Enlarge image
Surprising plan: FTX boss
John J. Ray III
, here at a hearing in the US Capitol, may want to reopen FTX
Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Investors may initially wonder whether this is good news or bad news: According to a report by the Wall Street Journal,
John J. Ray III
, the new head of the insolvent crypto firm FTX, is considering reopening the trading platform.
Ray is looking for ways to recover the billions in investor and creditor funds that threatened to be lost as a result of the FTX bankruptcy, the newspaper said, citing the first interview Ray gave since taking office in November last year.
Therefore, the FTX boss has already set up a task force to determine whether a restart of the platform might be the right way to achieve this goal.
Enlarge image
Sought-after: FTX founder
Sam Bankman-Fried
, who is accused of fraud, on his way to a New York court
PHOTO: DAVID DEE DELGADO/ REUTERS
FTX founder
Sam Bankman-Fried
, Ray's predecessor at the top of the company, and other ex-managers of the company are accused of criminal behavior, which is why they will probably have to answer in court in the future.
However, there are FTX customers who praised the platform's technology and advocated a reopening, according to Ray.
"Every possibility is on the table," said Ray.
"If this is a path towards our goals, not only will we consider it, then we will do it."
In doing so, Ray follows a simple calculation: How can the greatest possible return be achieved for FTX investors and creditors?
According to "WSJ", there are two options: either the platform resumes operations, or it is liquidated or sold.
The bankruptcy of FTX triggered violent turbulence on the crypto market last year.
Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies tumbled sharply, and other crypto firms also ran into trouble.
The FTX case is the largest crypto platform outage in the past year — but not the only one.
In addition to FTX, the industry companies Celsius Network, Voyager Digital and BlockFi also went bankrupt.
Millions of investors lost a lot of money in the process.
According to the latest estimates by the US authorities and bankruptcy trustees, FTX alone is looking for ten to twelve billion dollars in investor funds that have been pushed over from the trading platform to the Alameda hedge fund, also part of the FTX group.
The background to this was a special line of credit with a theoretical amount of 65 billion dollars, which the founder Bankman-Fried (nickname: SBF) had had specially granted.
Alameda invested half of the billions in around 150 startups worldwide and funded various risky crypto bets, including a Bitcoin mining farm in Kazakhstan.
It is not yet clear how much money will have to be written off.
So far, US authorities have seized around $5 billion in cash and crypto assets from FTX.
In addition, there are crypto values of around three billion dollars in the Bahamas and the investments made by Alameda, the residual value of which has yet to be quantified.
The public prosecutor's office in New York assumes that after the remainders have been used, there will still be a gap in the billions.
If SBF is convicted of fraud, he faces more than 100 years in prison.
cr