Bologna Billionaire: CZ Spills the Tea on FTX—Spoiler, He’d Rather Have Had the Sandwich

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao recalls Sam Bankman-Fried casually asking for “a couple of billion dollars” like he was ordering lunch at a deli—specifically, a bologna sandwich—during the infamous November 2022 call that briefly made Binance the reluctant knight in shining armor for FTX.

Turns out, CZ wasn’t buying—literally or figuratively.
“I didn’t have any interest in owning FTX. I also wasn't that interested in helping SBF,” Zhao writes in his memoir Freedom of Money, dropped Tuesday like a hot wallet. “But we may have to step in to protect the users and the industry.” Translation: someone had to adult in the room, and unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be SBF.

The much-hyped non-binding Letter of Intent? A glorified participation trophy.
“I was explicit that we were not making any commitment. Our team would simply assess the numbers and then decide.” In crypto courtship terms, it was like swiping right just to see the bios—no strings, no promises, definitely no wedding ring.

When it came to the implosion, CZ points the finger straight at Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, who publicly offered to buy Binance’s $FTT stash at $22 apiece in a last-ditch Hail Mary to calm the market—only to commit what Zhao calls “a fatal mistake.”
“She had just revealed her floor price.” Rookie move. In the trading world, that’s like yelling “last call” at a liquidation bar—suddenly everyone knows the exit door is open, and the stampede begins.

$FTT promptly got rekt, plunging from $22 to $15, then $10, then $5 faster than a memecoin after a VC dump.
Within 72 hours, $6 billion had evaporated from FTX like a vaporized private key. Poof. Gone. The only thing faster was the speed at which degen Twitter updated its roasting memes.

Zhao also confirms the existence of “Exchange Collaboration,” a Signal group chat launched during the Terra/$LUNA meltdown that sounded more like a superhero alliance than a crisis response team.
The members? CZ, Bankman-Fried, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Kraken’s Jesse Powell, and other crypto OGs. It was less “Avengers assemble,” more “Oh god, not again.”

Naturally, the DOJ and SEC later came knocking, sniffing around for signs of collusion.
“Of course there was no such thing in this case,” Zhao writes, with the calm confidence of a man who’s been audited by the universe and still managed to keep his seed phrase dry.

By November 9, Binance was out the door, deal dead, $FTT now a digital paperweight.
Binance’s own peak $580 million $FTT position? Reduced to “basically worthless.” Just six months after losing $1.6 billion on $LUNA, it was like financial déjà vu with a side of schaden-bagels.

Then came the irony: a bank run on Binance itself, with $7 billion yanked out in a single day on December 14—because nothing says “trust” like watching your neighbor’s house burn down and wondering if yours has faulty wiring too.
Zhao’s reaction? Cool as a cold wallet. He went to dinner with friends.

“I was not worried,” he writes. “All user funds were in our reserves.”
Meanwhile, the rest of crypto was stress-eating their way through a tub of existential ice cream.

Within a month, users didn’t just return—they