Not a false flag. It's more like, never let a good crisis go to waste. Although you could say, the whole thing was never going to succeed from its inception. It was always a Ponzi scheme with an expiration date used to funnel money into projects that could not get those grants and funding through more traditional means. Therefore, those wanting to use the FTX collapse for screwing the private crypto market, only had to sit back and wait for it to blow up.