Sam Bankman-Fried the former CEO and founder of the collapsed Crypto exchange FTX said that he will start a new business to help the victims of his old firms by paying back.
Talking to the BBC from the Bahamas, he told he would “give anything” to be able to initiate a new venture in order to recoup his users’ lost assets.
“I’m going to be thinking about how we can help the world, and if users haven’t gotten much back, I’m going to be thinking about what I can do for them,” Bankman-Fried told the BBC. “And I think at the very least I have a duty to FTX users to do right by them as best as I can.”
When asked whether he would start a new business to pay investors back, he said: “I would give anything to be able to do that. And I’m going to try if I can.”
He also said that he was worried while “ruminating at night” about the chance of being arrested and oppose to performing fraud. He again said he was “not nearly as competent as I thought I was.”
FTX was a Bahamas-based Cryptocurrency exchange platform founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang in 2019 where people could invest and trade different cryptocurrencies from bitcoin to meme coins. But in November when the firm’s worth dropped from $16 billion to zero it collapsed.
Later the owner of FTX Bankman-Fried stepped down from his position of CEO when the firm filed for Bankruptcy chapter 11 protection on November 11.
Binance who agreed to buy FTX and to help in recovery, after it filed for bankruptcy the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform backed out from the deal.
Over a million customers of FTX have lost their access to their funds, according to the BBC. Bankman-Fried is considering how he can do his fairest for them, he said to the broadcaster.
“I’m going to be thinking about how we can help the world and if users haven’t gotten much back, I’m going to be thinking about what I can do for them,” he said. “And I think at the very least I have a duty to FTX users to do right by them as best as I can.”
Bankman-Fried, who said he has just $100,000 left, said he would “give anything” to be able to establish a new venture to attain money and pay back the customers.
Bankruptcy attorneys portrayed its collapse as “one of the most abrupt and difficult collapses in the history of corporate America” and blamed Bankman-Fried for operating the company as “his own personal fiefdom”
In an announcement, the US House committee on financial services told that the board would hear from FTX’s newly appointed chief executive, John Ray III, and from Bankman-Fried on 13 December.
After the collapse, the new management of the company led by John Ray III accused its previous management of a “complete failure of corporate controls”. In its first bankruptcy filing last month, FTX said it anticipated having more than 1 million individual creditors.