SBF's planned Congressional testimony included screenshots from a private channel showing that CZ, SBF, and others collaborate (illegally?) behind the scenes to prop up certain coins over others

Link to testimony

Most of the coverage of SBF's planned (and undelivered) testimony to Congress focused on his (bullshit) attempts to blame everyone from CZ to the Chapter 11 lawyers to FTX's own counsel for its demise. However, buried in his testimony is something far more interesting: he includes screenshots from a chat named "Exchange coordination" in which he and CZ have a conversation.

I would post high-res pics so we can easily read them, but the source material is low-res so there's no point. Here are the screengrabs SBF included in his testimony:

link to screens, slightly better res than Forbes

In that conversation, CZ chastises SBF for shorting Tether (a $250k short), instructs SBF to pause withdrawals only for TRON, and to otherwise do nothing.

This doesn't sound like a big deal, except we must remember:

1. CZ and Binance are "officially" not related to Tether. Why does CZ care if SBF is shorting a product his exchange is officially unaffiliated with? And why is it a problem at all, if Tether is fully backed? If it's fully backed, any short will inevitably lose.

2. CZ is complaining about a $250k short, in a Tether market which is supposedly $60bn+. Why did he even know about it? Why does the CEO of binance even know about a single hedge fund making such a miniscule bet? Why does he care, and why did it even reach his attention? This is a completely insignificant trade.

3. CZ tells SBF to pause withdrawals for TRON, and tags Justin Sun. Why, again, is CZ concerned with a product his company is not officially affiliated with? Why does he want to protect TRON, but not other coins?

4. It's almost certainly illegal for there to be an "exchange coordination" chat in which participants coordinate their market actions. That's the definition of market manipulation, and if I'm a prosecutor, I want to subpoena that chat and everyone linked to it immediately. When was that chat set up, was anything else coordinated, and who in total was in it?

5. Finally, the real zinger: why did SBF include the screenshots? Was he trying to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for prosecutors to follow such that they bring down CZ with him? Or is he truly just so arrogantly stupid that he thinks this somehow helps his case?

CZ's actions, to me, indicate that USDT is on way shakier ground than people think. Why else would he care about a $250k bet? And it also indicates that binance has some agreement with Tron, such that CZ / binance would lose money if Tron were actually allowed to undergo non-Binance price discovery.

I realize this is just a bunch of questions, but these are damn good questions! This portion of the testimony deserves way more attention, because it reveals a LOT about how things actually worked. We get to go beyond SBF's saintly victimhood claims to see that some to possibly most exchanges coordinate actions, that their CEOs presumably regularly chat to handle those actions, and that they're doing so out of self-interest. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, somewhere in that chat or in its participants' DMs, there's outright price manipulation being discussed.