FTX's Sam Bankman Fried: Some crypto exchanges are already secretly insolvent

Sam Bankman Fried, the 30-year-old billionaire investor and founder of crypto exchange FTX, believes that more failures among crypto exchanges are coming amid the ongoing market downturn that has wiped off around $2T in market value since November."Some third-tier exchanges are already secretly insolvent," he told Forbes on Wednesday. The slump in cryptos has been exacerbated by recent collapses in algorithmic stablecoin TerraUST (UST-USD) and its sister token Luna (LUNA-USD), in addition to crypto exchange Celsius and crypto-focused hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. As crypto winter sets in, though, Bankman-Fried has taken bold steps to bail out a handful of troubled crypto firms, namely Voyager Digital (OTCQX:VYGVF) and BlockFi after both companies got hit hard after Three Arrows Capital's levered crypto bets turned sour. SBF's FTX and Alameda, his quant trading shop, extended a combined $750M in credit lines to those companies, but it's possible that SBF doesn't recoup his investment. "We're willing to do a somewhat bad deal here, if that's what it takes to sort of stabilize things and protect customers," SBF, who has an estimated net worth of $21B, explained to Forbes. Recall crypto lender BlockFi had secured a $250M line of credit from FTX in an effort to increase "access to capital that further bolsters our balance sheet and platform strength," BlockFi CEO Zac prince wrote in a Twitter post on June 21. The crypto meltdown...