You will still get this story on the screens on Netflix-
One of the most dramatic weeks I’ve experienced in the market since 2018 when two similar cases happened and started the market fall that the whales used to dive to $3300 BTC and raise the “this is the end of crypto” headlines for the fourth time since the birth of the market.
Today, while the gossip sections are preparing this headline again, the story that started already in 2021 is starting to get a clear but more complicated picture than you thought.
You will have to give this post a few minutes of reading and a few hours to digest and understand.
When the story of the overthrow of the Almeda research models began to catch my eye about 8 months ago with the market manipulation they carried out on the Waves project , I began to closely follow the fund, in the establishment of SBF (Sam Bankman Freed, CEO of FTX).
The story continued to the fall of LUNA# where other entities were involved along with SBF because greater liquidity was needed ($530 million) in order to drop a project from the top 10 in the table, we will put this issue aside for now because it deserves a separate post.
3AC, which was a major investor in LUNA, began to dive following the case and also announced bankruptcy afterwards – source .
The next chapter in the special crypto edition of Black Mirror continues with the fall of Celsius, the Israelis already in July began to be investigated by Israeli bodies under the title of “Ponzi scam” and days after the fall it also declared bankruptcy – source .
The documents show a withdrawal of 10 million dollars to the wallets of the founders through the exchange, guess what… FTX.
Sam jumped to the “help of a friend” and expressed interest in purchasing the product after bankruptcy – the source of
the case plunged into the digital depths together with the sale of 14 thousand pages that include a sensitive database of the investors of the “decentralized” protocol – source
The market dive then continued for Voyager, Voyager Digital, which could not collect its $380 million loan following the collapse of 3AC and was forced to cease trading, deposits and loyalty reward payments on July 1.
Back in October 2021 Alameda invested more than 75 million dollars in Voyager when half a year later they took part of the bankruptcy of the project and it was announced that the loan was uninsured.
Followers?
The Almeda Research Foundation made headlines, as part of the active investors in these projects, which raised a number of question marks that I delved into 4 months earlier – source .
The post received the least exposure even though it is currently the most relevant to establishing the image.
SBF- Sam Bankman Freed, also known as the young crypto billionaire, set out at the time to “rescue the falling projects” when he lent huge sums to Blockfi, and others in the form of the stock exchange and the Alameda fund.
Later, Blockfi was purchased at a 99% discount by FTX at a value of 25 million dollars, by the way, this is the application for which hacking warnings were issued yesterday, as a result of which 400 million dollars were leaked, which were “the last balance to be returned to the affected customers”. – source
Why am I lingering on Almeda research you ask?
The company was established under the auspices of Sam, Sam became rich from the start due to the arbitrage trading skills he carried out with the help of large sums invested in him and made him so rich, behind the scenes he established a solid network of companies with 1-10 employees, which invest in one another without clear traces while declaring that ” I believe in crypto but I operate according to liquidity and volatility.” – source
Almeda held as investors in FTX a high percentage of tokens from the allocation worth more than 10 billion dollars.
Let’s go back a week and a half to the SBF interview in which he claimed that decentralized machines *should* require comprehensive customer identification, a statement that provoked Twitter into direct fury towards him since this claim goes against one of the main principles in crypto – #Decentrelization.
When SBF didn’t bounce back on its own, Binance CEO CZ woke up and announced that he was taking a step back and releasing 20% of the FTX token holdings into the crypto space in controlled pulses.
CZ has undoubtedly held his own for a long time in India hinting to the community a few months earlier about decentralization versus decentralization and ways to safely hold crypto “Crypto is a volatile market, don’t invest what you are not willing to lose”.
CZ’s influence on Twitter celebrated his 7 millionth follower this month and this announcement caused a Panic Sell situation among investors, the currency dive began and there was nothing to stop it, the only thing that stopped was withdrawal orders from the exchange’s customers who requested in less than 12 hours to withdraw more than 8 billion dollars.
Another big influencer who raised the first red flag when no one was looking in the direction was Bitboy crypto .
The statement raised doubts and began to flood a lot of messages, conversations, meetings and investments that show that Sam has no desire to support a decentralized market.
The stable coin of FTX lost stability and plunged as well along with FTT.
No investor deal could save the protocol from the created situation.
FTX is now in bankruptcy, which looks like the lockout of the stock exchange workers in the Bahamas, an advanced stage of “cleansing” the crypto market from the resulting fog. What now appears to be chaotic will later be announced as necessary in order to maintain transparency, decentralization and anonymity.
At this time it is important for me to point out that we must note that 3AC, Celsius and Voyager are all centralized projects.
No decentralized lending protocols collapsed as a result of the 3AC collapse.
This is another indicator that true DeFi could be the way forward towards a more secure crypto industry.
It is also important for me to note that NOT YOUR KEYS=NOT YOUR COINS proves itself again.
To the founders of the projects out there, it is important for me to say – never use the token you invented as collateral!