Bitcoin dips below $90K hours after SBF tweets for first time since entering prison
Bitcoin (BTC) slipped below $90,000 on Tuesday, just hours after jailed former FTX supremo Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted for the first time since beginning his 25-year sentence for multiple fraud and conspiracy offenses.
The dip to $88,780 represents a 19% slide from its $109,114 all-time high on January 20 – the date of Donald Trump’s inauguration – and is BTC’s lowest point since November. At the time of writing, it has seen a slight rebound to $89,154.
BTC’s dramatic slide is part of a wider dip across the crypto industry. Rival currency ether (ETH) saw an 11% drop to $2,390 earlier today while Binance’s BRB token, Ripple’s XRP, and Solana’s SOL dropped 6.4%, 14.3%, and 15% respectively.
Not even Donald Trump’s own token $TRUMP was safe, seeing its own price tumble 14% in 24 hours and 82% from its all-time high.
The seemingly industry-wide drop-off comes just days after crypto exchange Bybit was hacked for somewhere in the region of $1.4 billion in ETH and staked ether (stETH).
It also follows the highly-publicized disaster that was the launch of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s LIBRA token.
LIBRA not only collapsed from a $4.5 billion market cap, but, amid accusations of insider trading, it triggered a political crisis and impeachment proceedings in Argentina.
Read more: LIBRA co-founder ‘can’t remember’ sending texts about Javier Milei’s sister
Bitcoin’s dip comes hours after SBF’s reappearence on X
Just hours before BTC began its dramatic slide, disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried took to X for the first time since 2023.
The ex-billionaire posted a bizarre 10-tweet thread, apparently prompted by the controversy unfolding in Washington as Elon Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut a swathe through what he deems to be an unnecessarily bloated federal workforce.
“I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days,” wrote Bankman-Fried.
He added, “And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks.”
Read more: SBF wants Trump to know he was working with Republicans all along
He then goes on to detail his firing process as the head of FTX (“I’d tell this to everyone that it was as much our fault for not having the right role for them”) and claims that he saw competitors hiring “30,000 too many employees” and having no idea what to do with them.
He concludes that firing an employee “sucks for everyone involved” but that “there’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing.”
Bankman-Fried once again appears to be taking a sympathetic stance on Musk and his methods, presumably in another attempt to align himself with the Donald Trump administration and put himself in the frame for some kind of leniency with regards to his prison sentence.
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