NFL quarterback Tom Brady and Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary are among the celebrities named in a class-action lawsuit filed in Miami, Florida. The celebrities all had endorsed FTX, a cryptocurrency firm whose multi-billion dollar bankruptcy has sent shock waves rippling across the globe.
Current estimates are that FTX lost at least $11 billion, although some analysts believe the final tally could be as much as four to five times higher. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wonders how everyone was fooled.
Edwin Garrison of Oklahoma and other FTX investors filed the lawsuit against the celebrities. Those named include not only Brady and O’Leary, but also NBA stars Stephen Curry, Shaquille O’Neal and Udonis Haslem, the Golden State Warriors, high-fashion model Gisele Bundchen, MLB’s Shohei Ohtani and David “Big Papi” Ortiz, and No. 1 women’s rated tennis player Naomi Osaka, as well as the comedian Larry David. More from Robert Gouveia, Esquire.
Cryptocurrency expert Marty Bent describes FTX’s scandal in an interview with Glenn Beck. “Sam Bankman-Fried [SBF]… a wunderkind, that is going to be the next trillionaire and it seems that he was just running a big fraud Ponzi scheme in the literal sense for many years. I’ve been suspicious of SBF and FTX specifically for a bit over a year… Their whole origin story is a bit odd and that starts with Alameda, the trading company. Then FTX spun out of that.”
He continues, “…exchanges will launch what they call an exchange token by Binance has BNB, FTX has FTT… they premine a token… they’ll release that to their users and their users can buy that token… they’ll only release a certain amount to market to freely float and then the hold the rest so they’re able to inflate the value of those tokens pretty easily with some spoof trading… that is what FTX did…” More from Red Voice Media.
Economist Nouriel Roubini has denounced the cryptocurrency market as an “ecosystem that is totally corrupt,” and described some of its big players as “con men” after a major exchange collapse. Speaking at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, he criticized Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, and called for his crypto exchange to become the subject of careful scrutiny from regulators.
There were “seven Cs of crypto: Concealed, corrupt, crooks, criminals, con men, carnival barkers, and finally, CZ,” Roubini said at a panel hosted by CNBC. Roubini, a New York University professor and chief executive of Roubini Macro Associates, came to prominence after predicting the financial crisis of 2008-09. Wall Street dubbed him ‘Doctor Doom.’
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