Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita and Rachelle Akuffo discuss this week's What Just Happened topic: The crypto industry in disarray.

Video Transcript

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AKIKO FUJITA: Welcome to Yahoo Finance. This is "What Just Happened." I'm Akiko Fujita.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And I'm Rachelle Akuffo. Now this is our deep dive into the biggest story of the week and how it impacts your investments in more ways than one.

AKIKO FUJITA: This week, the collapse of FTX leaving the crypto world in a state of disarray as Sam Bankman-Fried's empire comes crashing down. And of course, this was the week, Rachelle, when we saw prosecutors hone in on Sam Bankman-Fried. The former CEO now of FTX arrested over in the Bahamas, indicted on eight counts of fraud, as well as, we should say, financial and elections fraud on the very day he was expected to testify before Congress.

And we did hear in his absence from the now current CEO, John Jay Ray, giving a damning testimony against FTX, saying that this was a case of good, old-fashioned embezzlement. Now while the focus has largely been on FTX, we're going to attempt to sort of pull back here over the next hour to take a look at what this means for the crypto space. What does it mean for the future of digital currencies.

And more importantly, what does this mean for your money if you are, in fact, invested in crypto? And Rachelle, it's worth pointing out, the key question here is, was this a one-off? Was it just about Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX, or is this a symptom of a larger problem within the space?

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And I think that's what the crypto community right now is trying to decipher, was this one bad actor? Was this him plus his inner circle? Was this all these people who relied on other people's due diligence, not doing their job, or perhaps some of this patchwork regulatory that we have that allow for this to go on for as long as it did? So a lot of people pointing all the fingers here. But it's interesting to see we're still seeing Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ether doing well today, still progressing, although down a little bit with the broader markets.

But not being as affected, as you would expect, which does make you wonder how much of this is about crypto versus, say, the individual platforms or SBF himself. But as we've been mentioning, SBF was the golden boy that regulators were turning to. So when we try and think about contagion, and we look at SBF and FTX as trying to be this white knight, this rescuer of the crypto industry, once he goes down, what happens next, and who's next? Obviously, we continue to hear about what's happening with Binance as well. A lot of people wondering if perhaps Binance could be next.

AKIKO FUJITA: And of course, Rachelle, there are still questions within FTX. We got these reports this week about insiders who were among the senior executives who turned on Sam Bankman-Fried himself. So we still haven't seen the full story here of FTX and how it collapsed. Of course, the allegations at the center of this remain that FTX did, in fact, comingle its funds with Alameda, which was also owned by SBF. So still a lot of slices that are question marks here, but there's certainly a lot of questions here about what this all means for the space moving forward.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Indeed, and we'll try and get those answered for everybody today because as investors try to navigate the turmoil in crypto, the question is, where do we go from here?