FTX’s Road to Recovery: Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
There was some premature celebration on Crypto Twitter after an FTX lawyer's comments during a bankruptcy hearing were misinterpreted.
While the lawyer revealed that FTX had recovered $7.3 billion in cash and liquid crypto assets, including $2 billion in cash and $4.3 billion in “liquid” cryptocurrencies, this doesn’t mean the company has nearly all its funds back or is close to restarting.
“Liquid” refers to tokens with a market capitalization of $15 million and $1 million in daily volume over a month.
It’s worth noting that a market cap of $15 million would place a coin at around 700th on CoinMarketCap, indicating that selling some of these assets may be challenging.
FTX is currently evaluating whether restarting the exchange is feasible but warned that it would require significant capital from asset sales or external funding. The existing app was described as a “facade.”
FTX aims to complete its assessment of the viability of relaunching the exchange by Q2 2023.
READ MORE: FTX’s European Operations up for Sale Amid Cryptocurrency Chaos
The FTX debtors aim to file a Channel 11 Target Plan next quarter, but confirmation of the plan isn’t expected until Q2 2024.
In previous statements, the FTX debtors have revealed that the exchange had few internal controls, with decision-making authority resting with CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who is facing 12 felony charges related to the FTX fraud, as well as civil charges from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
SBF has pleaded not guilty, but some of his co-conspirators, including Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have pleaded guilty to charges related to the fraud.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
