FTX Crisis Ignited Debate at LaBitconf, Latin America’s Largest Bitcoin Conference

The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire has been the talk of this year’s LaBitConf in Buenos Aires.

Latin America’s largest cryptocurrency conference, LaBitConf 2022, began on Friday and ended this weekend.

The hysteria even caused Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin surely the conference’s most recognizable speaker to give a surprise talk at the start of its premier event in which he compared the Sam Bankman-Fried to a “1930s dictator.”

The fall of the FTX CEO

Bankman-Fried, whose cryptocurrency empire went up in smoke this week, is under investigation for “criminal conduct.” This alarm has caused other cryptocurrency Exchanges and organizations to look for ways to show their consumers that the same will not happen to them.

At LaBitConf they had ready answers.

Many of the top crypto people in Latin America shared responses to what has happened, below we share them with you:

Mexico-based Bitso: spoke to Decrypt about the debacle.

BitGet operations manager Mario Iemma commented that the crisis may be a possibility: the Singapore-based exchange, which runs the derivatives market in the area, made known a new system that makes it possible for users to see the exchange’s liquidity at all times.

The CEO of blockchain organization Koibanx, Leo Elduayen, mentioned on stage that we need to “open our eyes” to organizations like FTX and Celsius that went under earlier this year and recognize that they are not true Web3 organizations.

Buterin added that “this year we just saw a huge set of things,” referring to the collapse of several cryptocurrency projects and hacks.

“It’s the things that break because they have a model, and that model is pretty much bad,” he commented. “And the other is things that are broken as there is no trust in the model at all, but in a guy.”

Conclusion:

As regulators and law enforcement investigate what indeed led to the FTX collapse, everyone seemed to be in consensus on one thing at this year’s LaBitConf: the cryptocurrency sphere requires being very careful about whom you give your money.