Hey, it's Aaron. This week we have interviews with winners of this year's George Polk Award

for Journalism. It's something we've been doing for the last few years at Longform

Podcast. This interview is with Nick Baker and Tracy Wong from CoinDesk, along with

the reporter Ian Allison. They wrote about the exchange FTX, maybe a little backstories

helpful here, a balance sheet for Alameda Research, which was the hedge fund within FTX was

leaked to CoinDesk. Their reporting set in motion a huge domino role that resulted in

Sam Bankman-free being charged with bunch of crimes. So here they are, Nick Baker and

Tracy Wong from CoinDesk. Very nice to have you on the Longform Podcast, Tracy Wong and

Nick Baker of CoinDesk. Hello. Hi, Aaron. Thanks for having us.

So I was excited to do this interview because it's a topic that I feel like it ranks as

my personal number one new story of the year, which was the implosion of the Crypto

Exchange FTX last year. Maybe you could take me briefly through where this story started

for both of you. Sure. So this was, I think, the first week of November. And our colleague

Ian Allison, who is a superstar reporter, was able to source a copy of Alameda's balance sheet.

Alameda's this hedge fund entity that was very closely related to FTX, the exchange. And we ended

up writing a story that was pretty innocuous at first. Basically, once we got the balance sheet,

we were able to verify that it was authentic. And then we took a look at all of the holdings

on this balance sheet. And what kind of stood out was just the amount of FTT token, which is

this token issued by FTX, the exchange. And seemed pretty suspect because in traditional

financial markets, when you have an exchange, think like the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ,

it's, I think, illegal in the US to have a trading firm also trade on your exchange. And this

was kind of the relationship between FTX and Alameda. And so we ended up writing this very innocuous

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