Earlier yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of FTX, publicly admitted on Twitter that his crypto exchange should have done more to protect customers and their funds. He further stated that it was wrong of his team to not take greater action on the issue–which was the accidental sending of $1 million in FTX tokens to a whale investor–prior to the incident occurring.
The incident in question happened after FTX released an airdrop of $10 million in their native token, FTT, to holders of the FrenBasis token (FREN). This was done with the intention of incentivizing new customers to join FTX and also promote the trading of the FREN token on their platform.
Unfortunately, an unexpected bug in the FTX smart contract code caused the airdrop to be allocated among whale investor addresses, rather than ordinary customers as intended. As a result, a whale investor ended up receiving an $1 million on April 4, 2021, while the rest of the FTT tokens were spread out among a few other large holders.
Following the incident, Bankman-Fried posted a heartfelt Twitter thread, in which he apologized for the incident and promised to take immediate action to protect FTX customers’ funds going forward. In particular, he said they will increase their bug bounty and also implement stricter requirements for security audits.
Bankman-Fried also stated that he and his team will work hard to ensure an incident like this never happens again. In conclusion, FTX is proving to be an example of a trustworthy exchange that takes care of its customers by taking the necessary steps to guarantee the safety of their funds.