Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX claims in Delaware bankruptcy court that it was able to recover $5 billion in liquid assets, including cash and digital assets, lawyers told the court. They say there are profits from more than 300 non-strategic investments that could yield that amount. However, the lawyers said that the total amount missing between FTX’s assets and the extent of its liabilities to customers and creditors is still unclear.
The company’s lawyer, Adam Landis, emphasized that the figure of $5 billion does not include illiquid cryptocurrency assets and added that the company’s holdings are so large that if they were to sell them, it would lead to substantial damage to the market and reduce the value of these holdings.
In the meantime, the federal bankruptcy judge, John T. Dorsey (John T. Dorsey) accepted the company’s request to keep the names of the customers secret and not publish them, in the meantime, for a period of three months. The lawyers said FTX has more than 9 million customers with a transaction volume of more than $120 billion.
“We know what Alameda did with the money,” the lawyers added about the conduct of the FTX-related hedge fund that prosecutors claim illegally used customer funds on the FTX exchange to make risky investments. According to them, the former CEO Bankman-Fried himself ordered the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to create the same back door, the same Alameda that allowed the company to take the money from the customers without their permission and bet on them. According to the information provided by the lawyers to the court, Alameda reached a credit limit of 65 billion dollars.
“It bought planes, houses, threw parties, made political donations, gave personal loans to its founders. It sponsored the FTX stadium in Miami, the Formula 1 team, Coachella and many other businesses, events and personalities. It gambled on cryptocurrency investments – sometimes close without success”.
Federal prosecutors announced a plan to seize at least $500 million in assets linked to the company of Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old CEO of FTX, who was arrested in the Bahamas and later extradited to the United States. He is charged with fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate campaign finance laws and was released on $250 million bail.
The company recently estimated that at least $8 billion of customer assets had evaporated in what the company’s new CEO, John J. Ray, recently called the worst case of corporate governance failure he had ever seen.
At the same time and in contrast to what is happening in the rest of the market that lays off employees, the crypto exchange Binance is talking about how it wants to increase the scope of its employees in the coming year by an additional 15%-30%, at least that’s what CEO Changfeng Zhao said. The lease says they want to be ready for the next time the crypto market surges. According to Zhao, in 2022 Binance increased the number of employees in the company from 3,000 to 8,000 employees.
Other companies were forced to lay off workers after the crypto market wiped $1.4 trillion off its value in one year. For example, just yesterday Coinbase was forced to lower forecasts and announced the layoffs of 950 employees, which are about 20% of its employees.
Coinbase’s CEO claimed that the fall in crypto and the growing pressure on the sector was caused by “unscrupulous players in the industry” referring to FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried; “The collapse of FTX and the resulting trend created a black eye for the industry,” he said, adding that it is likely There is still room to fall – the Coinbase stock has crashed by 85% since the IPO (for more on the layoffs at Coinbase, click here)
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