Sam Bankman-Fried has agreed to sell %Cryptocurrency exchange %FTX to rival %Binance amid a deepening liquidity crisis.
The deal will effectively merge two of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world under the Binance banner.
Binance remains the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, and, in a funding round earlier this year, FTX was valued at $32 billion U.S.
Financial terms of the transaction, which was announced on %Twitter ($TWTR), were not disclosed. However, Binance said that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent to buy FTX.
The sale of FTX comes in the middle of a liquidity crisis at the cryptocurrency exchange that has worsened in recent days.
Investors have been scrambling to pull their money out of the FTX exchange due to concerns that the balance sheet of FTX’s corporate sibling, Alameda Research, is too reliant on FTX’s proprietary %FTTDigitalToken.
Both FTX and Alameda were founded and are owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT graduate and leader in the crypto sphere.
Investors began pulling their money out of FTX at the start of the week on concerns that Alameda’s finances, and possibly FTX’s, are not as secure as they had believed.
On November 6, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted that he planned to sell all his holdings of FTT token (about $2.1 billion worth), prompting a stampede to pull money out of the FTX exchange.
The value of the FTT token has since plunged more than 80%.
The crisis at FTX has hurt the entire cryptocurrency market, with the price of both %Bitcoin ($BTC) and %Ethereum ($ETH) falling more than 10% this week.