The former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has said at a conference in New York that he “screwed up” but maintained that he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” and was shocked by the collapse of the exchange.

At the same conference Sam Bankman-Fried spoke, the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, Larry Fink, also commented on the FTX situation. Per Fink, BlackRock invested $24 million into the exchange.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has announced the company will begin building “non-custodial wallets” and “decentralized exchanges” to let millions of users safely trade their digital assets.

Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Ex-FTX CEO Says He ‘Didn’t Commit Fraud’
• BlackRock CEO Says Firm Invested $24 Million in FTX
• Telegram Announces Plan to Launch Decentralized Exchange
• Average Daily Aggregate Crypto Investment Product Volumes Rise

Ex-FTX CEO Says He ‘Didn’t Commit Fraud’

The former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has said at a conference in New York that he “screwed up” but maintained that he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” and was shocked by the collapse of the exchange.

Bankman-Fried, who was visibly shaking at times, appeared via a video conference from a nondescript room in the Bahamas. Speaking to the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, he said he was “deeply sorry about what happened,” but argued he did not have a full picture of what was going on at FTX’s various branches.

SBF resigned as head of the exchange when it declared bankruptcy earlier this month, and true fallout of what happened is still emerging. FTX owes $3.1 billion to its largest creditors and some assets have disappeared, while contagion is affecting other crypto firms.

Questioned on whether FTX misappropriated customer funds, FTX’s former CEO shifted the blame to the hedge fund he founded, Alameda Research, saying he “didn’t knowingly comingle funds” and “was frankly surprised by ow big Alameda’s position was.”

Bankman-Fried insisted he was not running Alameda and was surprised by its position, and attributed the situation to an accounting mistake, saying there was a “substantial discrepancy” between the company’s legitimate audited financials and the figures displayed on the exchange’s dashboards.

BlackRock CEO Says Firm Invested $24 Million in FTX

At the same conference Sam Bankman-Fried spoke, the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, Larry Fink, also commented on the FTX situation. Per Fink, BlackRock invested $24 million into the exchange.

During his interview, BlackRock’s CEO said that it appeared FTX’s collapse was the result of mismanagement and bad behavior. Fink hinted that BlackRock may have been given misleading information at the time of its investment. He said:

“Right now, we can make all the judgment calls that it looks like there was some misbehavior of major consequence. Could we have been misled? Until we have more facts, I will not speculate.”

Other investors in SBF include Temasek and Sequoia, and have marked down their investments to zero.

Telegram Announces Plan to Launch Decentralized Exchange

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has announced the company will begin building “non-custodial wallets” and “decentralized exchanges” to let millions of users safely trade their digital assets.

Referencing FTX’s collapse, Durov said:

"Telegram's next step is to build a set of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and decentralized exchanges for millions of people to securely trade and store cryptocurrencies. This way we can fix the wrongs caused by the excessive centralization, which let down hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users."

Durov argued that the project should be feasible as the development of Fragment, Telegram’s decentralized auction platform, only took “5 weeks and 5 people.” The marketplace launched last month and has already raked in $50 million worth of Toncoin by selling tokenized usernames on the blockchain.

Average Daily Aggregate Crypto Investment Product Volumes Rise

The average daily aggregate crypto investment product volumes across all digital asset investment products saw a significant rise of 127% to $139mn in November, the highest volumes recorded since June 2022, breaking the downward trend volumes have witnessed since May 2022.

This is explained by the significant rise in trading activity caused by FTX-related events. Read more via CryptoCompare’s latest Digital Asset Management Review report.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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