Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on Sunday he would sell the crypto exchange’s holdings of FTT, the native token of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX.
Binance received $2.1 billion worth of FTT and BUSD (Binance USD) last year when it sold the equity it held in crypto exchange FTX.
Bloomberg reported that Binance now holds 23 million FTT coins, today worth just over $500 million, or 16% of FTT’s market capitalization.
Zhao, better known as CZ, said the exchange will liquidate its FTT over the next few months to “minimize the market impact” of the sales.
CZ said his decision to sell FTT is a form of “post-exit risk management” that follows unspecified “revelations”. His tweet comes about two weeks after Bankman-Fried announced his support for trading blacklists in late October.
“We won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs (…) We want the industry to grow together. But there is a limit to hold,” tweeted CZ. He did not reference Bankman-Fried’s policy proposals.
Others speculated that Binance sold its coins after a balance sheet from Alameda Research, FTX’s trading firm, leaked last week. The leaked balance sheet, dated June 30, showed that Alameda’s holdings of FTT exceeded the market cap of all FTT in public circulation.
Caroline Ellison, Alameda’s CEO, offered to buy all of Binance’s FTT tokens at $22, now a $0.68 discount on the token’s market price. She said that the leaked balance sheet missed over $10 billion of company assets, and that it had returned most of its loans.
