CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Constructing on Capitol Hill December 8, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
House lawmakers are calling FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and other executives to Capitol Hill to testify at a hearing in December concerning the crypto exchange’s collapse.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and the rating Republican, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, are holding a rare bipartisan hearing on the matter. They plan to haul up executives from FTX, Alameda Research, Binance and others to testify as well.
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“The autumn of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over a million users, a lot of whom were on a regular basis individuals who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to observe all of it disappear inside a matter of seconds,” Waters said in an announcement. “Unfortunately, this event is only one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms which have collapsed just this past 12 months.”
After a deal to shore up its liquidity with Binance fell through last week, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday together with 130 affiliated corporations, including Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm Alameda Research and FTX.us, the corporate’s U.S. subsidiary. Bankman-Fried has since stepped down as CEO of the corporate he founded.
In a matter of days, FTX went from a $32 billion company to bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and customers demanded to withdraw their funds. Bankman-Fried admitted last week that he “f—ed up.”
“There is no such thing as a sugar coating it. The collapse has been a dumpster fire. Users overlooked to dry. Ecosystem in limbo,” McHenry said, speaking at an unrelated hearing Wednesday.
