Anthony Scaramucci has been quite active in commenting on the cryptocurrency industry. In particular, in early April he announced the official end of the bearish trend. According to the expert, Bitcoin is an excellent investment for four years, because usually this period is enough time for the growth of the cryptocurrency.

He has no doubts about the prospects of the latter. As Anthony said two weeks later, ignoring BTC as an investment vehicle today is simply silly. You can read more about his point of view in a separate article.

How FTX went bust

Scaramucci has previously shared other details about Sam Bankman-Friede, the former head of FTX and partner trading company Alameda Research. In particular, it has come to light that prior to the collapse of his exchange, Sam had spoken negatively about Binance CEO Changpen Zhao.

The remarks against Changpen reached him, as Bancman-Fried insulted him publicly. According to Scaramucci, Changpen responded by announcing the sale of all FTT tokens from Binance reserves. The precipitous drop in the value of FTT later became a major factor in the rapid collapse of FTX.

As a reminder, FTT is the native token of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, which the company's employees essentially printed out of thin air. It was the coins that the company used most often to secure its trading positions in the cryptocurrency world and real-world transactions. So when the value of the FTT slipped sharply, FTX and Alameda's activity was threatened.

However, the collapse of FTX should not be blamed on Zhao: Scaramucci called for an objective look at what happened. Here is his rejoinder, cited by Cointelegraph.

If Sam had run the business properly, the exchange would have been fine. Some people believe that Zhao has put Bankman-Fried out of business. No, no. Sam put Sam out of business by the way he ran the business.

That's a logical assertion. Still, as the prosecution side of the case against Sam in the US alleges, Bankman-Fried and his colleagues created a so-called backdoor in the exchange code that allowed crypto-assets of FTX users to be withdrawn unobtrusively into Alameda accounts. These coins were then used to secure Alameda positions, purchase real estate and fund politicians.

According to Scaramucci, he had just returned from a conference in Florida on 6 or 7 November 2022. After talking to Bankman-Frieda’s father, he learned that FTX had some kind of liquidity problem. The problem didn’t seem that catastrophic at the time – Anthony thought it was just a short-term hiccup in withdrawals for the exchange’s customers.

However, over the next few days, the hole of funds needed to cover all customer requests grew from $1 billion to $4.5 billion. It then became clear that something more serious was happening to the exchange. Scaramucci immediately bought a ticket to the Bahamas to visit FTX headquarters to find out the real situation. On arrival he witnessed total apathy and despondency – but these emotions dominated only a small group of people.

These were those closest to Bankman-Fried, Anthony notes. Here’s Scaramucci’s quote on the subject.

Crimes are committed by very small groups of people. It’s hard to pull off something like this in a large company because, as you know from psychology and sociology, there will always be one conscientious person who will stop the scam.

The head of Skybridge also stressed that FTX was exactly a huge fraudulent scheme and not “a victim of lack of liquidity”. The blame for the collapse of the exchange and the losses of its customers lies with its management, both in the person of Sam Bankman-Friede and his inner circle.

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The day before, another person from that entourage in the person of FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame came under the radar of the FBI. Agents of the agency conducted a search of his home in Potomac, Maryland. As a reminder, FTX Digital Markets is a subsidiary of the exchange based in the Bahamas.

According to Cointelegraph sources, Salame was the beneficiary of suspicious loans and payments made to a number of FTX executives through Alameda Research. Salame was the fourth largest recipient of these payments, who received a total of $87 million in compensation. Bankman-Fried received $2.2 billion, while former engineering director Nishad Singh and co-founder Gary Vaughan received $587 million and $246 million respectively.

The exact purpose of the FBI searches has not been publicly disclosed, but it can be assumed that agents were looking for money in cash or any other physical assets of Salame. It is also worth noting that he himself has not been charged with a crime and is only being held as a witness in the FTX court case.


It seems the prospect of FTX's impending collapse became apparent to its management at least a couple of days before the bankruptcy was filed. Although the collapse of the trading platform led to the collapse of the cryptocurrency market, there were still several upsides to it. Firstly, the industry was cleared of a bad player who had unethically and illegally used its own customers' funds. Secondly, after the FTX collapse, crypto exchanges took to publishing evidence of their reserves, making the coin niche more transparent.


Look for even more interesting things in our cryptochat of former millionaires. There waiting for the onset of the bull run, which will happen sooner or later after all.