U.S. House committee plans December hearing on FTX meltdown
Craig Barritt
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), ranking members of the House Financial Services Committee, said that they are planning to hold a bipartisan hearing in December to scrutinize the multibillion-dollar collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its "broader consequences" for the digital asset space, according to a release dated Wednesday.
FTX founder and ex-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried along with his hedge fund, Alameda Research, and rival exchange Binance, which temporarily offered to bail out FTX, are all expected to attend the hearing.
“The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds,” Waters said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year.”
With many pieces of the FTX-fiasco puzzle still missing, McHenry highlighted that "we must get to the bottom of this for FTX's customers and the American people," referencing Congress' oversight functions.
Neither FTX nor Alameda Research immediately responded to Seeking Alpha's request for comment.
SBF's once-mighty crypto empire, consisting of FTX and Alameda, has come under intense regulatory spotlight after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., having been probed by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office as well as Bahamian authorities.
The FTX-driven financial contagion effects on the wider digital asset ecosystem continue to spread, as crypto broker Genesis paused customer withdrawals.
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