Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of failed crypto-exchange FTX, has said he hopes to start a new business to help pay victims of his former company’s collapse.
Speaking to the BBC from the Bahamas, he said he would “give anything” to be able to start a new company to recover lost investments from his users.
“I’ll think about how we can help the world, and if the users haven’t recovered much, I’ll think about what I can do for them,” Bankman-Fried told the BBC. “And I think at the very least, I have a duty to FTX users to make it the best I can.”
Asked if he would start a new business to pay back investors, he said: “I would give anything to be able to do that. And I’ll try if I can.”
Bankman-Fried also said he was worried as he “ruminated at night” about the possibility of being arrested and again denied committing fraud. However, he added that he was “not as competent as I thought”.
FTX, a digital currency agency founded in 2019 where people could trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, collapsed in November when its value dropped from $16bn (£13bn) to zero.
Bankman-Fried stepped down when the agency filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11.
Bankruptcy lawyers described its collapse as “one of the sharpest and most difficult collapses in American corporate history” and accused Bankman-Fried of running the company as “her own personal fiefdom.”
Bankman-Fried is due to testify before Congress next week about the FTX collapse.
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In a statement, the US House Financial Services Committee said the panel would hear from FTX’s new chief executive, John Ray III, and from Bankman-Fried on December 13.
Following the collapse, online bank Starling announced a seven-month suspension of all customer deposits to cryptocurrency exchanges, citing the risk to consumers. The suspension will be reviewed in June 2023, the bank said.
Since its collapse, FTX’s new management has accused its previous management of a “total failure of corporate controls”. In its first bankruptcy filing last month, FTX said it expected to have more than 1 million individual creditors.