The cryptocurrency exchange FTX appears to have close ties to World Economic Forum (WEF) as a “partner” which appear to now be severed.
Last Friday the cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy as the company crashes and burns.
World Economic Forum (WEF) have quickly scrubbed FTX from their partner listing on their website, but the page was indexed with Archive.org wayback machine and still accessible here.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was also a guest speaker at the Davos WEF gathering last May with the world’s elites and billionaires.
“FTX was a World Economic Forum partner. In light of last week’s events, their partnership was suspended and they were removed from the Partners section of our website,” a spokesman for the Geneva-based organization headed by Klaus Schwab told the New York Post on Monday
According New York Post a WEF insider said, Bankman-Fried likely landed on the group’s site because he donated cash to the group.
FTX has been in the headlines for weeks, ever since its collapse begun early November. It started with an article that was posted on Coinedesk of a report that claimed that the balance sheet of Alameda, a crypto hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, FTX’s top investment was holding billions of dollars worth of its own cryptocurrency FTT, which was being used to gamble.
“It’s fascinating to see that the majority of the net equity in the Alameda business is actually FTX’s own centrally controlled and printed-out-of-thin-air token,” said Cory Klippsten, CEO of investment platform Swan Bitcoin
Investors who connected the dots between the two companies were alarmed by the revelations and began withdrawing money from the FTX exchange and panic-selling FTT tokens. Bankman-Fried stopped withdrawals when about $5 billion worth of withdrawal requests hit FTX as users rushed to withdraw money. One week later FTX filed for bankruptcy.
Before FTX’s spectacular fall, donations for Ukraine were being collected through FTX in partnership with the Ukrainian government on its website “Aid for Ukraine.” which has since been modified. You can see a snapshot from October available on the wayback machine here.
Before its downfall, the Ukrainian government partnered with FTX and announced in March its “new crypto donations website” titled “Aid for Ukraine.”
The Bitcoin wallet address Ukraine was collecting donations with was posted in February BTC wallet address – 357a3So9CbsNfBBgFYACGvxxS6tMaDoa1P
This address has transacted 19,347 times on the Bitcoin blockchain. It has received a total of 611.63804226 BTC ($10,201,663.82) and has sent a total of 611.53952016 BTC ($10,200,020.54). The current value of this address is 0.09852210 BTC ($1,643.27). According to Blockchain.info. However it could be higher because that is calculating the current bitcoin market rate of $16,679 USD per BTC for the total 611 BTC when the withdraws actually began when Bitcoin was worth more.
The Wall Street Journal has reported since FTX’s bankruptcy filing that FTX lent billions of dollars’ worth of client funds to fund dangerous bets at Alameda, his trading outfit. The amount of the loan from FTX to Alameda was $10 billion which was more than half of FTX’s $16 billion valuation at the time.
Millions of dollars of FTX customer money was funneled to political campaigns through donations to the Democratic candidates and left-wing lobbyists but also Republican candidates.
Although the disgraced executive scaled back the amount of political expenditure he had originally intended, he was still a significant supporter of left-leaning candidates and causes during the 2022 midterm elections. He was the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party after George Soros.
According to the Financial Times, Bankman-Fried spent over $36 million on political donations during the final stretch, the majority of which supported Democratic-affiliated causes. Apparently politicians are giving back the donations.
