How Binance exacerbated a bank run on FTX before offering to acquire the company, and why the potential deal represents a meteoric fall for Sam Bankman-Fried (Daniel Kuhn/CoinDesk)

Andrew Rummer / The Block:
FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried insists the exchange is “fine” after Binance begins selling FTX’s FTT; a recently leaked Alameda balance sheet showed $8B in liabilities  —  – FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried insisted his crypto exchange is “fine” after rival Binance announced it would start selling its holdings of FTX’s FTT token.

Cade Metz / New York Times:
A look at Anthropic, which raised $580M led by SBF in April to research “AI safety”, and 70 AI-related organizations SBF and FTX executives invested $530M+ in  —  Mr. Bankman-Fried and his colleagues spent more than $530 million to battle what they saw as the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Wall Street Journal:
FTX’s collapse was exacerbated by centralization; FTX being a decentralized exchange, based on smart contracts, could have prevented SBF draining customer funds  —  Automated market makers can obviate the need to hold customer money and the opportunity for fraud.

Helen Partz / Cointelegraph:
Hours after announcing an emergency deal with Binance, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried deletes a Twitter thread saying the exchange and assets were “fine”  —  Sam Bankman-Fried has deleted a Twitter thread where he tried to assure customers that FTX and the assets on the platform were “fine.”

Tracy Wang / CoinDesk:
Current and former FTX and Alameda staffers say the Bahamian operation SBF ran with housemates is full of conflicts of interest, nepotism, and lack of oversight  —  “The whole operation was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas,” a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk on condition of anonymity.

Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
Some questions about FTX’s “liquidity crunch” and its deal to sell to Binance, probably for a fraction of its former valuation of tens of billions of dollars  —  CZ vs. SBF  —  I kind of can’t believe this worked?  Here are Bloomberg’s Philip Lagerkranser and Joanna Ossinger this morning: