Bahamas Government Used Sam Bankman-Fried to Hack FTX and Just Cashed Out Some of it in Bitcoin

The government of the Bahamas revealed on Thursday that they ordered Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) to hack FTX and disperse various funds to the securities branch. After this effort succeeded, Bahamian officials converted the holdings into Ethereum, while they have now cashed out some of it in Bitcoin.

Based on blockchain data, researchers determined that the Bahamian government has now converted $30 million of the Ethereum into Bitcoin. It was estimated the total value of the hack was over $300 million, so this conversion represents 10% of that sum. 

A possible explanation is that the Bahamian government is trying to convert their Ethereum, which is censored by OFAC, to a coin like Bitcoin that doesn't have OFAC-censored blocks.

Crazy situations like these are driving people away from the industry, due to fear of being a victim of fraud. If a government benefited from this disaster so effortlessly, the trust in many centralized coins could evaporate.

It's likely the main goal of the hack was to enrich the government and display it to the public as regulators simply collecting a penalty from Bankman-Fried for his actions.

Sam Bankman-Fried was subpoenaed to testify in front of a US house committee on the 22nd to explain how the FTX collapse happened. Most troubling, is that Maxine Waters, who leads the committee, received large amounts of campaign donations from him.

It's fairly clear to the world at this point that SBF committed massive fraud. New FTX CEO John Ray III, the business guru who oversaw Enron after its collapse, called FTX's corporation control a "complete failure."