Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, says the crypto exchange’s bankruptcy restructuring team claims about missing millions worth of customer funds are wrong. He said the team’s claims are contradicted by data later on in the same document.
John Ray, FTX CEO, made a presentation to the company’s committee of unsecured creditors on Wednesday. He highlighted that they found only $181 million worth of FTX US funds, wherein half of the assets were drained from wallets in unauthorized transfers following the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022.
SBF said FTX US was and is solvent with hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of customer balances. He wrote in a Substack newsletter that S&C reveals in the same report that FTX US has an additional $428 million in bank accounts. There is an additional $181 million of tokens for about $609 million of total assets. SBF may have been referring to a Confirmed Cash table attributing $428 million to the West Realm Shires silo, which is the parent company of FTX US and LedgerX.
Ray had stated on November 17 in his initial declaration that the West Realm Shire silo includes FTX US, LedgerX, FTX US Capital Markets and Embed Clearing. SBF is using numbers that were current when he stepped down as CEO on November 11, while Ray has been distancing the company from its founder and cutting off his access to company records.
Furthermore, Bankman-Fried maintains that he didn’t steal funds and certainly didn’t stash away billions of dollars. He believes it’s ridiculous that FTX US users haven’t been made whole and gotten their funds back yet.
