Fintech Lab
Incident 35 decision steps
FTX, Alameda, and the segregation break
Customer funds and a sister hedge fund's balance sheet were never supposed to share a wallet. They did. You're the one who finds it.

It's Wednesday November 2 2022. CoinDesk has just published Alameda Research's leaked balance sheet, showing that the majority of Alameda's claimed assets are FTT, the token issued by FTX, an affiliated entity. You're a senior engineer at FTX. Until this morning you assumed that customer crypto held at FTX was strictly segregated from anything Alameda touched. Within 72 hours your read-only query against the customer-deposit aggregates and the on-chain wallet balances is going to tell you a different story. The simulation walks you through the week, not as the CEO or the lawyers, but as the engineer with database access who has to decide what to report, when, and to whom. Every choice here actually happened to someone at FTX between November 2 and November 11 2022.

Fintech Lab is a free, interactive lab for fintech engineers. Walk famous incidents from the engineer's seat at hour zero. See what else is here.

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