On Monday, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas at the request of US prosecutors, the day before he was scheduled to testify before Congress about the abrupt failure of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges last month. The arrest represents a stunning fall from grace for the 30-year-old entrepreneur known by his initials SBF, who rode a bitcoin and other digital asset boom to become a billionaire multiple times over until FTX’s rapid demise. The exchange, based In the Bahamas and founded in 2019, declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11 after struggling to raise funds to avoid collapse as traders rushed to withdraw $6 billion from the platform in just 72 hours. It has since been revealed that Bankman-Fried secretly used $10 billion in customer funds to support his trading business. The arrest occurred as Bankman-Fried prepared to launch a scathing attack on his former Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers, new FTX CEO John Ray, and rival exchange operator Binance at a Congressional hearing.
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