I can’t confirm if it’s a real Korean account
FTX has a branch of “Hannam Group” in Korea
Bloomberg News reported on the 14th (local time) that FTX, the world’s third-largest virtual currency exchange, used an account dubbed the “Korea Account” to hide its subsidiary Alameda Research’s huge debt.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which charged FTX with fraud, believes FTX hid Alameda’s $8 billion debt in FTX customer accounts denominated by this name. An indictment from the Southern District of New York Attorney’s Office also revealed that FTX founder Sam Bankmanfried (pictured) called the account hiding the debts “our Korean friend’s account” and ” the Korean expense account”.
Indeed, it has not been confirmed whether this account was an account in Korea, a Korean account, or just a simple alias. According to Bloomberg, the CFTC discovered that “KOREA KYC” and “expense account BD” were written to FTX senior executive Nashad Singh’s “Github” account. The “BD expense account” was found to be linked to the Korean expense account. GitHub is a space where developers communicate with “code” and share information.
Bankman Fried previously said he founded Alameda Research in 2017 after seeing “Kimchi Premium,” which is particularly expensive in Korea. The Kimchi Premium is an arbitrage transaction aimed at the fact that the domestic cryptocurrency market is more expensive than the overseas one. At that time, premium kimchi was about 50%. However, South Korea’s won currency remittance regulations are so strict that Bankman Fried made money through arbitrage in Japan, where the premium is about 10%, and founded FTX in 2019. FTX has a affiliate called “Hannam Group” in Korea and also promoted the acquisition of Bithumb, a virtual currency exchange.
The fact that Alameda has increased the amount of funds used by FTX clients has also been attributed to the Terra-Luna incident caused by Terraform Labs CEO Kwon Do-hyung in Korea. Bloomberg said, “Alameda has used FTX customer funds unlimitedly since the inception of FTX, but more importantly expanded the reach of useful funds as the virtual currency ecosystem collapsed due to crashes on Earth and Moon”.
According to the indictment from a New York prosecutor, Ryan Salami, co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, notified the Bahamian authorities on January 14th. Bankman Fried was charged with eight counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money.
New York = Correspondent Kim Hyun-soo kimhs@donga.com
