FTX Is In Advanced Talks To Buy Korean Bithumb Exchange, Sources Say
FTX, the crypto trading platform co-founded by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, is in advanced talks to buy South Korea’s Bithumb, according to Bloomberg sources.
The companies have been in discussions for several months, according to the person, who asked not to be named discussing something confidential.
“We cannot confirm anything at this stage,” a Bithumb spokesperson said. A spokesperson for FTX declined to comment.
Bithumb is South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange, according to Statista. The exchange’s offices were raided earlier this week by South Korean prosecutors investigating the collapse of Terra (LUNA) and its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), according to the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.
Bankman-Fried is moving to take advantage of the crypto market crash by propping up or acquiring hobbled companies. FTX and its American entity FTX US are in talks to raise fresh capital, people with knowledge of the matter said this week, putting Bankman-Fried in position to continue a deal spree that’s seen him commit about $1 billion so far.
Bithumb, founded in 2014, currently processes around $569 million worth of trades on its platform a day on average, according to data provider CoinGecko. It was among South Korean crypto exchanges whose offices were raided this week by local prosecutors as part of a widening investigation into Terraform Labs following the May collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been a visible figure in the current bear market. The crypto billionaire has said in recent interviews that his firm is making an attempt to keep multiple large players afloat regardless of profit potential.
“The explicit sort of working principle we had in a number of these, was like, it’s okay to do a deal that’s like moderately bad in bailing out a place. The bar was not ‘is this a good return on investment?’ The bar is like ‘this is not that bad of a return on our investment,’ or ‘we are incinerating a relatively smallish amount of money in doing this.’”
