SBF Cashed Out $300M Following $420M FTX Fundraiser in 2021: Report

A new report by the Wall Street Journal claimed that the disgraced founder and former CEO of FTX took over 70% of the funds gathered from a funding round in October last year.

He used the Binance buyback deal to justify his actions.

  • CryptoPotato reported the fundraising round in October 2021 when FTX closed a $420.69 million Series B-1, bringing its total valuation to $25 billion at the time. Aside from the unusual and meme amount, the round saw the participation of exactly 69 investors.
  • Sam Bankman-Fried told investors back then that the funds will be primarily used to engage with regulators and improve general user experience as well as the overall platform performance.
  • While those promises were quite ordinary, the WSJ’s report claims that most of the money went in another direction – to SBF himself.
  • According to documents seen by WSJ, SBF sold a portion of his stake in the company and cashed out $300 million out of the $420 million.
  • He explained to investors that he took that funds as a “partial reimbursement” of money he spent from his own pocket to buy back a company stake from Binance.
  • Recall that CZ’s exchange was the first outside investor in FTX a few years back, but things between the two crypto moguls began to deteriorate last year.
  • According to some reports, Binance ghosted FTX when the latter was trying to get a license in Gibraltar, which prompted SBF to buy back the former’s stake in his company.
  • FTX’s downfall could also be attributed to some extent to Binance, whose CEO said they were going to sell their FTT tokens due to “recent revelations” two weeks ago. This caused a domino effect, which resulted in a liquidity crisis for FTX, and the ultimate collapse.
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Source: https://cryptopotato.com/sbf-cashed-out-300m-following-420m-ftx-fundraiser-in-2021-report/