FTX crisis cascades

Liquidity-crisis battered FTX, said to be worth $32 billion a few months ago, is back to looking for an emergency bailout after Binance walked away from a tentative plan to buy the rival exchange.

White knight scenarios – now said to be led by Tron founder Justin Sun – continue to joust with worst-case nightmares, leaving many major coins severely bloodied. Bitcoin fell to as low as about $15,750 last night. But, as of early Thursday morning, the largest digital currency had retraced somewhat. At last check, as of 8:55 a.m. (EST), BTC was nearly $16,900, reflecting a 3.4% decline over 24 hours, not exactly a gaping head wound.

Among the ten largest cryptos, Ethereum, Cardano and Polygon are all surprisingly in the green, reflecting gains since this time yesterday. In fact, MATIC just shot up 6% in one hour.

Surveying a crimson-soaked triage ward of popular digital assets, a variety of injuries, ranging in severity, jump out.

Solana has been cut in half. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX are big supporters of its ecosystem. Alameda Research is a big SOL backer. And as Crypto Banter's Cryptoman Ran earlier this week pointed out: "Market realizing that CZ now owns 10% of the [SOL] tokens and that he would rather support BNB chain."

On the plus side, Solana’s dApp-laden smart contract platform has been deemed a worthy competitor to Ethereum, owing to lower fees and higher speeds. But, then again, a hefty chunk of its total supply is controlled by Alameda.

Meanwhile, Crypto.com on Wednesday halted all deposits and withdrawals for Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC issued on the Solana blockchain. Troublingly, network validators freed up about $400 million worth of SOL (Decrypt).

As for FTX's hemorrhaging native asset FTT, it barely remains in the Top 100; as of 8 a.m. (EST), it was perched precariously at No. 94. FTT was $2.75, down 40% in the past 24 hours.

Tron founder Justin Sun overnight vowed to step into the breach and save FTX, claiming there is an in-progress prescriptive path to resuscitate the ailing exchange and “return normalcy to all FTX users.”

Adding a new layer of drama to a fast-moving saga, Sun dubbed the rescue as a “Tron Ark.”

Sun/Tron/Huobi jumping into the fray led to TRX momentarily soaring 4,000% on FTX (CoinDesk).

FTX probably would be forced to declare bankruptcy sans an infusion of fresh capital, Bankman-Fried reportedly told investors yesterday (Bloomberg).

Per Reuters, citing a memo, SBF said that he has held fundraising talks with Sun.