Coindesk’s report on the FTX crypto exchange in late 2022 brought bankruptcy of FTX & 120+ small companies but at the same time exposed the backend dark game. Nearly 10 months later, Coindesk journalists won an award for such transparent journalism.
Coindesk is a popular Crypto news website that was initially founded by Shakil Khan in 2013. In 2016, this website was acquired by Digital Currency Group (DCG) for $500,000. Under the DCG’s umbrella, Coindesk Media has grown as a leading Crypto news media in this innovative sector.
In Nov of this year, Coindesk media published a report on the FTX crypto exchange’s sister firm Alameda Research. The report noted that Alameda was holding the majority of the funds in the form of FTX tokens (FTT). In short, Alameda was showing a healthy financial position by holding its native token. The news acted as a catalyst for the surge in the rapid investigation to check the reality of the actual financial position of FTX & its subsidiaries and finally, it came to know that FTX was not holding 100% of the customers fund & the whole thing resulted in a bad situation, the exchange filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 code in a US bankruptcy court & its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is currently behind bars for the fraud he committed with huge numbers of people with the help of FTX exchange.
On 29 Sep 2023, Coindesk reported that its journalists won a Gerald Loeb Award because they uncovered the FTX crypto exchange’s backend dark game.
The Gerald Loeb Award is known as the top prize in financial and business journalism, so it is a very big honor for this news media.
CoinDesk report, DCG, & Problems
However Coindesk journalists tried their best to report with full transparency but indirectly they hit the hammer on their own feet, as Genesis Trading, another company under Digital Currency Group (DCG), had significant exposure to the FTX exchange.
With the bankruptcy of the FTX exchange, Genesis Trading faced huge struggles & finally filed for bankruptcy on 19 Jan of this year, as a victim of FTX exchange bankruptcy.
To maintain a healthy financial position, DCG once planned to sell Coindesk media but later revoked the same plan.
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