Twitter Thread Suggests Sam Bankman-Fried Mulled Shutting Alameda Months Before FTX Collapse

As part of the ongoing trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, an unpublished tweet thread has emerged, revealing the former CEO of FTX considered shuttering the sister hedge fund Alameda Research.

The draft was written in September 2022, just two months before the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange Bankman-Fried co-founded.

His lawyers brought the thread back to the fold on Tuesday during questioning of FTX’s former CTO Gary Wang.

“Alameda Research was a huge part of my life,” reads the thread publicly shared by Aditya Baradwaj, the former software engineer at Alameda. “It was one of my largest successes–and then, briefly, largest failures–and then again successes.”

Baradawaj did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

The draft also laid out reasons for shutting down the hedge fund, chief among them being the fact that the firm did not warrant the cost of capital, which he described as “really expensive” in the current economic environment.

Additionally, Alameda was not generating sufficient profits to validate its continued existence as a liquidity provider.

“I think that liquidity is incredibly important for any ecosystem, but especially so for a nascent one like crypto,” reads the draft thread. “The number of sophisticated liquidity providers has increased rapidly over the last few years, rendering Alameda’s on-exchange trading less important for the ecosystem than it once was.”

The post went on to say that “less important doesn’t mean unimportant” though, “which is one of the reasons that I’m sad to announce that, today, Alameda Research is doing its final trade.”

‘We came, we saw, we researched’

It’s worth noting that the unpublished thread was mentioned in a complaint filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in December 2022, when the regulator slapped Bankman-Fried with a lawsuit over alleged violations of federal commodities laws.

Back then, the CFTC said the statements contradicted what both Bankman-Fried and Alameda were saying publicly at the time.

In its complaint, the CFTC also cited a document titled “We came, we saw, we researched,” in which SBF said “I think it might be time for Alameda Research to shut down. Honestly, it was probably time to do that a year ago.”

The fallen crypto mogul also blamed “the FUD around Alameda’s relationship with FTX,” which, he said, “has been too much of a burden to justify its existence.”

“This FUD has been largely spread by competitors of FTX, looking to distract from their problems,” he said.

During her appearance in court on Tuesday, Alameda’s former CEO and SBF’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison testified that the company had intentionally manipulated its balance sheet to present a less risky image to investors.

She also claimed that, at Bankman-Fried’s direction, Alameda borrowed $14 billion in customer funds from FTX, using $10 billion worth of the money to repay its lenders.

“He directed me to commit these crimes,” said Ellison.