This Wednesday (14), the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs held a hearing entitled “Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and the Damage to Consumers”. One of the witnesses was businessman and Shark Tank show host Kevin O’Leary, who became a kind of ambassador for FTX in the “golden” days of the cryptocurrency exchange. In his speech at the hearing, the entrepreneur stated that the rival exchange Binance, “put FTX out” of the market intentionally and became a monopoly in the sector: “I have an opinion. I don’t have the records. Here it is… These two giants who owned the unregulated markets together and ruled these incredible businesses in terms of growth were at war with each other. And one put the other out of business intentionally,” he said. “Binance is now a huge unregulated global monopoly. They put FTX out of business,” he said.
JUST IN: Kevin O’Leary testifies at Senate hearing and says #Binance intentionally put FTX out of business. pic.twitter.com/90pYPYrU5J
—Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) December 14, 2022
O’Leary also said he spoke with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried after the company declared it filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11. He quoted SBF as saying that a large portion of the money lost by the company was used to buy back FTX assets from Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ). O’Leary said that $2 billion to $3 billion in funds were used for this.
Understand Binance’s involvement with the FTX crash
FTX filed for recovery shortly after CoinDesk revealed that much of the balance sheet of Alameda Research, sister company of FTX, was in the FTT token. In light of this, as reported by CriptoFácil, CZ stated that Binance would sell all of its stakes in the FTT token. According to what CZ said at the time, the measure was taken due to “recent revelations that came to light”. In this case, the revelations about Alameda’s balance sheet. In response to this, Caroline Elison, then CEO of Alameda, offered to buy Binance’s FTT holdings to “limit the impact of the liquidation on the market”. But CZ turned down Elison’s proposal. In response to a person on Twitter, the executive said that he prefers to stick with the “free market”. Shortly after everything came to light, Binance even considered the possibility of rescuing FTX from the ongoing collapse. However, the CZ company withdrew from the deal after reviewing the rival exchange’s finances. Perhaps this is why O’Leary claimed that Binance “kicked” FTX out of the market. CZ has yet to comment on the latest case, but he has defended himself against such accusations before. On December 6th, for example, Zhao tweeted the following: “’CZ’s tweet destroyed FTX’. No healthy business can be destroyed by a tweet. However, there was one tweet that may have done it, Caroline’s tweet 16 minutes after mine on November 6th. The data shows that it was the real cause for people to dump the FTT”, he wrote him sharing Caroline’s tweet offering to buy Binance’s FTT.
O’Leary Says He Lost Millions in FTX Collapse
After FTX collapsed, O’Leary said he took a big hit. The presenter, who became the company’s spokesperson at a cost of $15 million, said he was unable to receive the money promised by the exchange. “The total deal was just under $15 million. Of that amount, I put about $9.7 million in cryptocurrencies. I think that’s what I missed. It’s all reset, I don’t know why, but my account got wiped a few weeks ago. All data, all currencies, everything,” he said.
