FTX bankruptcy deals another blow to crypto, had India investments too

Updated: Nov 14, 2022

Until a few weeks ago, FTX was making waves with its sports sponsorships. The latest visuals came from the ongoing World Cup T20 cricket tournament in Australia. What has recently emerged from the debacle of FTX was, if we believe it to be true, a comical goof-up – a “poor internal labeling of bank accounts’, as shared on Twitter by its founder Sam Bankman-Fried. He was still worth almost $16 billion at the start of the week.

The trouble began when it was revealed that most of Alameda’s assets (Alameda is the trading arm of FTX), were in the form of its own token, FTT. When Binance decided to dump FTT (Binance is a rival exchange), there was a bank rush on the exchange, and FTX fell short, as indicated in the mention of liquidity in the above tweet. FTX, established in 2019, is headquartered in The Bahamas, a country with its own central bank currency, and considered to be crypto friendly.

The latest official message from FTX is shared on their website, indicating an agreement with Tron (Justin Sun) to allow for some swapping of users’ assets lying in FTX. The message reads: “We have reached an agreement with Tron to establish a special facility to allow holders of TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT to swap assets from FTX 1:1 to external wallets…”

As per reports, the net worth of FTX and Alameda was $16 billion just a week ago, and even more earlier. The bankruptcy is among the largest in the world, and ironically, the new CEO is John J. Ray III who managed the restructuring of Enron.

Among the list of 134 FTX subsidiaries filing for bankruptcy is an Indian registered firm, Quoine India Pte Ltd. Another India investment was in the much-hyped Gari. Alameda Research had investments in the Gari platform in India, whose token price recently crashed by over 80% in the beginning of July this year, from around $0.75 to the current price of around $0.036.

What kind of business could Quoine India could be engaged with? Another firm in the bankruptcy list is Quoine Pte Ltd, and it is the venture behind the crypto-fiat exchange, Liquid. It was set up as early as 2014, probably with the name Quoinex. A Japanese office was added in 2016, and a new exchange called Qryptos. In 2020, it extended buy-with-card support to 100 countries, as per the website history section.

FTX Ventures and Alameda has a large portfolio of investments. They were largely into Defi, NFT and gaming, and infrastructure, along with some more investments in trading, Web3, data and analytics, and crypto financial services (as per a graphic by The Block).

Never to miss it, Peter Schiff, well known gold enthusiast, is now calling the entire 2021 rally a big fraud:

A year ago #Bitcoin hit $69,000. One of the main reason for the spectacular rally was all the leverage that funded unprecedented #crypto advertising and speculative buying. The #FTX bankruptcy proves the entire rally was a fraud. It will never be repeated. Bitcoin mania is over.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) November 11, 2022