House lawmakers are calling FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and other executives to Capitol Hill to testify at a hearing in December about the crypto exchange's collapse.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and the ranking Republican, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, are holding a rare bipartisan hearing on the matter. They plan to haul up executives from FTX, Alameda Research, Binance and others to testify as well.
"The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds," Waters said in a statement. "Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year."
After a deal to shore up its liquidity with Binance fell through last week, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday along with 130 affiliated companies, including Bankman-Fried's crypto trading firm Alameda Research and FTX.us, the company's U.S. subsidiary. Bankman-Fried has since stepped down as CEO of the company he founded.
In a matter of days, FTX went from a $32 billion company to bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and customers demanded to withdraw their funds. Bankman-Fried admitted last week that he "f---ed up."
"There is no sugar coating it. The collapse has been a dumpster fire. Users left out to dry. Ecosystem in limbo," McHenry said, speaking at an unrelated hearing Wednesday.
— CNBC's Mary Catherine Wellons and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this article.