SBF refuted all the claims made by FTX. He said that they hadn’t included $428 million of cash held by FTX US in their calculations, and that that amount of cash would be sufficient to pay back the exchange’s US-based former customers.
“These claims by S&C are wrong, and contradicted by data later on in the same document,” he wrote on Substack. “FTX US was and is solvent, likely with hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of customer balances.”
This isn’t the first time that Bankman-Fried has said FTX.US isn’t facing the same solvency issues as his broader crypto empire. “This was about FTX International,” he said on Twitter on November 10 when addressing the exchange’s solvency crisis. “FTX US, the US-based exchange that accepts Americans, was not financially impacted by this shitshow. It’s 100% liquid.”
FTX.US filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November, alongside FTX International and its sister trading firm Alameda Research, among other companies under the FTX umbrella. The filing came just one day after that tweet.
Authorities in the Bahamas arrested Bankman-Fried the following month and extradited him to the US. Federal prosecutors have charged him with eight counts of criminal activity including fraud, money laundering, and violating campaign finance laws.
FTX provided some additional details about its recovery efforts on Tuesday, saying it had recovered $1.7 billion in cash, $3.5 billion in liquid cryptocurrency and $300 million in liquid securities. “We are making progress in our efforts to maximize recoveries, and it has taken a Herculean investigative effort from our team to uncover this preliminary information,” Ray said in a statement.
The crypto assets recovered to date include $685 million in Solana, $529 million in FTX’s proprietary FTT token and $268 million in bitcoin, based on crypto prices on Nov. 11, 2022. Solana, which was lauded by Bankman-Fried, lost most of its value in 2022. During FTX’s initial investigation into hacks of its system, it uncovered a November asset seizure by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, which led to a dispute between FTX’s U.S.-based bankruptcy team and Bahamian regulators.
The two sides settled their differences in January, and Ray said on Tuesday that the Bahamian government was holding $426 million for creditors. Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis referenced the dispute during a Tuesday event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, saying Ray’s team had “come around” and accepted that the Bahamian asset seizure “was appropriate and perhaps has saved the day for many of the investors in FTX.”
