" SBF could even be a patsy, while still possibly being a criminal fraudster in this story. A patsy who believed in crypto, being controlled by those who believe in fiat. “They are buying all the Lambos, Mortimer! This shit is getting out of hand. Time to kill the baby.” The broad crypto community can’t even imagine the perspective of someone who thinks all of crypto (and BTC) is a bunch of bullshit. For lots of reasons, the concept of cryptocurrency always pissed off the old white collar on a blue striped shirt finance guys. What if FTX did not find itself in this situation by unfortunate circumstance? What if it was built for this? What if FTX was created to eat Ponzi schemes in the wild and deplete them of any actual cash they had? Because the whole project was actually architected by those who don’t really believe in crypto? It just had to survive long enough to eat all of the major Ponzis in the space. Extracting all the cash and paving the way for regulatory pushback. It would go something like this: Create a crypto exchange Become a market maker and mover Pretend to be US compliant by having a placeholder US presence (FTX.us) Maybe make a stablecoin (was in progress) Definitely make a market traded token (FTT) Liquify the token with dollars (USDT) Target Ponzicoin projects with proven real world cash reserves Advance them liquidity via FTT Securitize the loans with their cash Extend their runways, allowing them to keep aggregating cash Wait for their collapse Take their cash, book a loss Repeat Do this until you have wiped out all the major players and have set the stage for a changing of the guard. This money eating machine was always destined to fail. But so was the market it played in. Perhaps the creators of FTX decided to roll up all the Ponzis in a giant mega-Ponzi and extract all the cash for as long as possible. It might have lasted longer but for the recent bitcoin price drop which injected a black swan into the timeline and likely blew out a lot of positions FTX was counting on to remain solvent. Where the money was intended to go is open to speculation. How this started is a more interesting question. How much dollar liquidity flowed into FTX via USDT to create credibility for the FTT token is a much more interesting question. "