Disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried Steps Down as CEO of FTX

Disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, whose empire collapsed in a matter of hours, this week, has officially stepped down.

It's been a tumultuous week for his former cryptocurrency exchange, which just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US, wiping out a $32 billion valuation in a matter of days.

The exchange bottomed out earlier this week, with much larger rival Binance first offering a bailout, only to back out of the deal after getting a closer look at FTX's books.

One looming question: whether customers will get any of their money back. According to the bankruptcy filings, FTX has more than 100,000 creditors. There are assets that range from $10 billion to $50 billion, CNBC reports.

"Duped I guess is the right word, but I am very disappointed because I do like Sam," Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of FTX investor SkyBridge Capital and notoriously short-lived White House communications director, told CNBC. "I don’t know what happened because I was not an insider at FTX."

Bankman-Fried, once seen as the "Robin Hood of crypto," used his personal wealth to donate to political causes and even bail out smaller exchanges.

The CEO rapidly became synonymous with a controversial form of philanthropy often referred to as "effective altruism," the idea of using data to figure out how to bring as much benefit to as many people as possible.

In Bankman-Fried's case, he said the idea was to amass huge amounts of wealth to maximize the amount of positive impact he could have on other people.

In reality, his donations remained modest even before his spectacular fall from grace, especially compared to the big promises he made. At one point, Bankman-Fried promised to donate up to $1 billion to the next US presidential election, but later backtracked and gave far less.

Now that his net worth has plummeted, the picture is looking drastically different. In fact, the entire team behind FTX's philanthropy team, called FTX Future Fund, resigned earlier this week in what journalist Teddy Schleifer called a "holy-shit moment in the world of effective altruism."

"We are now unable to perform our work or process grants, and we have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund," an open letter signed by Future Fund members reads.

In a statement on Thursday, Bankman-Fried admitted that he had "f*cked up, and should have done better."

READ MORE: Sam Bankman-Fried steps down as FTX CEO as his crypto exchange files for bankruptcy [CNBC]

More on the saga: Sam Bankman-Fried Deletes Tweet Promising Customers' Money Is Safe