Binance-FTX saga: A crypto cold war is brewing — a timeline

Let’s take a look at how we got here:

2019:

Bankman-Fried was the new kid on the block when he started FTX in 2019. Binance, which had been created in 2017, had risen to become the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by that time.

2019:

Binance invested in FTX and had said that "FTX would help build  out liquidity and institutional product offerings across the Binance ecosystem."

2021:

Binance announced in July 2021 that it was selling its stake in FTX. The exit happened during FTX's $900 million funding round of that year.

2021-22:

Bankman-Fried became increasingly active in US regulation as FTX grew bigger. He also became one of the major donors in crypto and was the second largest donor to US President Joe Biden.

Nov 2022:

A CoinDesk report showed that FTX's trading arm, Alameda, had $14.6 billion in assets. However, most of the assets on the balance sheet were FTX's own FTT tokens.

This public spat on Twitter has led to the plummeting of the FTT token. It dropped by around 20 percent on November 8 morning. Further, FTT is trading down 19 percent at $17.93. SOL is lower by 17 percent and Serum's SRM token is down 10 percent. This has also led to bitcoin which is down 5.6%.

The industry fears that this could lead to a liquidity problem for FTX and could repeat a Luna-type collapse with a cascading effect on the global crypto ecosystem.

According to CoinDesk, FTX saw a massive stablecoin exodus, with $451 million being sent off the platform last week, and $15 million being pulled from its US subsidiary. Currently, FTX has a balance of $59.2 million USDC and $28.5 million USDT, along with $8.6 million BUSD. FTX US has $41 million USDC, $12.8 million USDT, $39 million PAX, and $11.3 million BUSD available.