Binance, the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange, said on Tuesday that it bought its fastest-rising competitor, FTX. The move was announced on Twitter by Binance’s co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao, and it immediately sent shockwaves through a crypto landscape already besieged by turbulence and falling prices.
The deal delivers a blow to the public image of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, one of crypto’s most well-known figures—who was widely acknowledged as an industry leader working to push crypto toward the mainstream.
“It will probably go down in history as one of the greatest corporate raids of all time,” Alex Svanevik, the CEO of the blockchain analytics firm Nansen, tells TIME, noting that the deal greatly increases the power and stature of Zhao.
FTX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zhao helped set off the turn of events on Sunday by publicly sowing doubt on Twitter about the amount of cash FTX had on hand. After Zhao announced that Binance intended to sell off more than $2 billion worth of FTX’s native token, FTT, it created a bank run in which crypto investors—jumpy from a year’s worth of financial disasters—rushed to pull their money out.
This caused an actual liquidity crisis for FTX, and it temporarily paused withdrawals. On Tuesday, Bankman-Fried acknowledged the deal on Twitter, writing that Binance was helping them to repay all of their users who were trying to withdraw their holdings.
The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed on Tuesday.
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