On May 7, 2022, Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison shared a document with Sam Bankman-Fried, the trading firm's majority owner and her on-and-off-boyfriend, that outlined her current estimation of Alameda’s risk, taking into account its "fairly leveraged" position and billions of dollars of borrowed capital from third-party lenders and FTX's own customers. 

Ellison’s conclusion: "I think things are going better," she wrote. Yet that very night the Terra stablecoin would depeg, sparking a crash that vaporized $45 billion in value and took down several crypto firms in its wake. While Alameda Research wasn't a significant holder of Terra or its companion coin, Luna, the resulting drop in cryptocurrency prices across the ecosystem would spell the first sign of doom for Alameda. 

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