The worlds second-largest crypto exchange that some in the ecosystem considered too big to fail collapsed spectacularly this week, filing for bankruptcy on Friday morning and announcing the resignation of its founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF.

Its the tail end of what has been a disastrous week for the company that was once valued at $32 billion, and was one of the most influential players in the crypto world. 

FTXs collapse has some striking similarities to the demise of the giant investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008, yet another institution that was deemed too big to fail, until it did and led to a wider financial crisis and economic downturn.

Whether FTXs implosion is set to cause the same destruction as Lehman is up for debate, but it will certainly create major fallout.  

With FTX going down, we will see cascading effects, Changpeng Zhaoaka CZfounder of Binance, the worlds largest crypto exchange, warned on Friday. Especially for those close to the FTX ecosystem, they will be negatively affected, 

Speaking at the annual Indonesia Fintech Summit in Bali, CZ said that FTXs undoing could create ripple effects throughout the crypto world comparable to the 2008 global financial crisis which he called probably an accurate analogy. 

A very big player going down

CZ said that the FTX crisis presents an unprecedented challenge to the crypto industry, despite his role in the events of the last week. 

After an online Twitter feud where CZ accused SBF of allegedly bad-mouthing him to regulators, the Binance CEO announced on Sunday the company would be dumping all of its holdings of FTT, a token used by FTX customers. Binance offloaded around $500 million in FTT, sparking a massive selloff amongst FTX users, and subsequently causing FTX to lose all of its liquidity. 

Binance, FTXs main competitor, stood to gain the most from the rival exchanges collapse by picking up the pieces and entrenching itself as the largest digital asset platform in the world. CZ stepped in with an offer to buy the exchange with a letter of intent, but quickly retracted it after Binance said it completed its due diligence process.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that SBF had authorized the use of billions of dollars in customer assets to fund the investment activities of Alameda Research, a trading firm and sister company to FTX also founded by SBF. On Thursday, he made a public apology on Twitter and took responsibility for the situation.

Im sorry. Thats the biggest thing. I f-d up, and should have done better, he wrote in a Twitter post

FTXs collapse comes on the heels of a longer crypto winter that has seen values plummet this year, higher regulatory scrutiny, and the implosion of several other components of the crypto ecosystem, including the stablecoin TerraUSD and its sister token Luna, as well as crypto lenders Voyager Digital and Celsius.

Weve just seen another very big player going down, CZ said of the FTX collapse on Friday, but warned that the sheer size of FTX makes this a much bigger deal than other companies that have gone under during the crypto winter.

A lot of consumer confidence is shaken, and I think basically weve been set back a few years, he said.

The scale of FTXs failure has raised eyebrows in Washington, as years of indecisiveness mean that officials have so far been unable to establish clear legal frameworks for the crypto industry. It is also the latest setback for Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose agency critics say failed to warn investors about the numerous collapses in the crypto world that came to pass this year.

Now regulators will rightfully scrutinize this industry much, much harder, which is probably a good thing to be honest, CZ said, although the billionaire was optimistic about cryptos chances to recover from its latest mishap. 

The market will heal itself, he said. Were in a new industry and theres a lot of risks. We need to learn how to deal with these and how to build a much healthier industry.

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Pandemic-driven mobility patterns are challenging our traditional understanding of the urban and rural voting blocsand our perceptions of who lives in these areas. Some regions grew and others declined as some fled high-priced, high-density urban environments for more affordable, lower-density communities.

For example, the population in Phoenix, Arizona grew by 13,224 in 2020-202. Meanwhile, North Las Vegas, Nevada gained 9,917 new residents. Two of the top five cities which gained the largest populations during the pandemicNorth Las Vegas and Phoenixare located in states that are still counting votes. 

Three days after the election with 80% of the votes in Arizona, Democratic candidate Kelly is ahead 51.7% to Republican candidate Masters who has 46.1%. Meanwhile, in the Nevada Senate race three days after the election with 88% of votes in, its neck and neck with Republican candidate Laxalt with 49% of the vote to Democrat Cortez Masto with 48% of the vote. With such close margins, there is now an intense focus on the location of the outstanding ballots.  

During the COVID pandemic, significant numbers of voters began to move within the country. Remote work gave them the opportunity to move to new, more affordable communities so long as they had a good internet connection. The U.S. Census, in collaboration with the Annual Business Survey (ABS), found that from 2019 to 2020, the percentage of businesses that had employees working from home increased from 28.1 to 41.9%.

Like attracts like

Understanding geographic mobility patterns is essential to understanding voting patterns since people and places are interrelated. Toblers First Law of Geography states, everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. Translated into a voting context, we would expect two voters living near one another will be more likely to have similar voting patterns than those living far away. In short, like attracts like.

People moved in response to both long-term socioeconomic forces and the unique circumstances of the pandemic. What is not yet clear is whether the political norms of communities these people moved to were motivating factors for selecting them or if other factors (environment, cost, etc.) drove their choices and led them to migrate to communities with differing political perspectives and voting patterns than the places they left.

Walter Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, commented on the New Great Migration back to the South, including a shift toward younger, college-educated, Black Americans, from both northern and western places of origin. They have contributed to the growth of the New South, especially in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina This demographic change is contributing to voting pattern shifts in Georgia and North Carolina.

The influx of new voters into metro, suburban, and rural areas may exert a significant influence on election outcomes. The geographic density and distribution of voters and districts represents a pattern that has limited Democrats in the past, even when they won the popular vote.

In 2019, writer Derek Thompson posed the question, What would happen to the American political picture if more Democrats moved out of their excessively liberal enclaves to redistribute themselves more evenly across the vast expanse of Red America?

The pandemic and remote work may have prompted just this sort of move.

Stanford Political Scientist Jonathan Rodden notes, Democrats tend to be spatially clustered in politically homogeneous cities, while Republicans are spread out in more heterogeneous suburbs and rural areas.

Shifting to new geographies

During the pandemic, many people moved to more affordable places as they experienced reduced income or, alternatively, chose to explore environmentally diverse rural and suburban areas.

In July 2021 the U.S. Census reported that only six of the top 15 fastest-growing cities with a population of 50,000 or more were also among the fastest-growing in 2019 before the pandemic hit. These were often smaller cities: Georgetown, Texas; Leander, Texas; Buckeye, Arizona, New Braunfels, Texas; Fort Meyers, Florida; and Meridian, Idaho.

Cities with the largest growth rates during the pandemic were predominantly in the West and South, including (in order of gain) San Antonio, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; Fort Worth, Texas; Port Lucie Florida; North Las Vegas, Nevada; Cape Coral Florida; and Buckeye, Arizona.

The overall trend was that several of the countrys biggest or densest cities lost residents. Between 2020 and 2021, New York City experienced the largest decrease (305,465 people), followed by San Francisco (54,813), Chicago (45,175), and Los Angeles (40,537). When we compare these numbers to pre-pandemic declines the difference is clear: In 2018-19 New York lost 53,264 people, Baltimore, 8,953, Chicago, 7,447, and San Jose, 6,225. COVID clearly changed peoples preferences for where they wanted to live and work.

People and place matter

As former city dwellers moved to rural or suburban areas, they imported their urban views to new geographies. As Rodden notes, Republicanstend to live in areas that are more heterogeneous, leading to the creation of districts where Republicans win districts by narrower margins.

Democrats who move into these less dense areas may have a meaningful impact on elections. Moving from suburban to rural areas would involve an influx of potentially different voting patterns. Meanwhile, the density of big cities makes their voting outcomes more resilient to these population shifts, since a moderate influx of new voters is unlikely to sway the larger trends. In some smaller communities, a moderate influx may be sufficient to change election outcomes.

Geographically shifting populations are forcing a reexamination of traditional assumptions about red and blue areas. When voters move to new communities are they more influenced by their surroundings, or do they influence new geographies?

It seems the simple answer may be that people choose to move to a place because its affordable and they like the environment, not because its red or blue.

Sheila Lakshmi Steinberg, Ph.D., is a professor of geographic information system, social, and environmental sciences at University of Massachusetts Global.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Musks lawyer Alex Spiro, who is guiding the legal team following the billionaires acquisition, sought to reassure employees that they would not go to jail if the company is found in violation of a Federal Trade Commission consent decree, according to a message viewed by Bloomberg.

I understand that there have been employees at Twitter who do not even work on the FTC matter commenting that they could go to jail if we were not in compliance that is simply not how this works, the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP lawyer wrote in a memo, earlier reported by Insider. It is the companys obligation. It is the companys burden. It is the companys liability.

An information security team at Twitter that oversaw sharing of user data with advertisers and research partners was laid off after the takeover, a move that triggered internal concerns about vulnerability to security threats and potential violations of FTC rules, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs, which started November 3 and affected 50% of all Twitter employees, have contributed to a chaotic atmosphere within the company and were followed this week by the resignations of senior executives, including Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty.

Spiro said Twitter had spoken to the FTC and has its first compliance check upcoming. The legal department is handling it, he said in his note. 

The move to scrap the six-person information security team was combined with layoffs of at least a dozen other employees working on security, privacy and compliance issues at the company, the people said. The full size of those teams wasnt immediately available.

The layoffs and departures are particularly noteworthy at a company that is under an FTC consent decree in which it agreed to better protect users personal data and also has to submit to regular audits of its privacy and data security systems. Twitter has been sharply criticized by former employees for security lapses, and in May was subject to a $130 million fine as part of a settlement with the FTC and Department of Justice over data privacy.

The information security team was focused on third-party risk management and was responsible for providing security assurances to advertisers that work with Twitter and share data with the company, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they arent authorized to discuss the situation publicly.

The team also monitored Twitters sharing of user data with dozens of commercial partners and research organizations, some of whom have access to a programming interface that can be used to view sensitive non-public information about Twitter users, such as location data, IP addresses and unique device identification codes, the people said.

The people at Twitter doing the checks on that access are simply not there anymore, one of the people said, adding that the privacy and security of user data has been put at risk as a result.

The work carried out by the laid off information security team was partly intended to ensure compliance with a consent decree issued by the FTC in March 2011, according to the people. The decree, effective until 2042, ordered that Twitter must establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of non-public consumer information. Violations of the decree can result in large fines.

On Thursday, a leader on Twitters legal team circulated an internal note that warned employees the company would, going forward, ask engineers to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements, according to a memo viewed by Bloomberg.

This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers, wrote the unnamed member of the legal team. I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.

In a statement, the FTC wrote it was tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern. The agency added that no CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow consent decrees.

Twitters cybersecurity policies have previously faced criticism after high-profile data breaches. In 2014 and 2015, Saudi Arabia recruited spies inside the company and used them to obtain information on dissidents operating on the platform anonymously, according to U.S. prosecutors. In 2020, a teenager from Florida was charged for compromising the accounts of prominent people, including Musk and US President Joe Biden, and using them to promote a cryptocurrency scam.

In September, Peiter Zatko, Twitters former head of security who is known as Mudge, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company had poor security practices, which made it vulnerable to teenagers, thieves and spies. He said that Twitters leadership had ignored its engineers in part because their executive incentives led them to prioritize profit over security.

While rare, there have been instances of personal liability for executives at companies from security breaches. Former Uber security head Joe Sullivan was found guilty in San Francisco federal court in a case that stemmed from a 2016 hack details of which he tried to keep hidden. Part of the charges against Sullivan related to the fact that Uber is under an order with the FTC and required to disclose breaches.

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