Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang launched FTX in May 2019 within the walls of Alameda Research. The exchange began as an abbreviation for Futures Exchange before expanding its reach into global markets.
Venture capital firms poured nearly $900 million into FTX by July 2021, valuing the enterprise at $18 billion. Over sixty investors participated in this round including Softbank Group and Sequoia Capital.
Anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that FTX lent approximately $10 billion of customer funds to Alameda Research by 2022. These funds helped pay back loans taken by Alameda to make investments elsewhere without authorization from clients.
FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings on November 11 while authorities froze assets belonging to one subsidiary named FTX Digital Markets Ltd. Both FTX and FTX.US filed these proceedings in Delaware following a three-day depositor run estimated at $6 billion.
A U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved a restructuring plan on the 7th of October 2024 designed to repay customers holding balances under fifty thousand dollars their full amounts back using cryptocurrency values calculated at collapse dates. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission declared this recovery effort the largest such instance in its history totaling $12.7 billion distributed among former clients and victims.