A portion of the potential billions of dollars missing from FTX Trading’s coffers, according to the corporation tasked with seizing its assets, has been recovered so far: $740 million.
BitGo, a cryptocurrency custody provider, revealed the sum in court documents on Wednesday. Hours after the business filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, FTX hired BitGo.
Many of FTX’s customers are most concerned about whether they would ever see the money they invested on the site again. According to experts, many customers may never receive their money back, and they will likely have to wait years to do so.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, and his associates lost the company by using customer funds to place wagers in Bankman Fried’s trading company, Alameda Research. The $740 million number is current as of Nov. 16, but more assets have progressively been recovered since then.
The collapse of one of the biggest exchanges, FTX, in little over a week has shocked the crypto community. For conceivable securities offences, the company and Bankman-Fried are under investigation both domestically and internationally. Days after FTX filed for bankruptcy in the United States, securities officials in the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered, confiscated some of the company’s assets.
Regulators in Texas and California say they are also looking into FTX.
When Bankman-Fried informed a group of investors that the company needed around $8 billion to back up its consumers’ crypto holdings, problems with FTX became apparent earlier this month. Earlier this month, amid growing worries about FTX’s stability, users withdrew approximately $5 billion in a single day, creating the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run for the company.
The funds BitGo was able to retrieve are now secured in South Dakota’s “cold storage,” where the cryptocurrency is kept on drives disconnected from the Internet. According to South Dakota state law, BitGo offers “qualified custodian” services.
Along with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the assets recovered also include a variety of less well-known cryptocurrencies with varying levels of appeal, like the Shiba Inu coin.
California-based The history of BitGo includes asset recovery and protection. After the 2014 collapse of the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, they were tasked with protecting assets. The corporation is also in charge of looking after the government of El Salvador’s assets.
