Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Lawmakers are demanding information from Silvergate Capital Corp. SI -4.42% about transfers of customer funds between Sam Bankman-Fried ‘s collapsed trading firm, Alameda Research, and his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. In a letter to the bank Monday, Republican Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana and Roger Marshall of Kansas, along with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said an Alameda…

And he said 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. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bankman-Fried distanced himself from Alameda, saying 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…

Sam Bankman-Fried sat for news interviews this week about the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded and once ran, even as investigators dug in and its new leaders scoured the globe for assets to salvage.The interviews could be a case study in what not to do in a crisis, some communications executives said.  “He’s basically breaking every rule that somebody in the crisis communications field would advise,” said Andrew Gilman, president and…

WASHINGTON—Lawmakers should pass legislation that would impose strict rules on cryptocurrency exchanges, including rules to limit or prohibit the conflicts of interest that contributed to FTX’s collapse, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Rostin Behnam said Thursday. Speaking to members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Mr. Behnam said he still supported a bill that would give his small agency authority to police trading in bitcoin, ether and other digital assets classified as…

Sam Bankman-Fried said that he didn’t intend to commit any fraud or use customer funds to back leveraged bets that went wrong at Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund attached to FTX that pushed the exchange to bankruptcy. Mr. Bankman-Fried, speaking at the DealBook Summit in New York, denied knowingly commingling customer funds to back his crypto trading operation and said he was surprised at the size of Alameda’s bets that went wrong, which he called a “failure of oversight on my part.”…

Years before Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire collapsed, a group of employees quit in a power struggle—after becoming concerned about what they say was his cavalier approach to risk, compliance and accounting.The employees worked at his trading firm, Alameda Research, and were some of his earliest colleagues, including Alameda’s co-founder, Tara Mac Aulay. They left in 2018, well before the crypto exchange FTX grew out of Alameda. Both FTX and Alameda are now…

FTX Digital Markets Ltd. planned on building new headquarters in the Bahamas before the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. Photo: LEVI MANDEL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL…

Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi Inc. filed for chapter 11 on Monday, following FTX into bankruptcy and spotlighting the contagion effects that the failure of the crypto exchange has unleashed. BlockFi blamed its chapter 11 filing on the downturn in cryptocurrency prices this summer and this month’s failure of FTX, a big exchange with ties throughout the largely unregulated industry. FTX’s affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research, defaulted on $680 million owed to BlockFi earlier this month, the firm…

WASHINGTON— Sam Bankman-Fried’s multimillion-dollar Washington charm offensive revolved around a small financial regulator and a group of senators with whom the purported crypto billionaire found common cause in a bid for light-touch regulation of digital assets.For FTX, the crypto exchange Mr. Bankman-Fried founded, the goal was to steer oversight of crypto into the hands of what was perceived to be a friendlier regulator than the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been promising…

A substantial amount of FTX’s assets are either missing or stolen, a lawyer for the failed crypto exchange said in court, vowing to cast a wide net to secure potentially billions of dollars in funds that passed through the firm he called the “personal fiefdom” of co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Tuesday’s hearing marked an inflection point for FTX’s bankruptcy case as its new leaders begin chasing down what assets they can salvage and trying to determine who might be responsible for the loss of customers’…