On October 29, 2022, the Africa team of the embattled global crypto exchange, FTX.com, held a summit in Accra and declared they have recorded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions and deposits in Ghana. 12 days on and the company has declared bankruptcy.
It is not clear how much of the millions of dollars worth of transactions in Ghana are actually deposits, but Techgh24 is reliably informed that one trader in Ghana alone, has customers who have traded at least GHS70 million ($4.84 million).
Things are even worse for Nigerian investors who are said to have invested more than twice what Ghanaians have invested on FTX.com.
Bankruptcy
Ahead of declaring bankruptcy, FTX was recording over $16 billion worth of transactions every 24 hours, and over $290 billion every 30 days. But as of now the company is said to be worth zero dollars.
The woes of FTX started when another globally renowned crypto exchange, Binance pulled out their $2 billion investment in FTX, citing protracted liquidity problems at FTX.
Binance Founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao had earlier warned that Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.com has had liquidity problems for more than a year now.
Zhao made an attempt to bailout FTX, but has recently called off that move and declared that “it is beyond our ability to help”.
Africa Push
It would appear that FTX’s Africa push was an attempt to shore up their liquidity to salvage the company.
So the FTX Africa Summit, held at the UPSA main auditorium on October 29, 2022, where the venue was fully packed to capacity, was a major move by the company to convince Africans to invest into crypto via the FTX platform.
Techgh24 learnt that at the Summit, the FTX Africa team actually made a declaration that with the rapid depreciation of the Ghana cedi, it was better to invest into crypto that to buy the Ghana cedi, and people bought into that idea.
It is still not clear who these Ghanaian investors are but the value of transactions, as the company declared, runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Techgh24 has also learnt that FTX Africa was actually working of getting some financial institutions to buy into the venture in Africa, but that move has been botched due to the recent bankruptcy declaration.
This story is still unfolding.
