FTX has recovered more than $5 billion in liquid assets, including cash and digital assets, the company’s attorneys said in a Delaware court hearing today.
The news comes after federal prosecutors announced plans to seize at least $500 million in FTX-related assets in connection with the ongoing lawsuit against the founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The news will provide relief to FTX clients, who collectively hold at least $8 billion in assets that disappeared after the exchange’s implosion in November 2022.
The $5 billion figure is for “any value holdings of dozens of illiquid cryptocurrency tokens, where our holdings are so large relative to the total supply that our holdings cannot be sold without substantially affecting the token market.” FTX attorney Adam Landis told the Tribunal.
FTX’s collapse has been linked to, among other things, an inability to correctly mark illiquid assets in the market.
Executives including Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research and Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, have been borrowing the FTX-issued FTT token.
Alameda controlled the vast majority of outstanding FTT coins, similar to those of a publicly traded company, and could not liquidate its position at full book value.