Binance founder Changpeng Zhao says in a new memoir that he never truly intended to buy FTX during the exchange’s final days in November 2022. According to Zhao’s account, Binance’s public rescue announcement was not a serious attempt to bail out a rival but a way to open FTX’s books as pressure intensified around the business. The sequence remains the same: Zhao said Binance began selling its FTT holdings on November 6 after what he described as recent revelations, then announced a non-binding agreement to acquire FTX two days later before withdrawing and leaving FTX to enter bankruptcy within 48 hours.
Zhao also says Sam Bankman-Fried asked him directly for “a couple of billion dollars” before the deal collapsed. That claim adds a further detail to a period that has already been heavily documented through court records and bankruptcy testimony. Those proceedings showed that FTX customer assets were misused, funds were routed to Alameda, and the exchange’s balance sheet was badly compromised.
The memoir adds colour to a critical episode in the industry’s recent history, but it does not alter the underlying facts. Binance did not complete a rescue, and FTX was already too impaired by the time any transaction was considered. The distinction matters because the market impact of that week was driven as much by collapsing confidence as by the legal and financial specifics that emerged later.
The broader significance is that exchange risk in crypto remains unusually sensitive to perception. Trust in leadership, custody, and solvency can evaporate faster than price discovery itself, and the consequences spread through the market before formal proceedings catch up. The FTX collapse remains a case study in how quickly institutional confidence can fail when the infrastructure at the centre of the market comes into doubt.