FTX says most customers affected by the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse will get all their money back. Bankruptcy lawyers for the fallen firm say they’ve collected assets valued at up to $16.3 billion — more than they will need to repay the company’s estimated $11 billion debt.
John Ray III, the chief restructuring officer of FTX, says the company is “pleased to be in a position to propose a chapter 11 plan that contemplates the return of 100% of bankruptcy claim amounts.” Once the court approves the plan, FTX will begin distributing the funds within 60 days. FTX’s lawyers said earlier this year that they expect customers to “eventually be paid in full.”
But there’s a catch: customers will receive the amount their assets were worth at the time of FTX’s collapse. While the value of digital currencies like Bitcoin tumbled after FTX’s fall, they have since rebounded. That means some creditors feel they’re being shortchanged — since they’re getting dollars rather than digital assets back, and not as many dollars as the digital assets are currently worth.
“In reality [I] am only getting 25% of my Bitcoin back, and that will be over many years,” Arush Sehgal, a member of FTX’s unsecured creditors committee, tells Bloomberg.
The crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, while former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — who is now serving a 25-year prison sentence — resigned. This left Ray to clean up the mess, which he said was worse than the Enron accounting scandal he also worked on.
FTX’s restructuring team still managed to recoup the billions of dollars the exchange owed customers by selling off the company’s assets, including its $884 million stake in the AI startup Anthropic.
Update May 8th, 11:30AM ET: Added clarification about the value of customers’ assets.