November 12: At least one billion dollars of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Reuters reported citing people familiar with the matter.

According to the news agency, the exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred US$10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried's trading company Alameda Research.

A large portion of that total has since disappeared, Reuters said referring to information provided by two people familiar with the matter. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.

While it is known that FTX moved customer funds to Alameda, the missing funds are reported here for the first time, Reuters said.

The financial hole was revealed in records that Bankman-Fried shared with other senior executives last Sunday, according to the two sources. Reuters reported that both sources held senior FTX positions until this week and said they were briefed on the company's finances by top staff.

Bahamas-based FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday after a rush of customer withdrawals earlier this week. A rescue deal with rival exchange Binance fell through, precipitating crypto’s highest-profile collapse in recent years.

At the heart of FTX's problems were losses at Alameda that most FTX executives did not know about, Reuters reported.

According to the news agency, customer withdrawals had surged last Sunday after Changpeng Zhao, CEO of giant crypto exchange Binance, said Binance would sell its entire stake in FTX's digital token, worth at least $580 million, "due to recent revelations." Four days before, news outlet CoinDesk reported that much of Alameda's $14.6 billion in assets were held in the token.