A new report claims an FTX deal to buy the South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb is currently in “advance talks.”
According to a new report from Bloomberg, a person familiar with the matter says the two exchanges have been working on the deal for months.
Bithumb is South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange, according to Statista. The exchange’s offices were raided earlier this week by South Korean prosecutors investigating the collapse of Terra (LUNA) and its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), according to the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.
Bloomberg also reports that FTX and its American arm FTX US are attempting to raise new capital, citing “people with knowledge of the matter.”
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been a visible figure in the current bear market. The crypto billionaire has said in recent interviews that his firm is making an attempt to keep multiple large players afloat regardless of profit potential.
“The explicit sort of working principle we had in a number of these, was like, it’s okay to do a deal that’s like moderately bad in bailing out a place. The bar was not ‘is this a good return on investment?’ The bar is like ‘this is not that bad of a return on our investment,’ or ‘we are incinerating a relatively smallish amount of money in doing this.’”
FTX has made multiple acquisitions since crypto markets first started weathering severe downside volatility, including lending platform BlockFi. The company reached an agreement for $400 million in revolving credit facility plus an option to acquire BlockFi at a variable price of up to $240 million.
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