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Capital One Arena removes FTX sign

By Peter Hassett

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December 9, 2022 1:19 pm

On Friday morning, staff at Capital One Arena took down a placard marking their partnership with FTX.

The removal marks Monumental’s continuing distancing from the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange, which declared bankruptcy on November 11.

The placard was replaced by a blank slot.

On November 17, the Washington Post’s Ava Wallace reported that Monumental teams were halting promotions of FTX, marking the end of a partnership that lasted eleven months. “Monumental Sports & Entertainment has taken the appropriate steps to remove FTX as much as possible from our promotional platforms,” Monumental told WaPo in November. “While their logo will still appear on certain pre-produced giveaway items that we will continue to distribute out of fairness to our fans, they will not have a presence with our teams in light of the recent news surrounding the company.”

FTX was the product of Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried, a.k.a. SBF, made his fortune initially from buying cryptocurrency in the US at a low price and reselling it in Japan at a higher price. FTX became an exchange for cryptocurrency trades, making money on transaction fees that would have been illegal had the company been based in the United States instead of the Bahamas. But the company’s real value was in its own token, which was traded almost exclusively within FTX itself. FTX would spend its profits to buy back its own token from its users, inflating the token’s value and by extension the company’s value as well, which they would then use to buy more token, further inflating the token’s value. Again: this token was not widely traded outside of FTX.

Though they trade in an unregulated security, FTX and similar companies have successfully evaded oversight by the US government. Incidentally, SBF was the second-biggest disclosed donor to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle and admitted he secretly donated the same amount to Republicans through dark-money channels.

In 2011, FTX competitor Binance sold its share of FTX’s tokens, and then in early November of this year they made a cheeky tweet about how wise their liquidation was. That tweet led to a crash in the token’s value, which led to a bank run by FTX users, which led to FTX freezing withdrawals, which led to FTX declaring bankruptcy on November 11.

All the while, FTX’s sister company Alameda, a hedge fund, had been using FTX’s token as collateral to make risky investments, some of which were already funded by an (apparently illegal) transfer of ten billions dollars of customer money from FTX to Alameda. On top of that, SBF had funneled FTX money into private property for himself, his family, and his inner circle. Oh, and on top of that, one billion dollars were stolen as a result of a hack that was likely an inside job. Overall, tens of billions of dollars were lost, with the biggest losers being FTX’s small-scale users.

“Monumental Sports & Entertainment is thrilled to be working with FTX to bring the leading cryptocurrency exchange to the most loyal and sophisticated fans in the country,” Monumental President Jim Van Stone said last December. “The integration of blockchain technology with the sports experience has only just begun, and together we are going to advance to an entirely new frontier which will ignite fans beyond what they can even imagine today.”

The Capitals’ final tweet mentioning the company was in promotion for its “Rock the Retro” concert. The final tweet came just hours after FTX announced bankruptcy.

FTX appeared on digital board advertisements that same night, but have since disappeared.

Headline photo: @pennybacker

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