Binance said it would pull out of the FTX deal in a tweet, citing corporate due diligence and media reports.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao released an internal staff email sent out Wednesday that said he did not plan for the deal to shake out this way.
“We did not master plan this or anything related to it. It was less than 24 hrs [sic] ago that SBF called me. And before that, I had very little knowledge of the internal state of things at FTX,” Zhao said.
“FTX going down is not good for anyone in the industry. Don’t view it as a ‘win for us.’ User confidence will be severely shaken.”
The FTX Ventures website and Alameda Research went down around mid-day Wednesday, and FTX paused withdrawals.
The contagion
According to Coingecko, FTX was the fourth-largest exchange by volume at the beginning of the week. Its inevitable collapse and outage saged the industry like a hole in the side of a boat. Bitcoin reached its lowest price in two years.
Crypto.com paused trades between Solana and ESDC, and USDT, a top ten coin and eth rival, was hit dramatically by the panic.
The trending fear is that FTX and Alameda Research were two of SOLs most prominent backers. According to Solana Compass, a tracker of Sol transactions, 8% of the coin’s supply is about to unlock from an unknown source in 14 hours.
Related: Binance announces purchase of FTX.com
Sam Bankman-Fried was a central figure in the cryptocurrency space and an outspoken advocate and media presence, with a marketing budget that landed a 20-year naming right to a massive football stadium.
