U.S. federal prosecutors are investigating whether FTX's founder Sam Bankman-Fried manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies this May that led to their collapse and resulted in the implosion of his own cryptocurrency exchange, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The investigation is in its early stages, the newspaper said, adding that it is not clear whether prosecutors have determined any wrongdoing by Bankman-Fried, or when they began looking at the TerraUSD and Luna trades. Regulators around the globe, including in the Bahamas where FTX is based and in the United States, are investigating the role of FTX's top executives including Bankman-Fried in the firm's stunning collapse, Reuters has previously reported.