According to a report from CoinDesk, Peter Easton, a professor of accounting at the University of Notre Dame, testified at a court hearing on Wednesday that FTX had used customer funds to repurchase all FTX shares held by Binance, “more than $1 billion coming from FTX exchange customer funds.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has hired Peter Easton to track the billions of dollars in funds between Alameda Research and FTX. He had previously assisted the government in investigating Enron and WorldCom twenty years ago. The professor stated that FTX user funds were reinvested in businesses and real estate, used for political donations and charitable contributions.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) had stated in a tweet in 2022 that as part of the repurchase, the company received over $21 billion worth of BUSD stablecoins and FTX’s FTT tokens.
It was reported that in 2019, as part of a strategic partnership, Binance invested an undisclosed amount of funds in FTX. At that time, FTX was just starting out and processing about $500 million in trades per day, far below the peak of over $50 billion.