Brian Armstrong, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, has praised the work of citizen journalists and blockchain analysts covering the FTX crisis and its former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried.
In a tweet from November 16 that has been retweeted over 9,000 times as of this writing, Armstrong said that most of the news about FTX’s liquidity crisis and subsequent bankruptcy filing has come from regular people and not from traditional media.
Armstrong said this about a recent “puff piece” in the New York Times: “Feels like a turning point for citizen journalism and loss of trust in MSM” — referring to mainstream media.
“Crypto Twitter” has also been highly critical of the article, with Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt tweeting at the author of the article that Bankman-Fried had “committed significant crimes” and it was “a disservice to all of those impacted.”
Since he bought Twitter in October, Elon Musk has talked about the rise of citizen journalism on Twitter more than once.
As an example of how blockchain analysis and citizen journalism are becoming more popular, on November 5, blockchain tracker Whale Alert reported that just under 23 million FTX tokens (FTT) had been moved to Binance. This was about 17% of the total supply and was worth $584.8 million at the time.
This was one of the first signs that FTX had a liquidity crisis, but the NYT picked up on the story on November 8.
Blockchain investigators were also the first to tell people about the FTX hack. Twitter users closely tracked the movement of funds to different wallets and figured out it was a hack hours before FTX announced it.
“The Roundtable Show,” a gathering of crypto community members hosted by Mario Nawfal, has moved to Twitter Spaces. This is where 891,499 people can listen to Musk, BankToTheFuture CEO Simon Dixon, and internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom talk about the FTX story as it unfolds in real-time.
Twitter has helped break news and analyze the FTX mess, but it has also been home to a lot of conspiracy theories and just plain false information.
A recent cryptic thread by Bankman-Fried on Twitter spread rumors that he was using the new tweets to delete older, possibly incriminating tweets. This theory was later disproven.
Twitter users also pointed out that Bankman-private Fried’s jet left The Bahamas for Argentina on November 12 and thought he was running away. He denied this, and a source later told the media that Bahamian authorities were watching Bankman-Fried.
