My Top 7 WTF Learnings from the FTX/SBF Chapter 11 Filing

I spent 8 hours yesterday reading through the SBF/FTX bankruptcy filings and related docs and here’s my top 7 🤪😳🤯 learnings

*Feature Image: ‘centralization or decentralization of finance, white boy’, midjourney AI
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1 - Worse than Enron….said the Enron lawyer

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

2- The audit firm forFTX.com is literally the first of its kind to HQ in the metaverse #cantmakethisshitup

The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”

3- SBF and crew approved expenses and disbursements for employees via chat, using personalized emojis. Not for like meals, but more for like houses

4- They all sharedan unsecured group email as root key to most private and sensitive digital assets

Unacceptable management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, and the absence of independent governance as between Alameda (owned 90% by Mr. Bankman-Fried and 10% by Mr. Wang) and the Dotcom Silo (in which third parties had invested).

5- Some employees were possibly fake.No one knows who works on what and where the complete list of employments is

6- No accountant was ever employed. Hence estimate of how much cash is available ranges from half a billion to 15 billion dollars to 40 billion dollars (yeah right)

7- Alameda casually gave SBF a 1 billion dollar in personal loan…and 2.3 billion to ‘paper bird inc’ which was also basically a personal loan to sbf