‘I’m Licking My Chops. I Know It’s Going Down’: The Pissed-Off Crypto Traders Who Predicted—and Profited From—the FTX Implosion

Ishan Bhaidani had been patient for over a month, waiting for blood in the water. Now was his moment.

It was the late hours of Nov. 7 and he was in his home office in San Antonio, Texas, staring at a chart on TradingView. The price of the FTT token—the cryptocurrency created by FTX—had been fluctuating oddly on the futures market all morning, following a tweet by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announcing his imminent sell-off of the token. Over and over, it would begin to drop below $22 and then abruptly spike back up.

Bhaidani had shorted FTT in October. Using crypto-trading platform Gains Network, he put money on the token’s value dropping below $22. As the chart undulated between $21.90 and $22.10 for hours, Bhaidani realized someone was going to great effort to keep the token’s value at $22. “You can tell by the price movements that [someone was] dumping capital in order to defend that number,” Bhaidani said. And he suspected he knew who.

A day earlier, Caroline Ellison, CEO of FTX sibling company Alameda Research, had tweeted a strange offer to Zhao: “If you’re looking to minimize the market impact on your FTT sales, Alameda will happily buy it all from you today at $22!”

It was the “stupidest” thing she could have done, according to Bhaidani. “She basically telegraphed to everybody that this is the number that we’re defending,” he said. “As soon as you give that number, you bring out the dogs. And the dogs came.”