In a new CNBC interview, Changpeng Zhao says that he received a call from Bankman-Fried within 48 hours after tweeting his firm’s plans to liquidate its FTT holdings.

“At the beginning, I thought he just wanted to do an OTC (over-the-counter) deal to buy out the FTT tokens we had. And then he actually wanted a buyout of the entire firm, of the entire FTX platform. We got a team on it. It was pretty clear pretty soon that there’s a misappropriation of user funds. The user funds are gone. At that point, it’s clearly that he lied to his users, his investors, his VC (venture capital investors), his employees. At that point, whatever data that’s in the data room, we couldn’t trust anymore.

It was quite hard for us to do that due diligence. We didn’t go very far.”

The Binance executive also says that it is very likely that only Bankman-Fried’s inner circle knew about what was really happening in FTX.