Sam Bankman-Fried: I can only guess what happened to the FTX customer funds that were transferred to Alameda

FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said he “can only guess” what happened to the billions of dollars that were transferred to Alameda Research.He also added that he has refused to run the firm and has little understanding of its operations, even though he owns 90% of its stock.Some FTX customers made deposits by transferring money into bank accounts controlled by Alameda with the intention of using the money on the exchange. According to Bankman-Fried, such a system worked from the early days of the exchange, since FTX did not have its own bank account. The amount of client funds on Alameda reached more than $5 billion. Now these funds simply do not exist.“They were sent to Alameda, and…I can only guess what happened after that. The dollars are interchangeable with each other. And so there is no $1 bill that you can trace from beginning to end. What you get is just an omnibus, a cauldron of assets of various forms,” he stated.Thus, FTX customer funds flowing into Alameda bank accounts could be recorded in two ways – as FTX customer funds and as part of Alameda trading positions.Bankman-Fried also denied that the double counting affected FTX’s financial performance, but acknowledged that Alameda’s liabilities may not have been fully accounted for.He also said he did not realize the size of Alameda’s FTX transactions because of flaws in internal systems. According to him, the control panel that FTX administrators used to monitor large traders’ bets could not properly account for customer funds transferred to Alameda bank accounts, which ultimately concealed Alameda’s huge positions and risky trades.“I didn’t have enough brain cycles to understand everything that was going on at Alameda,” he added.