By Dietrich Knauth
– 2022 has been a rough year for the crypto industry. The price of bitcoin has dropped 65% since the start of the year, the cryptocurrency Luna suffered a total collapse in value, and crypto exchange FTX went from buying Super Bowl ads to crash landing into bankruptcy.
Here are the major crypto companies that have gone bankrupt in 2022.
FTX
FTX‘s implosion was the biggest and most spectacular crypto downfall in 2022 thus far. The Bahamas-based exchange started the year with a $32 billion valuation, hired celebrities including Larry David and Tom Brady for flashy Super Bowl ads, and put its name on the home arena of the NBA‘s Miami Heat. FTX, which said it had more than a million users, positioned itself as a “white knight” that could rescue other crypto firms amid market turbulence earlier this year.
But by November, FTX went bankrupt after a week in which a possible merger with rival crypto exchange Binance failed, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried dealt with allegations that he had funneled customer deposits to FTX‘s affiliated trading firm Alameda Research, and the exchange suffered withdrawals of about $6 billion in just 72 hours. Bankman-Fried has said he is “deeply sorry about what happened” and acknowledged a “massive failure of oversight of risk management,” but said he did not intentionally commingle FTX‘s user deposits with Alameda’s trading activity.
John Ray, the new CEO brought in to oversee FTX‘s bankruptcy, said…
