learn that they have also been operating a scam. If all they do is run a reliable exchange and don't get hacked, as other exchanges fall they'll probably get more business.
But I think if public interest wanes, and crypto sort of becomes this amway for nerds thing, then they'll probably flounder unless they prune back their costs significantly.
I don't. Crypto traders will never learn. They'll continue to see that coinbase has high fees, low volume, and a limited set of coins and they'll continue to use scammy unregulated exchanges. When one dies they'll just switch to the next one. The majority of crypto volume will never be on a centralized US regulated exchange.
Yeah, its not like a pilot saying he doesn't know if the wings are coming off but that's just one part of your flight experience. The engines and the drink tray are just fine. Who is the PR person who coached that CEO?
But if you lurk on these Crypto threads you get to hear people who throw around financial terms they only half understand. They say do your own research but these "white papers" (btw how did that become a thing?) are these vague cut & paste web pages. No one seems like they could read a 10k. You can laugh about how dumb these things are but I don't wonder who falls for it.
No on-chain solution is ever going to prove that your exchange doesn't owe a trillion dollars to a third party.
You need an audit for that. An audit. One of those things that has been done for centuries and millennia. It's not rocket science, it just consists of paying an accounting firm to look at your books.
This is just a web page describing a process that is not an audit of Kraken. If a company isn't audited by a third party who assumes liability for being wrong there are all kinds of things that could blow up.
This web page is also a great example of using financial speak to make it sound like they are doing the things that are considered important in their own special non traditional way-- or really-- without actually doing them. Who wants their account audited? Does your bank do that? I want the bank audited.
A huge chunk of SBF's lobbying was to get on-chain DeFi banned. He was the biggest promoter of regulation, OFAC, KYC, etc in the space. His downfall, which began with the leak of the draft of the anti-DeFi and pro-KYC DCCPA bill he lobbied for, was catalyzed by people (including CZ) becoming enraged at him for trying to hurt FTX's strongest competitors using his DC connections.
Yes, that's the selling point of crypto. This is not about crypto however, which continues to work perfectly fine, this is about an exchange.
Nobody would be opposed to have these companies audited. In fact people have been asked for tether and so on to be audited for ages.
The problem is anytime regulations are mentioned, they are about hurting the user, and not preventing things like FTX from happening.
I'm talking of things like the bill SBF himself proposed, which aimed to fuck defi (actual crypto, where you can't steal people's money like FTX did), to force people into these centralized exchanges where you don't actually own or hold any crypto.
The surprise isn't that how disorganized they were _internally_. Even if it's an open secret that the money hose isn't strictly above board, it was assumed that at least, the guys in charge were keeping track of the money, even if only for purely selfish cover-my-ass purposes.
Usually that means something like keeping two sets of books.
In this case, there's... half a book? Or at least seems like that's the extent of it. Also a half filled out spreadsheet that doesn't make any sense.
It would be surprisingly bad even for a fly by night scammer who skimmed $100k before the cops caught up with him, let alone a billion+ dollar operation.
But good point. Essentially, 'less evidence to shred if we never had it in the first place'?
"The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence"
This is just provably not true. if you can find 3 credible people saying that FTX was lending out customer funds to the tune of $5+bn before 10/31/2022 I'll eat my shoe. the smartest critics in the room were taken as much by surprise at the extent of the crash and contagion as the most idiot-degen-ape. and it doesn't do anyone any favors to pretend it was obvious.
Many people's critical thinking skills go out the window whenever they think there is easy money on the table. That is how scams like these thrive, and how casinos get so big.
>A vocal community has been calling out the blatant scams and corruption for years. The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence.
Successful scams are like successful cults, nobody has ever joined a harmful cult thinking that they are joining a harmful cult. A good scam will never seem like a scam to the victim. The biggest risk factor in falling for a scam is believing that it can't happen to you.
The blatant scams and corruption are actually an incentive for many people who believed that they would be the beneficiaries of the scam, not the victim.
Probably not. Enron actually may have steered clear of violating any regulations. At the very least, the government lawyers were afraid to subject a jury to months of accounting regulations and debates over not black or white issues. So they just made the case that the sum of all the actions was an accounting fraud. And they got the CEO/CFO/CFO's wife (who helped/would have gotten the Chairman, but he died and several others in jail for it.
I would put money that SBF is going to prison for decades -or- evades US prosecution by managing to avoid extradition.
Thanks. So is it expected than he will jet off to somewhere before being arrested? Justice Dept or whatever relevant agency should act quick shouldn’t they? But I guess the answer there alludes back to a sibling comment’s point of testing the Justice system against someone with such a wide swale of influence/connections..
He has been in the Bahamas for a while. Theoretically, the Bahamanian officials are keeping him from leaving the country. The US does have an extradition treaty with the Bahamas, but they have their own crimes they want to try him for first. It's possible he could beat extradition. I don't think that's likely, but it's certainly legally possible.
Fraud, and other such white collar crime, has very harsh high-end penalties when the government chooses to enforce it with each offense potentially reaching 20+ years. If the government chooses to enforce the law, SBF could easily spend the rest of his life in prison. The question is will they?
That's what makes this case so interesting to observe. SBF is extremely well connected, donated to all the right people, and even actively advocated for their causes. It's a major, and very visible, test of the US Justice system.
Even if they can’t establish securities fraud it seems like they have wire fraud based on the deleted tweets alone. Plus whatever internal accounting manipulations he had going on are likely some form of honest services fraud. Plus they were handling some international withdrawals through a front company in California that pretended to be an electronics wholesaler called North Dimension Inc which from what I can tell did not register with FINCEN so they have unlicensed money transmitter and potentially some other fraud because they likely misrepresented the business to banks too. For sentencing you basically get a score that increases with loss amount, increases with whether any victims faced financial hardship (in this case obviously yes), and decreases with things like cooperation and acceptance of responsibility. See https://www.sentencing.us/. But IANAL.
but they also did that with their customers' fiat deposits which went through the traditional regulated finance network. Does that mean the point of fiat is to elude regulation too?
Whatever regulations there are on fiat apparently didn't stop them from defrauding their customer's fiat.
AFAIK straight up stealing customer's deposits in a way the contract specifically says you will not, whether in USD or UnicornBucks, is some form of theft/fraud/embezzlement and already illegal.
> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate
controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
Are these filings typically full of quips? This seems pretty damning but I don't read enough court filings to know whether this sort of language is typical
What he's really saying is, these guys had no back office accounting operation.
Usually, in a bankruptcy of a financial enterprise, there's a general ledger of transactions to look at. Some may be fraudulent, hidden amongst the legit ones. FTX does not seem to have had that. Much of the history is missing.
So it will have to be reconstructed, often from the other side of the transaction. Banks will be asked (ordered) to provide their transaction history for all relevant accounts. There will be heavy analysis of the blockchain, which is less anonymous than many people in crypto think. Whatever records FTX has will be analyzed. People identified as having dealt with FTX will be subpoenaed for their records.
Gradually, cells on spreadsheets saying "On DATE transferred AMOUNT denominated in COIN to UNKNOWN" will have UNKNOWN filled in. This is forensic accounting.
In bankruptcy, that happens in public. Over time, the PACER filings for the case will fill up
with details of where the money went. Some will be trackable, some won't. A lot of effort will go into finding out where big amounts went. The numbers are big enough to justify the effort.
Then come clawbacks, arrest, trials, civil litigation... A huge pain for everyone involved, but if you screw up at the 10-digit level, it gets done.
Thanks, that is a good analysis. Considering the mix of (often bespoke) coins and tokens, seems like a sure bet that some legal minded forensic techies are going to be able to build careers off this too.
I think this is it - he's looking for publicity as reputational CYA (which is a big part of his job).
If you take a look and go "I can do this" and can't, then you look sketchy. If you take a look and go "nobody will ever be able to do this completely, but I'll try" then you look like a hero.
On the other hand how could these guys have fucked up any more than they already did? I think it's clear that he's earnest and not trying to win points simply based on that fact... did they do anything right?
Look at the title again. This is the guy who cleaned up Enron and he is calling it "unprecedented" and says "never in my career have I seen such a complete failure..."
This is not typical language. John Ray III is a serious person.
The key are words like "unsophisticated". Enron was sophisticated, well documented, audited and done with Wall Street firms signing on. They could point to where every dollar had gone. It was an immense fraud, but no one was "unsophisticated".
A company filing for a chapter 11 reorganization starts the process with a story about how they came to be in some temporary trouble, and how a renegotiation with the debtors will allow the firm to continue and thrive.
But in this case, FTX filed with a blank page where that story would be. Now the new CEO is explaining to the court that nobody knows how they came to be here, he has no idea if there is a viable company, and he has no idea if the money was spent, stolen, lost, or smoked. He doesn't even have a list of employees, or a reliable list of the bank accounts. He is aghast, and in no position to tell that kind of story.
I don't understand if there is any path for FTX that doesn't end in chapter 13. I certainly wouldn't bet on it.
I don't' know, but I suspect its an attempt to put distance between the CEO running the bankuptcy and previous leadership. Essentially signalling to the court and debtors "serious people are in charge now. Things were messed up, but I'm not like that".
The new CEO (John Jay Ray III) was the one put in charge of Enron to clean up that whole mess. I don't think anyone doubts his legitimacy at this point, so there would be no need for him to be on the defensive. He was placed here specifically for that reason, I think.
This is a situation where lawsuits will be flying and a lot of very wealthy people who can afford lawyers and lost lots of money will be casting about for any deep pockets they can find and any scapegoats they can blame.
It is likely that nobody will sue this CEO, but a nontrivial part of that is precisely that this guy is correctly covering his bum. By being ready for this battle, he will probably never have to fight it. And that's only "probably". I wouldn't guarantee it. I would have some clauses about this written into my contract before I took the job.
This guy has no reason to need to do that, his career is already rock solid - and if even 1% of the stuff coming out is true, this is an epic cluster of malfeasance and incompetence.
Usually small businesses are terrible at accounting and finance, but even they typically have some idea where their bank accounts are and what is in them
> Essentially signalling to the court and debtors "serious people are in charge now. Things were messed up, but I'm not like that".
He's not trying to save or run the company. He's a liquidator with an unimpeachable reputation. From the instant he took over that distance became an ocean. I think he's just genuinely aghast, Enron was at least "clever" about their fraud, SBF and accomplices were brazen.
It is not typical. I think in this case the extreme language is meant to signal to judges and stakeholders, "this is going to take a long time and be really messy, your usual expectations of the timeline of this process do not apply".
What's clear is that FTX didn't have any real corporate structure in the usual sense. It was a handful of people sitting around on bean bags doing stimulants and trading crypto all day. It's amusing to read about the clash between the bankruptcy CEO's expectations of what a corporation looks like and what FTX actually was.
The thing is, it's incredibly unusual for a corporation to just ignore the massive legal risks like this. They commingled assets and used the corporation in a way that totally breaks the veil and means the directors are likely personally liable. That's honestly just moronic of them to do.
No idea why people invested in this, clearly nobody did their due diligence.
There’s a scene in the Hulu show about Theranos where an investor was trying to do due diligence and they kept getting the runaround with crazy excuses. Like a comedy. They eventually walked.
I guess the FTX investors didn’t walk.
Makes you think how lucky we are that the financial system even exists.
I wonder if that's how people will get out of lawsuits, by convincing the judge that no serious investor doing their due diligence would ever give these amateurs a single dollar.
If they wanted to mitigate legal risks, it probably would have been better to take advantage of 'serious' investors, as opposed to less knowledgeable investors. I believe the latter group generally enjoys more legal protections.
When the fishy balance sheets leaked I wondered who the CFO was who signed off on them. There was no CFO.
Beyond any regulation or regulatory failure it’s shocking the investors let this happen. You shouldn’t give someone billions of dollars without an adult in the room ensuring there are adequate processes in place to track and manage that money.
The GPs at the various VCs investing in this should honestly be fired.
But as story goes on the story just gets so much worse. This is theft of company and customer assets pure and simple. SBF and his cohorts are about to discover just how far reaching the long dick of the US government really is.
Like how can anyone think blindly spending customer assets wasn’t going to end in spending the rest of your life in prison or on the run? Because that’s where this is going.
This is effective altruism at its finest. They will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi. The industry as a whole will become safer due to their malfeasance. If that's not altruism, I don't know what is!
> will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi
Lumis and Gillibrand's proposals went from being considered for omnibus insertion to DOA. The people who write the coming rules are not going to be friendly towards industry.
The FTX business model was to initiate regulatory capture, spend a flood of money on the usual DC insiders to make all competitors DeFi illegal in the USA, then they just happen to soak up all the profits.
It would have worked out fine if they had just held it together until after they hired the US Gov to put all their competitors out of business. They would have been too big to fail and these smaller numbers could all be swept under the rug by larger numbers. Well, startups lose money until they make money of course.
One of the guys who's company was about to get shut down by the legislation FTX was purchasing, decided to out FTX's questionable balance sheet (if he's taking us out, then we're taking him out first...), and the rest is history.
If you pay the right people, the us government strongly supports anticompetitive policies. That side of the story was going to be very profitable.
Guilt by association. No, seriously. Do you expect Congress or the SEC or the DoJ to understand (and, perhaps more importantly, care) about the difference? I'm quite serious: all they're going to hear is "crypto".
Most of the perpetrators are in early thirties; they will do 10 years and be out by their 40th birthday. Once they are out, they will dig out the millions of dollars worth of bitcoins they have probably hidden away in thumbdrives or CDs.
I know nothing of Crypto or law but I did watch Shawshank Redemption.
> In the fall of 2015, Zenefits came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to comply with state health insurance regulations; the company was subject to an investigation by the website BuzzFeed. On 8 February 2016, Conrad resigned from Zenefits after it was discovered the company used unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance in multiple states. In the aftermath of the investigation, Conrad's replacement as CEO, former COO David O. Sacks—who was cleared of wrongdoing in the same investigation—announced that the valuation of the company would be halved and investors' positions "trued up" in an effort at rectification, while 10% of employees accepted an offer of a two-month separation package.
Now he's the head of Rippling and in full golden child mode.
I think the sons/daughter of the elite (like law school professors) get used to getting away with anything for their small crimes that they forget when they fuck up in a big and public way it becomes a lot more difficult to just sweep it under the rug. My guess is law professor daddy/mommy have bailed him out before and he never got the talk that when he does these things he needs to do it in a way where authorities can at least pretend they didn't see anything.
If you observe SBF behavior it's clear he has an almost kid-like understanding of the world, which speaks of a pretty sheltered existence that can nourish sociopaths.
Judging from the transcript of SBF's conversation with the reporter from Vox, I wouldn't say he has a kid-like understanding of the world. Rather, his understanding of the world is a mixture of pure cynicism and total Machiavellianism. He explains that he thinks everyone, everywhere is constantly running a fake persona motivated by social gains. That's not a child's worldview.
It is interesting to think about whether certain aspects of his upbringing might have contributed to this type of person though.
To be clear, you want to move off of earth to another planet because you think all children of law professors are sociopaths? Do you think there's any irony in accusing other people of having a child like view of the world?
I don't think he's been involved in a startup. Usually people like this get involved in big bankruptcies. Usually startups aren't big bankruptcies.
Most startups work like this(minus the fraud). It is what it is. Approving things via chat is completely valid, for example. Several bot products have flows for approving expenses etc. All kinds of things are approved via chat these days.
Malarky, and I say this as someone that works in a fintech startup. This excuse that somehow because you're a startup you don't have to follow the most basic rules of accounting is nonsense, especially when you're handling billions in assets.
What does "follow the basic rules of accounting" mean? Have rigorous systems in place such that you can close your books within a day? See a real time view of your financial position at any minute? Show a set of financials which meet GAAP requirements but are hand done in excel and complete 8 weeks after qtr end? Get audited?
Are you in the finance function at your startup? I'll guess no, and if you go ask someone there if it feels rigorous they'll laugh.
> What does "follow the basic rules of accounting" mean?
I mean, know how many employees and roughly how much cash you have, or at least be able to find out inside a week? Don't forget where you put eight billion dollars?
Look at the "topics" for example. There is a lot to it. To anyone who knows the field, the statement "you should follow accounting rules" is so vague it's meaningless.
> the statement "you should follow accounting rules" is so vague it's meaningless
We aren’t quibbling over GAAP versus IFRS. Anyone looking at FTX’s lack of accounting and control and seeing even a shade of familiarity at their firm should speak to a lawyer. Start-ups will be start-ups, but if you’re taking outside money and literally can’t say where your bank accounts are, run the hell away.
Most accounting issues aren't legal issues. Most businesses can't give you an up to the current date balance sheet. Most VCs don't get audited financials for most of their early stage investments. Most financials given to VCs have errors in them, most of the errors will be harmless and wouldn't meet any definition of fraud (legal or pub talk). Virtually none would meet GAAP if audited. Most early stage businesses don't have good management/cost accounting in place and can't actually work out exactly what's going on.
FTX seems to have been doing actual bad stuff - moving assets between companies that would never be done at arms length. From a practical perspective, it's almost sending money to the founder. If someone sees their company doing that, yeah, talk to someone. But that is not an accounting issue.
The chaos and lack of accounting rigor is.. just not rare or surprising.
This Gish gallop of questions strongly suggests that you don’t have a lot of experience in the financial industry yourself, and are trying to cover for it with bluster.
It's one question. The others are some potential answers. Sometimes when one asks a question, it's unclear if they are looking for a nuanced response, or they literally have no idea what something means. You'll often see someone who wants the nuanced response offer a few potential answers as a way to signal they are looking for nuance.
"Gish gallop" on wikipedia suggests something quite different.
Basic rules as in ”when the funds move from corporate account to founder account, is it a dividend, a loan, a bonus, or something else”. Basic rules as in ”not printing our own tokens as collateral for our own loans”
The first is a legal determination and maybe a contract issue. The accounting for it is easy - accounting for thousands/millions/billions of transactions is difficult.
The second is not an accounting issue, it's a combination of legal and business judgement.
> Are you in the finance function at your startup?
Yes, I am. I'm in engineering but I have to work closely with our accounting team to make sure all the numbers add up and, importantly, that everything is auditable, and I built the systems to do this.
I'll let Matt Levine say it better than I can. What passed for financial tracking at FTX (which was a financial company) is beyond disgusting. FTX had a "hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account, with a balance of negative $8 billion. The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison."
Then you are almost certainly an outlier, and it's nice to see. If I may ask, how old is the company? While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company.
What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry? Matt says clever sounding things that don't add up sometimes..
No, we are not an outlier. Nearly all fintechs that work in traditional finance must have these controls in place, because otherwise nobody else will do business with them. E.g. you've got to have SOC 2 or ISO27001 compliance (or some other standard) for counterparties to even pick up the phone to do business with you.
I don't mean to be rude, but you seem very unaware what standards are in this space. (Or rather, I should say the financial space, as everything seems to be a shitshow in crypto). You seem to be conflating what, say, some social media platform or todo app startup needs to do for compliance vs. a financial company.
FTX was in the business of handling other people's money, and they can't even say where billions of dollars have gone. If you think this is just normal "startup chaos", please, please, please don't ever work in a financial startup.
Without naming names, there are specific well known fintechs who were not SOC or ISO compliant when they were 2 years old. And SOC compliance is self determined anyway I believe. Plenty of people did business with them because their customers were small businesses (mostly startups) who didn't think about such matters. These were/are good companies, doing the right thing, but not doing things they didn't need to do.
Plenty of businesses did business with FTX. The things large enterprise want in a vendor or counterparty are generally not a consideration outside large enterprise. I used to be involved with oil price hedging where our counterparties were small/mid sized oil and gas producers - it didn't even occur to them that they were taking credit risk on us or that they should know if we had a credit rating.
> While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company
FTX is 3.5 years old, and Alameda is 5 years old.
> What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry?
"We're supposed to have $8 billion in this account but we don't."
Combining various sources of information and reading between the lines, the most likely explanation is that this is the Alameda account that FTX customers were depositing money into, which then got gambled away by Alameda instead of transferred to FTX.
I've never worked at a startup but I strongly question the idea that "Whoops we had customers send $8 billion to the wrong company and gambled it away instead of collecting it" is not out of the ordinary.
What startup deliberately builds back doors to siphon away customer funds with the knowledge of only the founders, and deliberately misleads internal finance folks.
Who "lends" customer funds without any documentation to let founders buy multi million dollar property in their own personal names
This isn't messy, move fast break things of a startup, it's fraud
But the bankruptcy ceo claims the lack of controls is unprecedented. It isn't. Even good guys building good companies have a lack of controls in place in the early days.
The word "startup" should not serve as a general-purpose "get out of responsibility free" card.
The level of organization and internal controls a company needs is a function of what it’s doing and, to a lesser extent, how big it is. The age of the company is not a factor.
Financial exchanges, in particular, have particularly strict fiduciary obligations that come into effect the day they start operations.
Mostly agree with the "should". But the guy saying it's "unprecedented" is miles off. There is plenty of precedent at young companies, he's just not aware of them, and they (almost?) all had a smaller balance sheet.
I don't think "most startups" happen to lose billions of their customers money. You can be a super-stealth-ninja-startup, when you're handling dollar sums with nine zeroes you better do things in a more orderly way than "via chats".
I worked at two small companies in the financial sector and both had compliance and legal assistance, nobody would even wire a hundred bucks anywhere without knowing where it went.
Then they were wild outliers. Money gets wired and lost by practically all financial institutions with some frequency. It usually gets tracked down eventually... but it's way messier than it seems.
SBF's admissions come off as kind of "lol yeah," like a dumb junior high prank or something, and they just keep finding new things. I am expecting an accusation like "Is it true that you smuggled a bunch of crypto wallets across the border, on thumb drives inside of the abdomen of a dead infant?"
SBF: o haha
SBF: yeah that
SBF: so many border searches
SBF: but good ventriloquists will do anything for money
SBF: crying baby sure
SBF: got a burial stateside at least right?
It really shouldn't be surprising that FTX is worse than Enron. Sure, Enron was run by crooks, but they were adults operating in a highly regulated industry. I've seen kids run a lemonade stand with better bookkeeping than FTX.
Adults operating in the US. They needed to have books. Now, the fact that those books were apparently a work of fiction is a different matter. But they did have to make the effort to have the numbers reconcile.
Who thought that giving a bunch of 20 year olds with no experience, and most importantly _no_ oversight hundreds of millions of dollars was going to end differently? Everyone involved with this deal at Sequoia capital should be fired. Did they do _any_ due diligence?
Maybe we should stop lionizing VCs as some sort of investment prodigies. All it is is some people already with money gambling on a large scale and occasionally winning - mostly because there is a bigger sucker somewhere downstream that buys into the promise of future mega-profits.
They are no different than some 20-year-old being all aflutter at the guy who just pulled up in a lambo and whispered "crypto & nfteee".
And, by the way, if you've already proven that you can break some hearts by doing borderline fraudulent stuff and conning people out of billions, that goes in your favor.
VC fund general partners are usually not employees that can be "fired" in the traditional sense. However, they can be forced out in certain circumstances and the limited partners are probably asking some hard questions about fraud and cancelling future capital commitments.
I read a thread from someone reviewing the books, showing all the issues. One conclusion was, “where did all the actual money they took in from people go? It’s missing as an asset.”
And I wonder if they’ve been hacked or otherwise extorted one or more times.
I don't really doubt that he's right about this, but doesn't he have a pretty big incentive to play up how bad the mess is? If he successfully unwinds it then he looks like a genius. If he can't do it, we can't blame him, because it was worse than anything anybody had ever seen.
This guys has been cleanup CEO a bunch of times, including the former biggest US bankruptcy ever. He doesn't need to worry about improving his reputation.
Plus, it's easy to compare his filings here with his filings in previous cases and reasonably conclude that FTX is just much, much worse.
Unstated subtext: "Who the heck gave these bozos this much investment $$? Your whole job is basically to check for this kind of basic corporate structure and organization before handing over hundreds of millions of $$."
I am wondering how Sequoia or SoftBank explain this to their investors.
(This was the infamous “Enron Moment” when the question was asked of Ken Lay by a random employee at an all hands meeting where Lay was espousing optimism even as Enron’s collapse was imminent. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uv47l2/so_i_was... @1:12 —Downvoters here are always showing their ignorance ROFL)
I still cannot understand what investors were thinking and doing. I thought those people were extremely demanding? You always here these stories of people being nervous even to present an idea to investors, but here is an example of a company with not a single shred of professionalism or even attempt at doing things properly. Yet, investors were throwing money at them and writing coronation articles about them.
Is there a way where investors are held liable for some things? Their investments and marketing material for FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, etc. are a large part of what lended credence to FTX and this people putting money in. Will the investors be investigated as well? They are partly responsible, in my opinion. I am not crazy about this world where investors give all this money and see nothing but upsides (aside from losing money that really doesn’t matter to them), but then have no downsides, even when funding fraudulent or incompetent enterprises.
> I still cannot understand what investors were thinking and doing.
Dumb money (like pension funds) was just following "smart money" like Sequoia. Smart money was investing based on his political, media, and regulatory connections and not the financials. They'll say different publicly, but I doubt anyone really cared if the books were cooked and it was all a house of cards, as long as they stood a good chance of getting out before it crumbled. VC's have been riding crypto pump and dump schemes for years now.
FTX was one of a biggest crypto exchanges (think - stock market), ran by bunch of smooth talking friends/lovers, who were more interested in playing games and Harry Potter than running a company.
They amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, from serious companies (who were impressed by their recklessness) and billions of dollars in deposits from customers. They donated millions to politicians and spent even more on ads (including Super Bowl). They stole those money, and partially pocketed it/moved it to their hedge fund (which they managed on a principle of “you don’t need to know math or finance” and “risk management is dumb”) that lost majority of it and triggered their fall.
They did all of that, while being run with less financial and corporate discipline than a neighborhood dog walking business by a teenager.
What's there to explain? Customers put money into their accounts, and now all withdrawals are blocked (because the money isn't there and because assets are frozen in bankruptcy).
I'd just like to hear from one of the reportedly million people affected directly.
Is there a subreddit or something? One person tried to open one but was called out as a scammer [0], and commenters in that thread are also asking if there is any FTX victim even on the subreddit.
So which one is it? Incompetence or Malice? These ultra-smart people from MIT and Jane Street, the "elite", couldn't possibly ignore basic accounting, or the fact that they were operating a Ponzi scheme and defrauding both their investors and their clients. It would be like calling Enron leaders "incompetent".
Why not both? They did some things that were clearly illegal (malice). But they lost the money because they thought they were smarter than they were (incompetence).
Step 1, finding the cash that's left and putting it into big banks with tight controls on authorizing withdrawals, seems to be going OK.
Step 2, finding the employees, not so much.
"At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment. Repeated attempts to locate certain presumed employees to confirm their status have been unsuccessful to date.
They thank some of the employees who stayed on trying to clean up the mess.
Step 3, "Digital Asset Custody", is not going well.
"Unacceptable management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, and the absence of independent governance as between Alameda (owned 90% by Mr. Bankman-Fried and 10% by Mr. Wang) and the Dotcom Silo (in which third parties had invested). The Debtors have located and secured only a fraction of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope to recover in these Chapter 11 Cases."
A few little prison-term sized problems:
(a) at least $372 million of unauthorized transfers initiated on the Petition Date, during which time the Debtors immediately began moving cryptocurrency into cold storage to mitigate the risk to the remaining cryptocurrency that was accessible at the time,
(b) the dilutive ‘minting’ of approximately $300 million in FTT tokens by an unauthorized source after the Petition Date and
(c) the failure of the co-founders and potentially others to identify additional wallets believed to contain Debtor assets.
They're working the problem. Chainalysis has been retained to find where those coins went.
"...investigators to begin the process of identifying what may be very substantial transfers of Debtor property in the days, weeks and months prior to the Petition"."
That's preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone. Anything in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy gets looked at hard, and the bankruptcy can go back further where fraud is involved. The Madoff Recovery operation used clawback heavily. Which is why the Madoff recovery took so long, but got a sizable fraction of the money back. Lots of lawsuits against people who thought they got out in time. Expect that here.
"Finally, and critically, the Debtors have made clear to employees and the public that Mr. Bankman-Fried is not employed by the Debtors and does not speak for them. Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public statements. Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F### regulators they make everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs. Delaware”.
Some news reports indicated that Bankman-Fried was still somehow involved, or "assisting", or something. He's not. He has zero authority at this point.