The crypto community is still reeling from the demise of the Terra (LUNA) network and Terra founder Do Kwon has been facing a huge amount of criticism in the last few days. He is even accused of organizing a Ponzi scheme† The CEO of the American exchange FTXSam Bankman-Fried, took to Twitter to denounce some of these allegations.
FTX CEO comes to the rescue
In the past few days, Terra’s demise has also been compared to one of the most notable fraud stories of the past 20 years. Coindesk suggested that Do Kwon is comparable to Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes was convicted by the court of large-scale fraud in 2014 and was the infamous CEO of Theranos.
According to Bankman-Fried, however, this comparison does not hold. He argues that serious mistakes were indeed made by Do Kwon, but that this does not necessarily mean that he acted fraudulently or even criminally. In fact, Do Kwon has always been honest about how the Terra network and its associated UST stablecoin worked.
1) Not all bad things are the same bad thing
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) May 14, 2022
According to the FTX CEO, the fact that many people have suddenly lost a lot of money does not automatically mean that this was a Ponzi scheme. He does state that it had actually been known for some time that LUNA would not necessarily be a good investment.
“Most bad investments are not Ponzi schemes. Some are fraud, some are bad luck, and some are somewhere in between.”
7) But he didn’t claim that UST was backed 1:1 by USD. He claimed, accurately, that it was backed by a bunch of volatile assets. It was very publicly clear that those assets might go down, and the rest followed.
Again–I don’t want to condone the behavior.
But it’s different.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) May 14, 2022
Binance CEO
The CEO of the largest crypto exchange in the world Binance, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), has already responded to the Terra debacle. According to CZ, the new rescue plan for Terra is nothing more than “wishful thinking”. He strongly criticizes Do Kwon’s announced plans on Twitter.
The Dutch trading platform bitvavo decided earlier to stop trading in LUNA and LUNA owners to accommodate† Meanwhile, the trade in LUNA resumed on Bitvavo.