Daniel Trinder, vice president for Government Affairs at Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange platform, assured a committee of the British Parliament on Monday that his firm had no intention of causing the bankruptcy of FTX, one of its main rivals.
The manager assured that the bankruptcy of FTX, which has caused a collapse of bitcoin and other digital currencies, was motivated by failures in “risk management” and potentially in the “inappropriate use of client assets”.
At the beginning of November, before the fall of FTX was triggered, Binance announced the sale of 580 million dollars (560 million euros) of FTT, the native currency of its competitor, in one of the first signs that set off alarm bells. among investors.
Two days later, after a collapse in the value of the FTT coin, Binance announced the purchase of FTX, an operation that it canceled the next day after having detected too many “problems” in the accounts of the platform.
The chair of the House of Commons Treasury committee, the conservative Harriett Baldwin, asked Trinder if “it was the CEO of Binance (Changpeng Zhao) who precipitated the collapse of FTX.”
“No, it was not like that at all,” said the vice president of the company, who assured that his firm had the intention of “rescuing” its rival.
“We started an audit process and realized that something was very wrong, so we withdrew. The reason Binance was trying to potentially rescue FTX is because we were aware of the broad implications for the industry,” the executive described.
Addressing the sale of millions of assets in her rival’s native cryptocurrency, the committee chairperson considered that “it must have been obvious that such a decision would likely lead to the collapse of FTX.”
“That was certainly not the intention,” Trinder stressed. Ian Taylor, CEO of CryptoUK, an employer group that groups firms in the cryptocurrency sector in the United Kingdom, told the same committee that it is not possible for now to determine how many Britons may have been affected by the fall of FTX.
“From what we’ve heard, most of the funding on the platform came from institutional investors,” Taylor said.
FTX filed for bankruptcy.
“There are many regulated exchanges in the UK that accept retail funds. At the moment, they are fine, we are not seeing anything (problematic), but we are in a very fluid situation,” he warned.
EFE
