Was Dealing With a Fraudster, Couldn’t Trust Data: CZ on FTX

Earlier today, during the Bloomberg Live interview wherein Changpeng Zhao was asked to speak, the Binance CEO expressed his displeasure and mistrust of FTX and its leader Sam Bankman-Fried. Chief International Correspondent for Southeast Asia Haslinda Amin took the interview.

When asked about the contagion from the FTX fallout, Zhao confessed that the industry would likely see a little bit of contagion. He, however, believes that overall, the industry would be fine.

Amin further questioned Zhao regarding his deleted tweets about liquidity issues at Coinbase and Grayscale to which Zhao replied that he didn’t talk about liquidity issues, and instead simply shared two articles. One article, Zhao argued, details Coinbase’s statement about Grayscale having 635k Bitcoins with them. The other article, according to him, points out that Grayscale only has 600k on the exchange. “I just posted it as a question,” stated the crypto leader.

Speaking about FTX, Zhao made some controversial remarks:

Regarding the FTX situation, I blame myself for tweeting that too late. As an industry, we let FTX get too big … I’m taking the approach where we ask questions much earlier. It does not mean any attacks on our industry peers, we just want to build more transparency and more scrutiny into the industry.

When asked about FTX’s books that he could inspect during talks of acquisition, Zhao admitted that there were a lot of funds missing. In his words, “Onto the tunes of double-digit billions.”

Calling SBF a fraudster, Zhao stated:

Given the amount of customer funds they had, they must have moved customer funds. At that point, we think there was fraud involved … When dealing with the fraudster, I could not trust any information in the data room.

The CEO addressed several other topics of concern in the 10-minute interview including the US National Security issues and the building of a crypto recovery fund. He also explicitly stated that Binance was not a Chinese company and that it was not related to China at all.

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