On Wednesday, attorneys for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX told a Delaware bankruptcy court that they have located over $5 billion in assets, including both cash and virtual assets.
These recovered funds are not part of the assets seized by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas. Those seized assets were mostly in the exchange’s native token, the FTX token. Those funds are estimated to be worth approximately $460 million.
FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said the exchange is still “working to rebuild transaction history,” noting the company still owed clients money, however the amounts owed are, “still unclear.”
Landis Rath & Cobb attorney Adam Landis said on behalf of FTX, “We have located over $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency and liquid investment securities measured at petition date value. [It] just does not ascribe any value to holdings of dozens of illiquid cryptocurrency tokens, where our holdings are so large relative to the total supply that our positions cannot be sold without substantially affecting the market for the token.”
John J. Ray, FTX’s new CEO, has said previously that at least $8 billion in customer funds are unaccounted for, and recordkeeping was in some cases, almost nonexistent, making FTX the “worst” case of reckless management and corporate control he has ever seen.
Once one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX hit a liquidity crunch which ultimately sent it into bankruptcy in November. Its collapse caused major ripple effects throughout the cryptocurrency sector. Initial bankruptcy filings pointed to an amount between $1 billion and $10 billion owed to customers.
The former CEO of the company, Sam Bankman-Fried, has pled not-guilty to eight criminal charges over the matter in a US federal court. Currently a task force set up by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is attempting to track and recover missing customer funds, as it investigates the circumstances which led to the collapse of the exchange.