This is not good. The Twitter feud between the CEOs of FTX and Binance, which I described in yesterday's newsletter, has blown up further and triggered a crisis in the crypto industry. The outcome as of Tuesday is still unclear, but markets show signs of buckling—Bitcoin is back below $20,000 for the first time in weeks—amid concern about the financial health of FTX, which until last week was seen as an industry leader poised to help crypto go mainstream.
If you're getting up to speed, the trouble began over the weekend when Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), citing this spring's Terra/Luna debacle, tweeted that the company would sell its holdings of FTX's native token, FTT. Other comments by CZ suggested that the decision came about in part due to his rival CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), maligning Binance to regulators.
