According to court documents, more than 100 parties are interested in purchasing a portion of the insolvent cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces up to 115 years in prison if proven guilty of all eight criminal accusations against him, used to operate four businesses that will be auctioned off by the attorneys handling his chapter 11 bankruptcy case.
According to a document submitted on Sunday to the Delaware bankruptcy court, 59 confidentially agreements have been made and 117 parties have expressed interest in buying at least one FTX-owned entity. They are listed in the filing as “different financial and strategic counterparties globally,” but their identities have not been made public.
LedgerX, an exchange platform that FTX bought in October 2021, and Embed, a purchase made as part of plans to provide stock trading on FTX, both have at least 50 parties interested in them, according to the filings.
According to the paperwork, FTX Europe and FTX Japan are also offered for sale and each has about 40 interested parties. For Embed and LedgerX, the debtors created management presentations with “preliminary diligence materials,” while they are still in the process of doing so for the FTX platforms, whose operations have been suspended.
Although bankruptcy records from December 2022 stated that the four businesses up for sale “kept segregated customer accounts,” Bankman-Fried is accused of squandering as much as $8 billion of customers’ money to support luxury items and political donations.
Additionally, it was revealed that FTX Europe and FTX Japan had separate corporate headquarters while Embed, LedgerX, and FTX Europe all maintained independent computer systems.
The transactions are crucial to maximizing the estate’s worth in the goal of compensating FTX customers, according to the debtors, who claimed to have received “dozens of unsolicited inbound enquiries.” The start date for the auctions is February 27.
The United States Trustee, a division of the federal justice department, has, however, protested the sales, citing “strong cause for worry.” It warned against approving such transactions since doing so would result in the sale of company records and obstruct future investigations into FTX’s suspected misconduct. On Wednesday, a hearing is scheduled at the Delaware bankruptcy court.
