It is unclear how much money investors and customers have lost as a result of the collapse of the company, and the situation has become even more unclear since the founder of the company, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been accused of masterminding an “epic” fraud that may have cost billions of dollars to investors, customers, and lenders. The collapse of the company has left many investors and customers wondering about the extent of their losses.
Counsel for the corporation that filed for bankruptcy stated that FTX was successful in recovering more than $5 billion in cash, liquid cryptocurrencies, and liquid investment assets. On the other hand, this is not enough to compensate for the possible loss of customers, which is still uncertain at this time. According to an estimate provided by the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the amount of lost client cash is greater than $8 billion.
FTX is planning to liquidate non-strategic investments that are estimated to be worth around $4.6 billion in an effort to reclaim some of the money that was lost. However, the process to collect proper internal records is still underway, and it is not clear whether or not all of the monies that may be used to repay creditors have been accounted for in full.
The assets that were taken by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, which is based in the same country as Bankman-Fried, are not included in the recovered cash either. The value of the confiscated assets was assessed to be somewhere in the region of $170 million by the attorney, but the Bahamian authorities placed the sum as high as $3.5 billion.
These confiscated assets are mostly made of FTX’s proprietary and illiquid FTT token, which is projected to move towards zero in value, further exacerbating the matter. FTX’s FTT token was taken because its value is likely to reach zero in the near future.
According to a story published by The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, FTX’s legal team appeared in court to seek clearance for the processes necessary to sell affiliates LedgerX, Embed, FTX Japan, and FTX Europe. This was done in an effort to raise capital for the company. However, it was said that the United States Trustee does not support selling the affiliates until the full amount of the suspected FTX fraud has been uncovered.
The fall of FTX will have had a significant impact on celebrities who were working with the platform, such as American football player Tom Brady, Brady’s ex-wife Gisele Bündchen, who is a supermodel, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
