The FTX Collapse: Timeline, Run and Recovery

Key Takeaways

• The hole was already there before anyone ran. The CFTC complaint states that by approximately mid-2022 the internal ledgers showed Alameda owing FTX around $8 billion, an amount the CFTC says exceeded the total lifetime revenue of FTX. The November withdrawal wave revealed that balance rather than causing it.
• The mechanism was code, not trading losses. FTX gave Alameda's account an allow negative flag, raised its borrowing limit to what the CFTC describes as many tens of billions of dollars, let it withdraw borrowed funds, and exempted it from the automatic liquidation process every other customer faced.
• The collateral was circular. Alameda's largest single holding was FTT, the token FTX itself issued, valued on the balance sheet at the quoted market price with no discount for the size of the position.
• The speed was extraordinary. Nine days separated a news report about a leaked balance sheet on 2 November 2022 from a Chapter 11 filing covering 134 companies on 11 November.
• Contagion was real inside crypto and almost invisible outside it. Genesis halted withdrawals for 340,000 Gemini Earn investors holding roughly $900 million, while the Bank for International Settlements found the 2022 turmoil had little discernible impact on broader financial conditions.
• The recovery is the part that surprises people. Claims that traded at the start of the case at prices implying roughly 10 to 14 percent are now projected to pay between 119 percent and 143 percent, measured against a November 2022 dollar valuation of each claim.

What Happened to FTX in November 2022?

FTX was a centralized crypto exchange launched by Samuel Bankman-Fried no later than May 2019. He had co-founded the trading firm Alameda Research in Berkeley in November 2017, a year and a half before the exchange existed. The CFTC complaint records that FTX was consistently ranked from 2020 as one of the largest digital asset exchanges, that daily trading volume on FTX.com exceeded $20 billion at its peak and that the business carried a $32 billion valuation, with an arena naming deal in Miami and a 2022 Super Bowl commercial describing FTX as the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto.

None of that was what broke. What broke was an accounting relationship. Alameda operated as a primary market maker on FTX, providing liquidity to the exchange's own order books, and the CFTC alleges that customer deposits placed with FTX were regularly accepted, held and appropriated by Alameda for its own use. That arrangement had run since 2019 without producing a crisis, because as long as customers were not asking for their balances back in size, an internal ledger entry and an actual asset are indistinguishable from the outside.

The nine days that ended it began with a news report about a leaked Alameda balance sheet and finished with a bankruptcy filing. By late on 7 November, the people running the company had concluded internally that the money was not slow, it was gone.

Chronology of the collapse and its aftermath

Dates and events as recorded in the CFTC complaint filed 13 December 2022, US Department of Justice announcements, and filings in Case No. 22-11068 in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

What Was Alameda Research, and Why Did Its Balance Sheet Matter?

Alameda was the older of the two businesses and the one that mattered structurally. It traded proprietarily, it made markets on FTX, and it invested. The CFTC complaint describes it using large amounts of capital, including capital derived from FTX customer funds, for long-term equity holdings in digital asset companies and for large positions in relatively illiquid tokens. Those are not market-making positions. They are venture and directional bets funded, in part, with money that belonged to somebody else and could be demanded back at any moment.

Alameda also borrowed heavily outside the group. The complaint states that during the relevant period it took out a large number of loans from digital asset lending platforms, at times totaling as much as $10 billion in notional value, secured against its holdings of FTT and similar illiquid tokens valued at market without discount. This is the setup that turns a market decline into an insolvency: illiquid assets on one side, callable funding on the other, and a collateral valuation that assumes you can sell a position without moving its price.

The trigger for that setup was not FTX at all. It was the spring 2022 crypto downturn, which the CFTC complaint says came to a head in May 2022 with the collapse of two widely traded digital assets whose value fell essentially to zero. The Bank for International Settlements puts the destruction from that episode at over $450 billion of value in crypto and decentralized finance between May and June. Lenders across the sector made margin calls, recalled loans and in several cases failed outright. Readers who want the mechanics of how a token designed to hold a fixed value can go to zero will find them in our guide to stablecoin depeg risk.

Alameda was on the receiving end of those margin calls in approximately May and June 2022 and did not have sufficient liquid assets to service its loans. The complaint states that it then greatly increased its use of FTX customer funds to meet its external debt obligations, drawing several billion dollars in notional value. By approximately mid-2022 the internal ledgers showed a fiat liability from Alameda to FTX of approximately $8 billion.

What FTX did publicly during those same months makes the private position stranger. Bankman-Fried acquired or lent to several distressed crypto firms and presented it as support for the industry. In September 2022 he circulated an internal document arguing that it might be time to shut Alameda down, noting among other things that Alameda was not making enough money trading to justify its existence. Alameda was not shut down. The reason given in the same document was that the exchange depended on it for liquidity.

How Did FTX Customer Money Reach Alameda?

Through the exchange's own source code, deliberately. This is the detail that separates FTX from an ordinary trading blow-up, and it is the detail an outsider had no way to observe.

The CFTC complaint describes four specific privileges built into the platform for Alameda's account. First, an allow negative flag, which let Alameda execute a transaction even when it did not have the funds in its account to do so. Second, an essentially unbounded credit limit in the FTX database: when Alameda once hit a previously set borrowing ceiling, the complaint says Bankman-Fried directed staff to raise it to a level unlikely ever to be exceeded, ultimately many tens of billions of dollars. Third, the ability to withdraw those borrowed funds off the platform entirely, which is what converts an internal ledger entry into a real transfer of somebody else's money. Fourth, exemption from the auto-liquidation risk engine that FTX marketed as a distinctive safety feature, alongside an execution speed advantage of several milliseconds over other customers using the same interface.

Set against that, FTX's Terms of Service told customers they were the owners of all assets in their accounts, that they had control over those assets at all times, and that the assets were appropriately safeguarded and segregated from FTX's own funds. Both statements were public. Only one of them was true, and no customer had any means of establishing which. That asymmetry is the entire subject of our guide to crypto exchange custody risk.

The concealment step matters as much as the borrowing. By mid-2022 an $8 billion negative balance sitting on the Alameda account was an obvious problem for anyone who looked at the ledger. The complaint says that at Bankman-Fried's direction, FTX executives reallocated that liability to a customer account that Bankman-Fried later referred to as the Korean friend's account, technically an Alameda sub-account but not opened under the alameda-research.com identifier and labeled in system notes as FTX fiat old. The same allow negative flag and liquidation exemption were applied to it. After that, the ledger no longer showed Alameda with an $8 billion negative balance. It showed a customer.

When the withdrawal wave hit in November, Bankman-Fried and others were simultaneously telling the public the exchange was solvent and privately searching for several billion dollars of rescue capital. The complaint records the internal estimate of the shortfall growing from $1 billion to $2 billion, then $2 billion to $4 billion, then to as much as $8 billion, with the number of willing rescuers falling as the number rose.

Why Did an Exchange Token Turn a Rumor Into a Run?

FTT was FTX's exchange token. Holding it entitled a trader to discounted fees, and FTX supported its price through a published buyback: the CFTC complaint states that FTX consistently used one third of the trading revenue it collected to buy FTT in the market and burn it, permanently removing those tokens from circulation, and announced the quantity on Twitter every week. That is a transparent and legitimate-looking mechanism. It is also a promise that the token's value tracks the exchange's future revenue.

Alameda held a significant share of all FTT in circulation, and the complaint says it did not pay to acquire those holdings. It carried them on its balance sheet at the market price with no discount for the fact that its position could not have been sold without collapsing that price. It then used FTT and similar tokens as collateral for loans from outside lenders. Bankman-Fried, according to the complaint, told an FTX executive he was not worried about Alameda's liability to FTX because it was sufficiently collateralized by FTT, which was the same token Alameda's own trading desk was working to support.

Take those pieces together and the structure has no independent leg to stand on. The asset backing Alameda's borrowing was a claim on the revenue of the exchange whose customer deposits Alameda had borrowed. A fall in confidence in FTX reduced the value of FTT, which reduced the value of the collateral behind Alameda's obligations, which increased the shortfall at FTX, which reduced confidence in FTX. Nothing external needed to go wrong for that loop to run.

That is why a single article about a balance sheet was sufficient. The CoinDesk report of 2 November 2022 showed $14.6 billion of Alameda assets as at 30 June, a high proportion of it FTT. It did not allege fraud and it did not need to. It told any lender or counterparty that Alameda's stated net worth depended on marking an illiquid affiliate token at screen prices. When Binance's chief executive announced four days later that he would sell his remaining FTT, the announcement itself was the event, because the buyer of last resort for FTT was Alameda, and Alameda's capacity to buy depended on the price it was defending. Alameda's response, an offer to buy the entire Binance position at $22 per token, was an attempt to hold that line, and it failed.

The general form of this problem, an obligation whose collateral is issued by the obligor's own affiliate, is covered in our guide to counterparty risk in crypto, and the leverage mechanics that make forced selling inevitable are in crypto leverage and liquidation risk.

Which FTX Warning Signs Were Public, and Which Were Hidden?

This is the section that hindsight ruins. Every account written after the March 2024 sentencing has the trial record in hand and treats the outcome as legible from the start. Being precise about what was actually available on 1 November 2022 is the only way this episode teaches anything usable.

Classification by Swoopr Investment. The underlying facts are drawn from the CFTC complaint filed 13 December 2022 and from SEC and Department of Justice announcements.

The honest summary is that the public facts justified refusing to hold large balances on FTX. They did not justify predicting that FTX would fail in November 2022. Only the first of those conclusions could be acted on by a customer with an account open on 1 November.

Note what is absent from the public column. There is no price signal, no volatility signal and no on-chain metric that would have flagged this. The information that mattered lived in a private database, and the loop that destroyed the firm ran through a token whose price was being actively supported by the party whose solvency depended on it. Anyone waiting for a chart to tell them was waiting for the wrong instrument. The one control that would have helped is the one nobody can apply retroactively: not leaving assets on an exchange you cannot audit, which is the practical argument in our comparison of custodial and non-custodial exchange risk and in hot wallets versus cold wallets.

How Far Did Crypto Prices Fall, and What Else Broke?

The CFTC complaint gives the cleanest official measure of the market move, because the agency needed to establish price impact on commodities in interstate commerce. Between the release of the 2 November CoinDesk article and the 9 November announcement that Binance would not acquire FTX, it states, the price of bitcoin futures fell more than 23 percent, to two-year low prices. The Bank for International Settlements describes the same week from a different angle, reporting that bitcoin, ether and other cryptoassets fell by over 20 percent in a matter of days, and putting $200 billion of crypto value lost in the wake of the FTX bankruptcy, against over $450 billion after the Terra episode in May.

The behavioral finding in the BIS work is more useful than either figure. Using daily data on crypto exchange app users across 95 countries together with on-chain wallet distributions, the BIS found that during both the Terra and FTX shocks, trading activity rose sharply and holders of large wallets reduced their bitcoin, while medium and small holders increased theirs. The phrase the authors use for the pattern is that the whales eat the krill. The larger, better-informed participants sold into the smaller ones before the steep decline. If you are wondering who was on the other side of the retail buying during that week, that is the answer, and it is documented rather than inferred.

The institutional damage ran through lenders rather than through prices. Genesis Global Capital had lent out crypto assets sourced from retail investors through the Gemini Earn program. In November 2022, according to the SEC, Genesis announced that it would not allow Gemini Earn investors to withdraw their crypto assets because it lacked sufficient liquid assets to meet withdrawal requests following volatility in the crypto asset market. At the time it held approximately $900 million in investor assets from 340,000 Gemini Earn investors. The SEC charged both firms on 12 January 2023 over the unregistered offer and sale of those interests.

That is the shape of crypto contagion in this episode. It did not travel through a clearing house or a repo market. It traveled through a chain of unsecured lending between firms that had each accepted the other's tokens as collateral, which is why the failures arrived in sequence over weeks rather than simultaneously. Diversifying across crypto assets does very little against that transmission path, for reasons set out in crypto correlation risk.

What Did Prosecutors and Regulators Actually Do?

There was no central bank response to the FTX collapse, and that absence is itself the most informative fact about it. No liquidity facility was opened, no institution was recapitalized, and no guarantee was extended, because no regulated payment or funding system was exposed. What followed instead was enforcement and bankruptcy, which allocate losses after the event rather than preventing them.

The CFTC order is worth reading closely for how it treats the victims. The agency agreed not to seek a civil monetary penalty and to subordinate its own monetary claims to those of the fraud's victims, so that the disgorgement flows into a supplemental remission fund rather than into the government. The agency's enforcement director called it the largest recovery for victims in CFTC history. Its chairman used the same announcement to argue that the basic regulatory tools that identify misconduct and prevent collapse, meaning governance, customer protections and surveillance, were simply not present at FTX.

The most durable policy output was analytical rather than punitive. In November 2023 the Financial Stability Board published an assessment of multifunction crypto-asset intermediaries, meaning firms that combine a trading platform with proprietary trading, investment and sometimes token issuance. It treats the May and June 2022 turmoil and the November 2022 FTX collapse as evidence that such combinations can exacerbate structural vulnerabilities, amplified by a lack of effective controls and operational transparency, poor or no disclosures, and conflicts of interest. That is a precise description of what FTX and Alameda were, and it names the combination itself, rather than any individual's conduct, as the hazard. The trade-off between combining and separating those functions is exactly what distinguishes the venue types compared in centralized versus decentralized exchanges.

Did FTX Customers Get Their Money Back?

Mostly yes, in dollars, and this is the part of the FTX story that most retellings get wrong in both directions. The bankruptcy did not wipe customers out, and it also did not make them whole in the sense they would recognize.

The estate's own filings set out the numbers. A March 2025 motion filed by the FTX Recovery Trust in the Delaware case states that between $14.7 billion and $16.5 billion of value was recovered and made available for customer and creditor distributions, and that projected creditor recoveries, originally implied by the market to be in the 10 percent range, increased to between 119 percent and 143 percent across unsecured creditor classes depending on the class. Expected distributions on customer claims are projected to exceed $12.5 billion, which the filing translates to more than 140 percent of the value of those claims. At the outset of the case, a market in FTX customer claims had priced an expected return of roughly 10 to 14 percent.

Where did the money come from? Not from FTX's operations, which had none left. The same filing itemizes approximately $8.1 billion of digital assets secured and stabilized, roughly $8 billion of digital assets monetized under a court-approved coin monetization order, approximately $1.1 billion from Grayscale and Bitwise trust holdings, the sale of LedgerX for $49.2 million and FTX Japan for ¥4.5 billion, almost $600 million of consensual turnovers from third parties holding estate assets, and a venture position that had nothing to do with crypto at all: shares in Anthropic, PBC, sold for approximately $1.3 billion. Roughly $13 billion of cash was generated in total.

Now the qualification that changes the meaning of every percentage above. Claims in a United States bankruptcy are fixed in dollars as at the petition date. For FTX that date is 11 November 2022, a point at which crypto prices had just fallen more than 20 percent in a week and were near two-year lows. A customer whose account held bitcoin did not get bitcoin back. They received a dollar claim struck at the November 2022 valuation of that bitcoin, and were eventually paid more than 100 cents on that dollar figure, more than two years later, with no participation in whatever the asset did in the interim. Whether that constitutes recovery depends entirely on which unit you were measuring in.

We are not publishing a figure for what crypto prices did between November 2022 and the January 2025 effective date, because no primary or institutional source verified in preparing this page supplies one. The mechanism is the point, and the mechanism does not need a number: petition-date dollar claims convert a holder of a volatile asset into an unsecured creditor for a fixed sum on the worst day of the episode. That is a structural feature of insolvency law, not a failure of the estate's administration, and it applies to any custodian holding an appreciating asset when it files.

The other clocks ran differently. FTT holders and FTX equity investors sit behind customers and unsecured creditors in the priority order and were not made whole by any of this. The calendar matters too: petitions on 11 and 14 November 2022, plan confirmed on 7 October 2024, effective date 3 January 2025. That is roughly 26 months during which affected balances were simply unavailable, across a customer list the trust's filings describe as more than 9 million names and addresses. For anyone whose planning assumed those funds were spendable, the freeze was the loss, whatever the final percentage turned out to be.

Why Did the FTX Failure Stay Inside Crypto?

An $8 billion misappropriation at a firm valued at $32 billion, whose customer lists run to more than 9 million names and addresses, with a cascade of lender failures behind it, produced no measurable stress in the financial system it sat next to. That is worth explaining rather than assuming.

The Bank for International Settlements tested it directly. Plotting each country's level of crypto adoption against changes in local equity prices and in broader financial conditions during both the Terra and FTX shocks, the BIS found at best a weak correlation for either metric. Its conclusion is that while the collapse affected individual investors, the aggregate impact on the broader system was limited, and it attributes that to what it calls the largely self-referential nature of crypto and decentralized finance. The Financial Stability Board reached a compatible judgment a year later, describing the threat to financial stability and the real economy from the failure of a multifunction crypto-asset intermediary as limited at present, while noting that this assessment faces significant information gaps.

The structural reason is that FTX's liabilities were owed to its customers and to a handful of crypto lenders, and its assets were tokens. Nothing in that chain was pledged into a regulated repo market, held as a bank's high-quality liquid assets, or wrapped into an instrument a pension fund was required to hold. Compare the 2008 financial crisis, where losses began in one credit structure and traveled because the securities sat on the balance sheets of leveraged institutions funding themselves overnight in markets everyone else depended on. Same conceptual failure, custody and collateral quality, and a completely different blast radius, because the connective tissue was different.

The BIS caveat deserves the last word. Its authors note that if crypto were more intertwined with the real economy, the aggregate impact of a shock of this kind could have been much larger. The absence of spillover in 2022 was a property of how connected the sector was that year, not a permanent property of the sector. And FTX did not fail into a calm market: it failed in the middle of the tightening cycle covered in the 2022 rate shock, which had already removed the cheap funding Alameda's balance sheet assumed and triggered the margin calls that started the borrowing.

Common Myths About the FTX Collapse

"It was a bank run." Only in appearance, and only for about 48 hours. A run is what happens when a solvent institution faces more claims than it can convert to cash quickly. The CFTC complaint states that by late in the day on 7 November 2022 the people running FTX had acknowledged internally that the shortfall was not a matter of having sufficient liquid funds on hand, and that customer funds were irrevocably lost because Alameda had misappropriated them. On the same day Bankman-Fried publicly described a competitor spreading false rumors and said the assets were fine. The withdrawals revealed the hole. Slower withdrawals would have delayed the discovery, not prevented the loss.

"Blockchain failed." No part of this required a distributed ledger to malfunction. Customer balances on FTX lived in a company database, the special treatment for Alameda was a flag in that database, and the concealment was a relabeled row in it. A public blockchain shows transfers between addresses. It cannot show what an exchange did with a balance once the balance stopped being an on-chain position and became an entry in a private book. That distinction is the whole reason custody risk is a separate category from price risk.

"Everyone knew." Some people were publicly skeptical of FTX before November 2022 and were right. Skepticism about an offshore exchange with an affiliated market maker is not knowledge of an $8 billion hole. The four decisive facts, the negative-balance flag, the borrowing limit, the relabeled $8 billion liability and the September memo, all sat inside systems no customer, counterparty or regulator could reach. The public facts supported a decision not to leave large balances on an unregistered offshore exchange. They did not support a forecast, and survivorship does the rest of the work: the accurate warnings are remembered and the equally confident warnings about exchanges that never failed are not.

"Customers lost everything." Most did not, which makes FTX unusual among the case studies in this library. Projected recoveries of 119 percent to 143 percent of claim value are not a normal bankruptcy outcome and are not a base rate for the next failure. They happened because the estate held appreciating assets it could sell, including a venture stake in an artificial intelligence company sold for approximately $1.3 billion, and because a restructuring team spent two years recovering them. None of that was predictable in November 2022, when the claims market was pricing roughly 10 to 14 percent.

"Getting more than 100 percent back means creditors did well." They did better than anyone expected and worse than holding the asset would suggest. The percentage is measured against a dollar value struck on 11 November 2022, near a two-year low in crypto prices, and paid more than two years later. A number above 100 in that unit is not the same as being returned the property.

"Proof of reserves would have caught it." This is a Swoopr assessment rather than an official finding, and the claim is too strong. A reserves attestation shows assets under an exchange's control at an instant. The FTX problem was on the liability side and inside an affiliate's books. An attestation that does not bind liabilities, is not a full audit and cannot see Alameda would have shown assets while the obligation to return them sat elsewhere. The useful lesson concerns what an attestation can and cannot demonstrate, which we set out in proof of reserves explained.

What a Reader Can Actually Carry Forward

FTX is not useful as a template for spotting the next fraud, because the specific mechanism, an allow negative flag in a private exchange database, is not a thing anyone outside the company could have looked for. It is useful for a narrower and more practical purpose: deciding how much of your assets should ever sit inside an institution whose books you cannot inspect.

What generalizes

• Custody is a separate risk from price, and it is the one that goes to zero. A holder of a token whose price falls 80 percent still holds the token. A holder of a balance at a failed custodian holds an unsecured claim in a court process. FTX customers got the second thing, and the two risks need different defences.
• Collateral issued by the borrower's own affiliate is not collateral. Alameda's FTT position secured obligations whose value depended on the same exchange that issued the token. Any structure where collateral and obligation share a single point of failure should be read as unsecured, whatever the stated coverage ratio.
• A written promise you cannot verify is a marketing claim. FTX's Terms of Service said customer assets were segregated. That statement was public, specific and false. Ask of any custodian not what it promises but what an outsider could check.
• Bankruptcy fixes your claim in the unit of account on the worst possible day. Petition-date dollar valuation converts a volatile asset into a fixed unsecured claim, struck when prices are usually depressed and settled years later. That applies to any custodian holding an appreciating asset when it files.
• Failures inside a self-contained sector stay there, until the sector is no longer self-contained. The BIS attributed the absence of spillover to crypto's limited connection to the traditional system in 2022, and said explicitly that a more intertwined sector would produce a larger shock.

What does not generalize

• The recovery of more than 100 percent. It required the estate to hold sellable assets that appreciated, including a large venture position outside crypto. Assuming a similar outcome for any future exchange failure is unsupported.
• The nine-day timeline. Terra took days, Genesis took months, and other lenders unwound over more than a year. Speed here reflected the reflexivity of a token backing its own issuer's affiliate, not a general property of crypto failures.
• The absence of a policy response. There was no facility and no guarantee because there was no regulated exposure. A failure touching a payment system, a bank's balance sheet or a regulated fund would not be handled this way.
• "Offshore and unregistered is the tell." It was a real risk factor here and it is also true of many exchanges that did not steal from customers. As a predictor it produces mostly false positives, which is why it is a reason to limit exposure rather than a reason to forecast.

The one question worth asking now

Take every venue that currently holds assets of yours, and for each one answer this: if it froze withdrawals tomorrow morning and returned nothing for 26 months, what would you be forced to do? Not what you would lose in a valuation sense, but what you would be unable to pay for, sell into or rebalance out of. FTX customers who could answer that comfortably had an annoying two years. Those who could not had something else entirely, and the eventual recovery percentage did nothing for them at the time it mattered. The question is answerable today from your own balances, and it requires no prediction about any exchange's honesty. Our guides to risk management and stress testing and scenario analysis cover how to run it properly.

References

Every figure on this page was verified against the following sources, each retrieved on 26 August 2026:

• US Commodity Futures Trading Commission: Complaint against Bankman-Fried, FTX Trading Ltd and Alameda Research LLC: the over $8 billion of missing deposits, the $20 billion peak daily volume and $32 billion valuation, the Super Bowl advertisement wording, the allow negative flag and the borrowing limit, the liquidation and execution privileges, the Terms of Service language, the FTT buyback and burn mechanism, Alameda's $10 billion of notional loans, the mid-2022 liability and its relabeling, the September 2022 memo, the November 2022 chronology including the $22 per token offer and the 134 filings, the more than 23 percent fall in bitcoin futures, the ranking of FTX from 2020 among the largest digital asset exchanges, the November 2017 founding of Alameda in Berkeley, and the 10 November halt of all trading and withdrawals.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission: SEC Charges Samuel Bankman-Fried with Defrauding Investors in Crypto Asset Trading Platform FTX: the 13 December 2022 charge date, and the more than $1.8 billion raised from equity investors including approximately $1.1 billion from approximately 90 United States investors.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission: SEC Charges Genesis and Gemini for the Unregistered Offer and Sale of Crypto Asset Securities through the Gemini Earn Lending Program: the November 2022 suspension of Gemini Earn withdrawals, the approximately $900 million held from 340,000 investors, and the 12 January 2023 charge date.
• US Department of Justice: United States Attorney Announces Charges Against FTX Founder Samuel Bankman-Fried: the 13 December 2022 unsealing of the indictment, its coverage of fraud, money laundering and campaign finance offenses, and the arrest in The Bahamas the previous day.
• US Department of Justice: Statement Of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams On The Conviction Of Samuel Bankman-Fried: the 2 November 2023 verdict date and the composition of the seven counts on which the jury convicted.
• US Department of Justice: Samuel Bankman-Fried Sentenced To 25 Years In Prison: the 28 March 2024 sentence, the three years of supervised release and over $11 billion in forfeiture, the one-month trial before US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, the authorization to compensate victims from forfeited funds, and the amounts defrauded from FTX investors and Alameda's lenders.
• US Commodity Futures Trading Commission: CFTC Charges Alameda CEO and Alameda and FTX Co-Founder with Fraud in Action Against Sam Bankman-Fried and his Companies: the 21 December 2022 amendment of the complaint to add two former executives.
• US Commodity Futures Trading Commission: CFTC Obtains $12.7 Billion Judgment Against FTX and Alameda: the 8 August 2024 consent order, the $8.7 billion of restitution and $4 billion of disgorgement, the subordination of the agency's claims to those of victims, and the quoted remarks on the missing regulatory tools.
• US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware: Motion to Authorize Payment of Incentive Fee and Completion Fee to Debtors' Chief Executive Officer, Case No. 22-11068, Docket 29834: the $14.7 billion to $16.5 billion recovered, the 119 percent to 143 percent projected recoveries, the customer distributions above $12.5 billion, the 10 to 14 percent implied by early claims trading, the digital asset and cash totals, the Anthropic, LedgerX, FTX Japan and Grayscale figures, and the October 2024 confirmation and January 2025 effective dates.
• US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware: Motion of the FTX Recovery Trust for an Order Authorizing the Continued Redaction or Withholding of Certain Confidential Information of Customers, Case No. 22-11068, Docket 30340: the 11 and 14 November 2022 petition dates, and the customer lists of more than 9 million names.
• Bank for International Settlements: Crypto Shocks and Retail Losses, BIS Bulletin No 69: the $200 billion lost after the FTX bankruptcy and over $450 billion after Terra, the fall of over 20 percent within days, the finding that large wallet holders sold while small holders bought, the 95-country dataset, and the limited effect on broader financial conditions.
• Financial Stability Board: The Financial Stability Implications of Multifunction Crypto-asset Intermediaries: the November 2023 assessment, the identification of controls, transparency, disclosure and conflicts of interest as amplifiers, and the judgment that the stability threat is limited at present subject to significant information gaps.

Figures deliberately not stated. This page gives no dollar price for bitcoin or any other asset on any date, and no percentage change in crypto prices between the November 2022 petition date and the January 2025 effective date. No primary or institutional source consulted supplied those figures, so the mechanism is described and the number is left out rather than estimated.

Method note: allegations in a complaint are identified as such in the text, and statements about what the trial established are drawn from the Department of Justice announcement following the verdict. The classification of which facts were publicly visible before 2 November 2022 is Swoopr Investment's own assessment applied to those sourced facts, and is labeled as such in the relevant table.

This is educational content about a historical episode. It is not investment advice, it is not a forecast, and nothing here should be read as a claim about how any future exchange failure will behave.

Frequently Asked Questions