[blue_light_man]

My vague guess is they need money to spend on advertising and investments made by Alameda and FTX.

For that, they can't use FTX. They need USD or a stable coin like USDC.

They can't convert hundreds of millions of dollars of FTT to USDC since demand for FTT is relatively small. And a transaction like that might cause a huge decline in the price of FTT.

So they must have used ETH, BTC etc deposited by customers for swapping to USD or USDC.

I guess their theory must have been the surbowl ads, celebrity endorsemens and all would result in demand of FTT going up after some time. And they can later swap them back to customer funds when required.

But then crypto crashed.

Now customers want to withdraw the funds and they don't have it to give back. And nobody wants FTT.