
H.E. Justin Sun 🍌|Apr 05, 2025 14:09
What are the similarities and differences between the theft of user funds by First Digital Trust (FDT) and the misappropriation of user funds by FTX?
This is familiar. FTX's SBF (SBF) contacted me in the final stages of the company's near bankruptcy, hoping that I could provide a potential rescue plan, but I thought it was almost impossible to achieve at the time because the situation was already in chaos. Coincidentally, when FDT was exposed for stealing user funds, I was once again contacted for financial support. This time, as a Techeryx consultant, I played the role of a white knight who rescued TUSD.
This is the experience I gained as an industry insider from two cases.
First of all, let's conclude that both are very serious and malicious incidents of embezzlement of user funds. However, if we have to compare the severity, the severity of First Digital Trust (FDT) is even more severe, even more than ten times worse than FTX, for the following reasons:
1. FTX misappropriated user funds. Although users were not aware of the misappropriation, at least within FTX, SBF acted as a collateral loan, representing Alemeda Research, pledging a large amount of FTT/SRM/FTX shares/Max tokens to FTX to lend user funds. At least on the surface, this was a loan, and a certain degree of collateral was used according to the percentage. FDT, on the other hand, directly misappropriated and stole assets without the user's authorization and without the user's knowledge, without even going through the process of internal collateral.
2. SBF misappropriated FTX user funds without user authorization, but ultimately used them for investment. At least the vast majority of them went into high-quality companies such as Robinhood, Anthropic, and other AI companies, without engaging in corruption or indulgence. On the other hand, FDT currently sees the vast majority of them entering private companies, completely misappropriated and embezzled, without making any substantial investments.
3. After the incident was exposed, SBF's attitude was at least positive, actively seeking remedies and hiring law firms to find ways to recover user assets. However, Vincent Chok Zhuo Junqiang, after the fact of embezzlement was exposed, still referred to a deer as a horse and pretended that nothing had happened, showing great subjective malice.
After the FTX incident, US regulatory and law enforcement agencies quickly took action, actively intervened in the FTX bankruptcy process, arrested FTX related personnel (including SBF), actively controlled the situation, helped users recover, and avoided significant impact on the US financial reputation.
After the FDT incident was exposed, we should actively observe the enforcement efforts, speed, and degree of Hong Kong's regulatory and law enforcement agencies, because Hong Kong's reputation as a world financial center is of great importance. We maintain confidence that Hong Kong's regulatory and law enforcement agencies need to intervene quickly and recover losses like their counterparts in the United States. We cannot let the situation get out of control and fraudsters continue to commit fraud.
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