CoinVoice recently learned that on October 19, according to CoinDesk, Peter Easton, a professor of accounting at the University of Notre Dame, testified in court on Wednesday morning that FTX customer deposits were reinvested in business and real estate, and used for political donations and charitable donations. Easton was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice to track billions of dollars in funds from Alameda and FTX. Easton said that around March 2021, total customer deposits were lower than FTX's bank balance, which meant that customer funds had lost support at that time. By June 2022, when FTX deposits peaked, the exchange had only about $2 billion on hand to support more than $11 billion in customer deposits, with a funding gap of up to $9 billion.
Easton said it can therefore be concluded that the entire acquisition of Modulo Capital was completed using customer funds. Modulo Capital is a Bahamas-based financial company owned by FTX. Easton's investigation also showed that most of FTX's investment in SkyBridge Capital was completed using customer funds. At the same time, most of FTX's $550 million investment in Bitcoin mining company Genesis Digital Assets also came from customer deposits. In addition, FTX customer funds also flowed into a bank account of Paper Bird, Inc., an entity solely owned by SBF. "Most" of the $100 million SBF invested in mobile banking platform Dave, Inc. through Paper Bird came from FTX customers. [Original link]
