US v. SBF: accounting professor Peter Easton testifies that FTX used “over a billion dollars” of customer funds to buy back Binance's FTX stake, bought in 2019
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a 2022 post the company had received over $2.1 billion in binance usd (BUSD) stablecoins and FTX's FTT tokens.
CoinDeskShaurya Malwa
Context & Ripple Effects
The Binance exit had already become a pressure point when Zhao said Binance would sell its remaining FTT received in the 2021 transaction, while reporting later tied part of FTX’s 2021 fundraising to Bankman-Fried’s reimbursement for that buyout. Easton’s testimony adds an accounting-based account of the funding source to that chronology.
The testimony gives prosecutors a concrete explanation for how the Binance stake repurchase was financed: customer assets were allegedly used rather than being kept segregated for customers.
It raises the legal significance of the Binance exit for Bankman-Fried and FTX’s estate by tying a major corporate transaction to the alleged customer-fund shortfall.
Second-order effects
A forensic account of the payment trail can strengthen creditor-recovery efforts and sharpen scrutiny of recipients of funds from FTX-era transactions, as reflected in FTX’s later effort to claw back the deal proceeds.
For exchange customers and counterparties, the case makes ownership and segregation of platform-held assets central to assessing whether a venue’s balance sheet can safely support acquisitions, buyouts, or related-party transfers.
Third-order effects
If courts continue to treat customer deposits as unavailable for corporate financing, crypto exchanges face a more durable separation between custody operations and strategic capital allocation.
The broader structural shift is toward proving reserves, liabilities, and asset ownership with records that can withstand insolvency and litigation, rather than relying on exchange-issued tokens or internal accounts.
The trend: This is one data point in crypto’s shift from opaque, exchange-controlled customer balances toward enforceable asset segregation and transaction-level accountability.
Anyone who believes Sam is anything other than a lying, evil, scam artist, conman must be blind, deaf and dumb. It would be appropriate if the @BillAckman and @kevinolearytv's of the world would come out and now admit that they were fooled by this scammer and acknowledge that he.…
The investigation revealed that all of FTX's acquisitions of Modulo Capital were using client funds. Most of FTX's investments in SkyBridge Capital are using client funds. Most of FTX's $550 million investment in crypto miner Genesis Digital Assets also came from customer...
An investigation by Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame, showed that around March 2021, total customer deposits fell below FTX's balance. In June 2022, FTX only had $2 billion to support more than $11 billion customer deposits....
[Deed of property to SBF's parents is shown to jury] AUSA Roos: Have you analyzed the spending out of the “Allow Negative” accounts? Easton: Yes. AUSA Roos: What about the Binance buy-back? Easton: Over a billion dollars came from customer funds from FTX exchange
🚨NEW(ish): Peter Easton, forensic accountant and witness for the prosecution at @SBF_FTX's trial said that of a $45M investment made in @Scaramucci's SkyBridge Capital in September 2022 by Alameda, around $27M “must have come from customer funds.” In addition to SkyBridge,...
They're back from sidebar. AUSA Roos: Let's talk about this $1 million from Nishad Singh, using customer funds, to MTG [It's not a / the politician, but rather Mind The Gap] Easton: It is from customer funds. AUSA Roos: What about properties? Easton: $96 million
FTX Trial Update: Currently testifying is Peter Easton, an accounting expert, who was solicited to help penetrate the financial flows on the FTX Sam Bankman-Fried case. He claims that the 30% investment SBF made in Anthony Scaramucci's firm SkyBridge may have been customer funds.…