Bologna, Floor Prices, and Boom-Bust: CZ's Tell-All on FTX's Spectacular Unraveling

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) just dropped his memoir "Freedom of Money," and it's basically the crypto industry's most anticipated tell-all since someone discovered a hidden backdoor in a spreadsheet. CZ paints a colorful portrait of FTX's final days — and spoiler alert: it reads less like a heroic white-knight rescue mission and more like watching someone else's house fire while sipping a latte.

According to Zhao, SBF hit him up asking for "a couple of billion dollars" with the casual energy of someone ordering a bologna sandwich at a deli. You know, just casually dropping "hey, spot me a few billion, no biggie." But CZ says he never actually considered taking the bait. "I didn't have any interest in owning FTX. I also wasn't that interested in helping SBF," he writes. The non-binding Letter of Intent everyone made such a fuss about? That was just CZ doing his homework — essentially a clipboard check to see if anyone's user funds could be pried out of that dumpster fire.

Here's where things got spicy, according to Zhao: Caroline Ellison publicly offered to buy Binance's FTT holdings at $22 each. "She had just revealed her floor price," he notes with the tone of someone watching a magician reveal their own trick. Professional traders — those beautiful, chaotic opportunists — immediately started shorting FTT through that level like vultures circling a roadkill buffet. The token went from $22 to $15, then $10, then $5 in what can only be described as a cryptocurrency cliff dive. Roughly $6 billion fled FTX within 72 hours. That's not a bank run — that's a bank jog.

Zhao also confirms the existence of "Exchange Collaboration" — a Signal group that FTX's Zane Tackett assembled during the Terra/LUNA collapse like some kind of crypto Avengers initiative. The group included CZ, SBF, Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), and Jesse Powell (Kraken), later attracting DOJ and SEC attention faster than your uncle's questionable DeFi investment attracted scammers. Zhao denies any wrongdoing with the confidence of someone who knows they definitely didn't collude: "Of course there was no such thing in this case."

By Nov. 9, 2022, Binance decided to swipe left on the whole situation and walked away. Their FTT stash — once valued at a cool $580 million at its peak — was now about as useful as a ski resort in July. Basically worthless. The whole FTX implosion triggered a bank run on Binance too: $7 billion withdrawn on Dec. 14 alone. That's