Yueqi Yang
Hannah Miller
Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is proposing a restructuring deal to Voyager Digital LLC with the goal of attracting customers from the bankrupt digital-asset platform.
Under a two-way announced Friday, Alameda, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, would buy all Voyager digital assets and digital asset loans, other than loans to Three Arrows Capital, in cash at market value. Meanwhile, FTX, his crypto exchange, will offer customers of Voyager an option to receive their share of claims by opening a new account at FTX.
The offer is currently non-binding and has not been accepted by Voyager. A spokesperson for Voyager declined to comment.
“Voyager’s customers did not choose to be bankruptcy investors holding unsecured claims,” said Bankman-Fried, chief executive of FTX. “The goal of our joint proposal is to help establish a better way to resolve an insolvent crypto business -- a way that allows customers to obtain early liquidity and reclaim a portion of their assets without forcing them to speculate on bankruptcy outcomes and take one-sided risks.”
Any customer that does not wish to sign up with FTX would continue to retain all of their rights and claims in the bankruptcy proceedings, but would not receive early access to a distribution on their claim via FTX, according to the proposal.
Earlier this month, Voyager filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, weeks after getting a credit line from Alameda Research. As part of the proposal, Alameda will write off its own $75 million loan claim.
to Voyager, FTX emphasized that “time is of the essence” and that the company’s goodwill with its clients “continues to erode.” FTX stated that it stands to benefit “from the opportunity to build new relationships with new customers” if the deal goes through.
The proposal is “a good move” that could help FTX increase its market share, according to Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of CMS Holdings, which has invested in FTX.
“All of the Voyager customers are in kind of this gray area right now,” he said in an interview. “The ability to give those people liquidity or at least the option for it is huge.”
He noted that the proposal could also help FTX expand its own brand. “It feels like they’re looking to make more steps toward potentially rolling Voyager into FTX entirely,” Matuszewski said.
Bankman-Fried has steadily increased the power and influence of both FTX and Alameda within the crypto industry through a series of acquisitions and bailouts executed during crypto winter. The company is in talks to purchase Bithumb, a South Korean crypto exchange and is looking to raise new funding
Some industry watchers have criticized the growing control Bankman-Fried has over a sector that some think should be decentralized. But Bankman-Fried said Friday in an interview with CNBC that he’s still interested in striking deals that could help support the crypto space.
“We could certainly see ourselves spending some number of hundreds of millions beyond what we have thus far, and in some cases more than that,” he said.
