Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX US, rejected claims by the company’s current leadership in a presentation Tuesday that the team has only recovered $181 million in funds from the exchange.
See related article: FTX Says $415 Million in Crypto Hacked Since Filing for Bankruptcy
Fast facts
- FTX’s current CEO, John J. Ray III, said half of those funds were lost to unauthorized transfers after FTX.com filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 11.
- “These claims of [restructuring firm Sullivan & Cromwell] they are wrong and contradicted by data later in the same paper,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday. “FTX US was and is solvent, probably with hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of customer balances.”
- FTX US, established in 2020 to serve US-based clients, is a separate entity from the Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX.com.
- Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest for his role in the FTX.com collapse and faces charges of securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering and violation of campaign finance rules. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
- He launched a Substack on January 13, a personal online newsletter that users can subscribe to.
- In this recent post on Substack, Bankman-Fried goes into lengthy explanations of how he believes FTX US remains solvent. However, as Ray has distanced himself and the company from his former principal, Bankman-Fried may not have access to the most up-to-date information.
- FTX.com leadership told creditors Tuesday that the hackers had lost $415 million since the November 11 bankruptcy filing, $90 million of which had been siphoned off from FTX US.
- FTX.com has marked for recovery approximately $5.5 billion in liquid assets, consisting of $1.7 billion in cash, $3.5 billion in cryptocurrency, including FTX Token (FTT), and $300 million in liquid securities.
See related article: US lawyers and Bahamian liquidators trade barbs over who governs FTX bankruptcy jurisdiction