Last Updated on January 12, 2023 by Bitfinsider

In a Substack article published Thursday morning, FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried refuted charges that he stole billions of dollars in user cash and indicated that Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao orchestrated a months-long operation to bring FTX down.

It is Bankman-Fried’s first substantive rebuttal to US charges that he masterminded a $8 billion scam that ruined his $32 billion crypto empire. Bankman-Fried pled not guilty earlier this month to eight federal accusations, including fraud and money laundering, and was freed on a $250 million recognizance bail. His trial is set to begin in October. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have also filed charges against Bankman-Fried.

His essay discusses the collapse of FTX and his hedge fund Alameda Research, as well as supposed FTX and Alameda financial data, which he qualifies as “JUST AN ESTIMATE.”

Bankman-Fried, for example, estimates Alameda’s total net assets at $99 billion by the start of 2022. By October, he thought his hedge fund’s net assets had dropped to $10 billion. He blamed the crash on a larger market decline, even comparing the performance of his FTT token to that of Tesla, bitcoin, and the Invesco QQQ, an ETF that follows the Nasdaq 100.

Many of the statements made by Bankman-Fried in his piece have been refuted by bankruptcy attorneys, federal prosecutors, and regulators.

According to regulators and prosecutors, neither FTX nor Alameda were entirely genuine enterprises, but rather were tools of Bankman-fried’s Fraud.

Following FTX’s bankruptcy filing in November, restructuring authorities stated that the firms suffered severe and unexplainable financial deficits.

Bankman-Fried’s case was built with the help of his longstanding executives Caroline Ellison and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, both of whom pled guilty to fraud charges. Bankman-Fried’s articles made no mention of their assistance with federal investigations.

Bankman-Fried also mentioned that other crypto businesses had been “blown away” in his piece. He refused to recognize that three of those companies, BlockFi, Genesis, and Gemini, purportedly suffered as a result of FTX’s demise.

Many of his statements were repeated, such as that FTX US remained solvent, that Alameda’s liquidity issue was caused by market instability rather than misbehavior, and that FTX International and Alameda were entirely genuine, thriving enterprises.