We broke the story that brought down Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire. Soon, we’ll be covering his trial, gavel to gavel. Ask us anything.

Hey r/CryptoCurrency, Nikhilesh De and Ian Allison from CoinDesk here.

Last November, Ian broke an explosive story raising questions about the financial underpinnings of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research – and, by extension, the safety of his better-known crypto exchange FTX.

Nine days after Ian’s story, SBF’s companies were in bankruptcy court – a collapse so big (FTX had been valued at $32 billion earlier in 2022) and so fast it has little or no precedent.

The story revealed that Alameda was on potentially shaky footing because of its deep financial exposure to the FTT token issued by FTX. FTT made up nearly half of the company’s $14.6 billion of assets.

That was a surprising degree of financial entanglement for two supposedly separate companies, and also a pretty speculative asset to stash much of a trading firm’s assets into. If sentiment around FTX and SBF were to tank, the price of FTT could fall, dragging Alameda down with it.

And that’s basically what happened. Four days after Ian’s story came out, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted that "due to recent revelations," his exchange would sell its hefty FTT holdings. That quickly drove down the price of FTT, putting SBF’s companies into a tailspin.

SBF was forced two days later to seek a bailout from Binance. But that proposed takeover fell apart in a day, something another scoop by Ian revealed was likely to happen hours before it was made official. Then, on Nov. 11, SBF’s companies filed for bankruptcy protection.

Ian’s initial scoop on the balance sheet was widely cited as the catalyst for the collapse. He and former colleague Tracy Wang went on to win a George Polk Award, one of the top journalism honors, for their FTX coverage. Our FTX reporting also won a New York Press Club award and is a finalist for the prestigious Loeb award.

We’ve been following SBF’s every move since then, from his unsuccessful bid for release from jail to his push for better laptop access. His trial in Manhattan begins Oct. 3. Here’s our preview. CoinDesk’s news team, led by Nik, will be in the courtroom every day of the trial.

This is our story. Ask us anything.

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We'll join you for an upcoming AMA on Sept. 26, 12 p.m. ET. Feel free to comment with your questions beforehand.

Meanwhile, subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.coindesk.com/newsletters/the-sbf-trial-newsletter/

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EDIT: CoinDesk admin here. Thanks for hosting us and participating in our AMA!

If you want to stay up to date on the SBF Trial, we’re covering it every day. Stay tuned on this page of CoinDesk.com and sign up for our daily popup newsletter, The SBF Trial: https://www.coindesk.com/newsletters/the-sbf-trial-newsletter/

If you have questions about the trial, hit up editor Nikhilesh De at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) or u/eagleraptorjsf.

Until next time!

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