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People who had money in FTX at the time of its collapse nearly 18 months ago got very lucky this week, as far as bankruptcy proceedings go. But some of them are still, understandably, pretty ticked off.
ICYMI: FTX, the crypto exchange that has become a byword for fraud and a black eye on the face of the entire digital asset industry, said that virtually all of the people who had money frozen on the platform will get their money back, plus interest.
That is an extraordinary outcome. Creditors are rarely made whole in bankruptcy, and it often takes years to claw back whatever pennies on the dollar they’re owed.
And yet, for FTX customers, there’s an unavoidable twinge of resentment over what could have been.
See here: If you had one bitcoin in an FTX account in mid-November of 2022, it was worth about $17,500. Two months ago, when bitcoin hit its all-time high, it would have fetched $73,700.
Today, it’d be worth more than $61,000.
In other words, if you’d been able to hold onto that bitcoin, you could have seen its value go up more than 300%.
The speed and scale of the asset recovery is an especially surprising outcome considering the state of FTX when it landed in the hands of John Ray III, the restructuring expert who shepherded the bankruptcy. Ray, who handled Enron’s liquidation, described FTX as a staggeringly mismanaged company with almost no formalized bookkeeping — a total mess.
Ray’s team now says it expects 98% of FTX creditors to receive approximately 118% of the amount of their claims. The bankruptcy managers tracked down all of FTX’s crypto and other holdings and hired an investment manager to sell them. All of that took time, and while it was happening, crypto markets staged a stunning comeback. The bull run inflated the value of FTX’s significant crypto holdings, leaving the estate with more than enough to pay back customers.
For that single bitcoin holder, that means after a year and half without being able to access their $17,500 in bitcoin, they’ll get about $20,650 back.
It could be worse! FTX’s shareholders — people like Tom Brady and private equity firms like Sequoia Capital — are almost certain to see their equity in the once high-flying crypto startup totally wiped out. Although FTX said it would have as much as $16 billion to disburse, customers and Uncle Sam get paid out first.
FTX’s founder and its former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, got a 25-year prison sentence for stealing customer funds and frittering them away on side projects.
Pretty much from the moment his crypto empire collapsed, SBF has been making the case that FTX was actually solvent. The money was always there, just, like, not in the most liquid form, he claimed. If he’d just had more time, he could have gotten everyone their money back…
Of course, that’s a somewhat fantastical claim.
Sure, the crypto fever returned, but that’s partly because the industry was able to pin the blame for the meltdown on SBF.
Prosecutors and the judge were extremely unmoved by SBF’s claim during sentencing that because customers would likely be made whole that there was effectively no harm, no foul.
That argument seemed to really irk Ray, the guy who’s spent the past year and a half sifting through the rubble of FTX and hunting down its globe-spanning assets. In a letter to the court ahead of Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, Ray wrote that the company Bankman-Fried left behind was “neither solvent nor safe.”
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