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CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill December 8, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
House lawmakers are calling FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and other executives to Capitol Hill to testify about the crypto exchange’s collapse at a hearing in December.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and the ranking Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry, of North Carolina, are holding a rare bipartisan hearing on the matter. They plan to haul up executives from FTX, Alameda Research, Binance and others to testify as well.
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“The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds,” Waters said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year.”
After a deal to shore up its liquidity with Binance fell through earlier in the week, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday along with 130 affiliated companies, including Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm Alameda Research and FTX.us, the company’s U.S. subsidiary. Bankman-Fried has since stepped down as CEO of the company he founded.
In a matter of days, FTX went from a $32 billion company to bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and customers demanded to withdraw their funds. FTX founder Bankman-Fried admitted last week that he “f—ed up.”
“There is no sugar coating it. The collapse has been a dumpster fire. Users left out to dry. Ecosystem in limbo,” McHenry said, speaking at an unrelated hearing Wednesday.
CNBC’s Mary Catherine Wellons and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this article.
