[guy_c]

Based off the balance sheet FTX may have peaked (September 2021) with more than $100 billion of paper gains in "less liquid" assets.

  Token   Last wks  Last wks  Estimated   Peak     Peak         Peak
           value     price     holding    price    date         value
  FTT     $5.9bn    $24.00       246m      $77.69  09-Sep-2021  $19bn
  SRM     $5.4bn     $0.75     7,240m      $12.50  13-Sep-2021  $90bn
  SOL     $2.2bn    $32.00        70m     $258.78  07-Nov-2021  $18bn

Just speculation, but once you've "made" $130bn you feel like a genius. You might want to start acting like a hundred billionare. Time to start throwing money around. Especially spending it on anything that helps you realise those gains.

But FTT/SOL/SRM is not very liquid. So you use your liquid assets (i.e. your customers' USD, USDT, BTC and ETH). People might wonder where you get all this cash. You don't want to admit you are using customer funds and you only have gains on tokens you printed. So pretend you're genius trader and run a highly profitable exchange.