FTX was making a killing, so its token that paid out trading fees was worth a lot. To bail out trading losses in Alameda, FTX sent it cash in exchange for a bunch of its own token. This might have worked out fine, except now the moment everyone expects FTX to go bankrupt, it's bankrupt.
Haseeb Qureshi said recently on his Chopping Block podcast that it was a not-so-secret secret that FTX was the least profitable exchange of any of the major exchanges, so even if they were generating a lot of revenue they weren't making much profit on it.
