Ethereum founder Vitalk Buterin in his first direct comments on the collapse of FTX late Friday, accused former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of “virtue signaling.”
FTX and its CEO courted and caught the ear of lawmakers and regulators with an aim to burnish crypto’s image, and hence it was unlike any of the previous collapses. However, last week’s events suggest otherwise; the exchange was no different from the other unstable and potentially fraudulent high-profile crypto projects that crashed.
Buterin tweeted,
“MtGox ‘looked’ sketchy and never tried too hard to whitewash itself. Luna too.”
MtGox is a Tokyo-based exchange that failed in 2014 after hundreds of thousands of bitcoins got stolen from its wallet.
Terra’s ecosystem suffered as Luna collapsed earlier this year.
Buterin tweeted that FTX did the opposite, doing full-on compliance virtue signaling. He further added that the latter cuts deeper than the former. Buterin’s comments came at the closing of a very tumultuous week for crypto, which capped off with FTX filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the dismissal of Bankman-Fried from his position.