The FTX story is getting wilder and wilder 🤯 Here are 8 astonishing new details that recently came out👇🏼 (1) First, a gentle reminder - FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) cashed out $300M personally during a $420.69M raise from 69 investors. Just like that 🌪 (2) Another refresher - in February 2022, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell met with SBF in an hour-long meeting. I guess they discussed interest rates and the economy? 🙃 (3) SBF and FTX executives donated $70M to US politicians for midterm elections. Just weeks before filing for bankruptcy 😳 (4) The global distribution of FTX customers shows that only 2% of them were from the US. Surprisingly, the majority of them - 22% - were from the Cayman Islands 🇰🇾 (5) Golden State Warriors face a class-action lawsuit from non-US customers for promoting FTX. One FTX customer who claimed he lost $750,000 after the exchange went bankrupt has filed a lawsuit against the NBA's GSW based on the team promoting the allegedly fraudulent exchange. Funny enough, even NBA advertised this partnership 🏀 (6) Alameda Research withdrew over $1.5B from FTX from October 20 to November 2. What’s more, Alameda reportedly withdrew $204M just ahead of the bankruptcy filing. It seems almost as if they knew what was coming… 👀 ​ (7) 8 congressmen tried to stop the SEC’s inquiry into FTX back in March. 5 out of 8 received donations from SBF and FTX from $2,900 to $11,600. Donations sound better than bribes, right? 🤷‍♂️ (8) But this is where things get really wild - FTX owned an $11.5M stake in a tiny rural bank in Washington state with just 3 employees 🏦 Farmington State Bank in the state of Washington (Farmington is a town of just 146 people), now renamed Moonstone, is the 26th smallest bank in the US. It has a single branch and 3 employees. FTX invested in the rural bank through its now-bankrupt sister company, Alameda, with an investment of $11.5M (for 10% of the bank) in its parent company FBH in March 2022. The Alameda investment was more than double the bank’s value of $5.7M. To put this into perspective - FTX’s investment valued the bank at $115M. Yet, it only had $10M in customer deposits 🤯 Why did they do that? Well, FTX’s ownership in Moonstone was mainly because they could bypass the requirements of owning a banking license in the US, which is actually a super complex task. That said, money laundering appears to have been FTX’s actual stock in trade 💸 FTX was supposedly worth $32 billion, it was backed by top-tier VCs and grew into one of the biggest digital asset exchanges in the world. It now seems that it's the biggest fraud case of all time.