Last week, the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance formally unveiled a $1 billion “industry recovery fund” to help contain the damage dealt to the industry by the spectacular implosion of FTX. A few weeks earlier, Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao had played a pivotal role in the events that led to that collapse.

Zhao said in a tweet on Nov. 6 that Binance would start selling off its holdings in FTT, FTX’s token, triggering a liquidity crisis that showed the business run by Sam Bankman-Fried to be nothing but a house of cards.  

Though Zhao has since dismissed “conspiracy theories” that he had orchestrated FTX’s demise and that of its sister trading firm Alameda Research, the irony of Binance playing both doomsayer and redeemer in the same month has not been lost on observers. “You sort of giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other,” said Hagen Rooke, a partner at the law firm Reed Smith.

More so than ever, the extraordinary sequence of events leaves Binance as consolidator-in-chief in the crypto industry — and there is a clear sense of relief at the company’s commitment to the role.

(By Ryan Weeks)