We didn’t have US crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX Group on our radar. This crypto brokerage scheme, controlled via offshore entities in Antigua and Barbuda or the Bahamas, recently acquired CySEC-regulated investment firm K-DNA Financial Services Ltd, led by Martha Lambrianou. In March 2022, FTX Group announced the establishment of FTX Europe AG, Switzerland, as a holding company. FTX Group came to our attention via a BaFin warning against the Investorix broker scam mentioning the K-DNA Financial Services Ltd. We want to learn more!
Key Data
| Trading names | FTX FTX EU FTX Group ZUBR |
| Domains | https://ftx.com https://ftx.com/eu https://zubr.io www.omipay.net |
| Legal entities | K-DNA Financial Services Ltd, Cyprus FTX Trading Ltd, Antigua and Barbuda. FTX Digital Markets Ltd, Bahamas Zubr Exchange Limited, Gibraltar OmiPay Pty Ltd, Australia FTX Australia Pty Ltd, Australia FTX Switzerland GmbH, Switzerland DAAG Certificates GmbH, Switzerland DAAG Trading, DMCC, UAB FTX Japan Corporation, Japan Quoine Pte Ltd, Singapore |
| Regulators | CySEC for K-DNA Financial Services Ltd Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) ASIC Australia AUSTRAC Australia FINMA Switzerland |
| Related | Samuel Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder Oleg Ravnushkin, CEO ZUBRI Sergey Yakubanets, Co-founder ZUBRI Ryan Salame, CEO Patrick Gruhn, CEO Europe Martha Lambrianou, CEO Cyprus Jessica Murray Henry Raatz Max H.A. Rothert Martin Liebi Robin Matzke Juerg Bavaud Kilian Schaerle Asher Afriat Andreas Georgaki Theodorus Luka Marios Athinodorou |
Short Narrative
Sam Bankman-Fried, the son of Stanford professors and a former trader, founded FTX in April 2019, making it the new kid on the block beside Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, or BitStamp. Currently, FTX is ranked as the 7th largest crypto exchange globally.
In recent years, FTX has aggressively bought into a number of existing licensed brokerage firms such as K-DNA Financial Services Ltd in March 2022, FTX Australia Pty Ltd (formerly ITFS Markets Pty Ltd), also announced in March 2022, or ZUBR, a Gibraltar-based DLT provider with GFSC license, in 2020. The chart presented above is certainly not exhaustive.
Martha Lambrianou has served as CEO of the CySEC-regulated entity since 2017 (pictured left), which has now become the operating vehicle for FTX Europe. With the acquisition of K-DNA Financial Services Ltd, FTX also opened FTX Europe AG in Switzerland.
FTX has a similar complex corporate structure as Changpeng Zhao‘s Binance. Both crypto schemes operate with a mix of offshore structures and regulated entities.
An extensive thread on Forex Peace Army (FPA), established in 2020, brought established a link between CySEC-regulated K-DNA Financial Services, now part of the FTX Group, to the infamous Lau Scheme that has operated a variety of fraudulent binary options brands.
Read our reports on the Lau Scheme here.
At this point, we can neither confirm nor falsify the veracity of the allegations in the FPA thread. We also do not know whether the reference in the BaFin warning to alleged links of the PandaTS white-label broker scams Investorix to K-DNA Financial Services is true.
Share Information
We would like to know more about FTX Group and its companies and individuals. In particular, we would need more information on the role of CySEC-regulated K-DNA Financial Services in order to continue our research.
