FTX is rumored to be in talks with South Korean trade Bithumb over a potential acquisition.
The talks are at a complicated stage, says one supply, and have been going down over the previous few months. Bithumb stated it couldn’t verify this info, whereas FTX declined to touch upon the matter. With Bithumb being a possible acquisition and never an funding, it is sensible that negotiations would happen over a couple of months, permitting the corporate to carry out due diligence earlier than taking the plunge.
Bithumb lately made headlines for being considered one of many South Korean exchanges to come beneath the hammer of nationwide authorities for alleged hyperlinks to Do Kwon, the now notorious co-founder of Terraform Labs that invented the failed TerraUSD stablecoin.
According to the Southern District Prosecutor’s Office, eighty-one retail traders filed two formal complaints with authorities.
Antitrust Issues in the pipeline?
Bithumb is licensed by the Financial Intelligence Unit to run a digital asset enterprise, changing money to cryptocurrency. The trade, which processes about $569 million in each day buying and selling quantity, was based in 2014 and registered on Nov. 19, 2021.
It is unclear whether or not any acquisition by FTX would trigger antitrust points. Bithumb fell afoul of antitrust authorities final yr when it turned considered one of twelve crypto corporations in South Korea deemed to have exclusionary causes that absolved them from compensating clients for damages.
Bithumb turns into third abroad trade in a brief interval
If rumors show true, Bithumb can be the newest acquisition in an nearly $1 billion spending spree by FTX and FTX.US that started in June 2022.
U.S. entity FTX US lately signed a take care of crypto lender BlockFi for a potential $240 million acquisition. FTX bought Japanese trade Liquid and Canadian buying and selling platform Bitvo. At the time, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried stated in an announcement that buying a Canadian trade broadened the corporate’s publicity to laws governing completely different geographies.
FTX loaned Voyager Digital, a crypto brokerage agency, $485 million inside two days of negotiations. Bankman-Fried insisted that the mortgage to Voyager was to shield buyer property as a substitute of attempting to bolster his firm’s backside line.
But some usually are not shopping for into the benevolence narrative. Chris Mann, a common associate at Race Capital, an early investor in FTX, says that Bankman-Fried’s investments lay naked his ambition to dominate the trade.
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