Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly received a sizable chunk of Raydium’s native token’s circulating supply before it was listed on the exchange back in 2021.
According to information shared by Coinbase Director Conor Grogan on Monday, Bankman-Fried’s wallet address received 2 million RAY tokens which amounted to 15% of its circulating supply.
SBF's wallet received 2 million (15%+ of circl. supply) of Raydium shortly before announcing listing + perps on FTX
The whitepaper stated that investor/team tokens were supposed to be locked for 1+ years 🧐
SBF proceeded to LP, sell 80k, and send 1 million $RAY to FTX that day pic.twitter.com/kkLf6AKAkK
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) January 2, 2023
Raydium is a decentralized exchange built on Solana that was launched in February 2021. It was built to be a liquidity provider for Serum – a Solana-based DEX backed by FTX and Alameda.
At the time of its launch, Raydium’s team said that its supply of tokens would be locked for over a year and were scheduled to be unlocked linearly over the next few years.
Grogan claims that on-chain data shows that Bankman-Fried used his tokens to provide liquidity on various DEXes, sell 80,000 RAY tokens and send 1 million RAY tokens on FTX on the same day.
While all of this was occurring, SBF was working hard with regulators on how to best protect consumershttps://t.co/pevNe0065a
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) January 2, 2023
After this, Bankman-Fried allegedly withdrew the RAY provided on liquidity pools at peak prices and cashed out a “few million in ETH.”
A similar situation took place with another DeFi protocol Reef Finance shortly after. In a blog post on March 16, 2021, the Reef team reported being hard done by FTX and Alameda.
The Reef team said that Alameda had reached out to them with the intent of making an $80 million strategic investment and secured the first tranche of $20 million in tokens at a 20% discount. Alameda then immediately offloaded their tokens to Binance, said the Reef team, sharing Etherscan screenshots of the transfers.
“We did not move forward with the additional $60M tranche due to doubts around Alameda’s long-term interest in being a strategic investor,” said Reef in a statement.
Sam Trabucco, former Alameda CEO, denied any affiliation with Reef in a tweet shortly after. Trabucco claimed that Reef reneged on the remaining tokens, which he described as an “OTC deal” as opposed to a strategic investment. He also refuted claims that Alameda had immediately sold a majority of these tokens.
FTX then issued a poll asking users if the exchange should delist the REEF token, calling it a “rug pull.”
“The fact that Alameda threatened to delist REEF from centralized exchanges in order to cause damage to the project highlights that CeFi players still have a strong influence on the crypto markets,” said the Reef team.
