The arrest of FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas in December 2022 - over charges of conspiracy and defrauding investors - made headlines worldwide. Less than a year before that, and before the crypto market suffered a two trillion-dollar crash, Bankman-Fried was the second richest crypto billionaire on the planet, with a fortune of 24 billion U.S. dollars.
Binance: clinging to top, bouncing between legal issues and coin drops
Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao was the richest crypto boss before and after the market crash - and was also the one who suffered the highest losses. The world's leading crypto exchange by trading volume, Binance is reportedly being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice over alleged money laundering violations. In December 2022, Binance temporarily halted withdrawals of Stablecoin USDC - a digital stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. This came after the crypto exchange witnessed a flurry of withdrawals amounting to a total of 1.9 billion dollars in 24 hours, and as it tried to reassure investors about the security of their holdings.
The crypto crash: a domino effect fueled by global uncertainty
Digital currencies lost two trillion dollars in value following their peak of three billion in November 2021, due to a combination of growing interest rates and inflation which drove investors to pull back from deemed risky assets. Bitcoin saw its value fall by more than half since its late 2021 peak, which in turn caused the whole crypto market to collapse. The subsequent downfall of FTX also contributed to wreaking havoc on the market.
