With help from Derek Robertson
Poof.
Yesterday, amid growing concerns about its liquidity and entanglements with a crypto trading fund, the high-profile crypto exchange FTX halted withdrawals of customer funds and announced that its largest rival, Binance, was pursuing a potential takeover. (Late this afternoon, Binance walked away from the deal.)
It was a stunning downfall for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had become the face of the crypto industry in Washington this year. It also has follow-on implications for an industry still sorting out its relationship with the governments and traditional finance channels that it hopes to supplant.
Here’s what else it means.
The industry is bracing for even more scrutiny.
Some of the biggest questions swirling around crypto just got more complicated: Who’s regulating it, and what are they looking out for?
The CFTC and Texas’s securities regulator have both said they are monitoring the situation, and Bloomberg reported this morning that the