FTX founder walks away from speaking before US Congress

Sam Bankman-Fried, formerly the head of FTX, which also doomed the American cryptocurrency exchange to bankruptcy, finds various ways to avoid court hearings related to the FTX bankruptcy case. This time, he showed his diplomatic skills and evaded a direct answer, while refusing to come to speak to US Congressmen.

Bankman-Fried received an unofficial invitation to the December 13 hearing from committee chair Maxine Waters. The latter said she appreciates the sincerity in the Bankman-Fried discussions about what happened to the US cryptocurrency exchange. The congresswoman also believes that Sam can help those affected by this situation, including company clients, investors and others.

In response, the ex-CEO of FTX wrote the following:

As soon as I have finished studying and reviewing what happened, I will feel it my duty to appear before the committee and explain.

I'm not sure if it will happen by the 13th, but when it does, I will testify.

Such a dialogue caused heated debate in the cryptocurrency community. Its participants do not understand why Maxine Waters considers Bankman-Fried a sincere person when many interesting details appear about him that speak of fraud on his part. In addition, they believe that only the official invitation of the ex-head of FTX to court will help in this situation. By the way, the Texas Securities Board has already sent the former CEO of the American company an invitation to the hearing, which will take place on February 2, 2023.

Sam has repeatedly given interviews regarding what is happening. According to him, many things were done behind his back, and there was no use of client funds for his benefit. Such statements do not resonate with all people. For example, Mike Novogratz, who founded Galaxy Digital, called Bankman-Fried's words outright nonsense.

Recall that in November, FTX stopped withdrawing money from customers, calling it temporary difficulties, after which they announced their bankruptcy. Almost the entire cryptocurrency community suffered from this news, and many companies were closed for a similar reason. They preferred to keep all or almost all of their funds on FTX, which led to bankruptcy.

Throughout the community, traders began to develop a great fear of risk, which set off a chain reaction. As a result, they began to massively withdraw their funds from exchanges and switch to cold wallets, which will now better protect their finances.

Although there have been speculations about Bitcoin getting cheaper, it seems that the flagship cryptocurrency is showing resilience and has already been able to rise from $15,600 to $17,200 in a couple of weeks. While many in the community speculated that the FTX news could crash the value of the flagship digital asset, people like the founder of Binance remained confident in the power of BTC.