Bring It Back

It has been a rough couple of months since FTX shocked the world by halting withdrawals on their exchange and filing for bankruptcy. We finally got a break in market conditions but we still have no idea where the fallout could reach, with Genesis now considering their own Chapter 11 filing. In the meantime, the newly appointed CEO of FTX has been relatively quiet, but John Ray III has been talking this week and leading investors to believe their beloved exchange may reopen. 

• According to the Wallstreet Journal, the new CEO has created a task force to explore restarting FTX.com.
• Ray is considering whether a restart of the exchange would be more valuable to customers than a liquidation of assets and has said that “everything is on the table.”
• Earlier this week, a team of top-level management at FTX met with the committee of unsecured creditors to share a presentation on the asset recovery process, where they announced they discovered $5.5 billion of liquid assets. Ray called the asset recovery a “Herculian investigative effort.”
• SBF continues to maintain that FTX US is solvent. However, the current management team has stated that both the US and the international exchanges face digital asset shortfalls.
• FTT, the FTX exchange token, pumped 30% after the news broke.

Is it possible that record-keeping at FTX was so inadequate that Bankman-Fried merely couldn’t find the assets? After all, he was running dozens of businesses and exhaustion would surely affect your ability to think clearly. Not to mention, we have all wondered how on earth they could lose so much money. If all of the assets are recovered, it will be interesting to see how the criminal proceedings against SBF play out.