A giant whale transferred 23M FTT, the native coin of FTX (approx.$530M), to crypto exchange Binance on November 6, according to a Twitter thread from on-chain analyst Lookonchain.
This comes in light of a November 2 CoinDesk report about a flaw in the balance sheet of Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm Alameda. According to the report, Alameda had $14.6 billion in assets as of June 30, with the FTT token accounting for the majority of it.
Following this disclosure, Zhao Changpeng, CEO of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, announced on Twitter that he has decided to sell the exchange’s FTT holdings.
Twitter personality Mike Burgersburg posted an article titled “IS ALAMEDA RESEARCH INSOLVENT?” and the Tweet received a like from Zhao, and he tweeted “, Crypto is high risk.” supposedly referring to Alameda.
According to Lookonchain, the whale transferred 23 million $FTT to Binance and began selling just two hours after Zhao tweeted, leading many to believe that the whale was the exchange itself.
A giant whale transferred 23M $FTT($530M) to #Binance yesterday.
After that, the price of $FTT began to gradually decrease, from $25.4 to $22.82, a decrease of 10%.
What happeded to $FTT?
1.
Here is a thread.🧵 pic.twitter.com/80kPHp2YTG— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) November 6, 2022
The data reveals that FTX & Alameda currently hold approximately $300 million in stable currency assets. These stable currency assets are insufficient to purchase 60% of the $FTT transferred by this whale. Therefore once the big whales start selling $FTT, the price might crash.
Zhao stated in a tweet dated November 6 that the decision was taken post “recent revelations that have come to light.”
Binance received the funds in FTT as part of its exit last year from an early equity position in FTX that it had held since 2019. According to Zhao, FTX bought out Binance’s stake in the company for $2.1 billion in FTT and BUSD—the stablecoin native to Binance’s exchange.
However, Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, offered to buy Binance’s remaining FTT for a fixed price of $22 from CZ today if he wants to minimize market impact.
In other tweets, she stated that the most recent balance sheet data does not provide a complete picture of Alameda’s assets.
She went on to say that the specific balance sheet being circulated is only for a subset of its corporate entities, and the trading company has more than $10 billion in assets that are not reflected.
