The core tension is whether customers are paid out in the crypto they supposedly had at the exchange or in an equivalent dollar value. So far, FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers have steamrolled ahead with dollarized claims. Yet with bitcoin breaking new highs, ether retesting old ones and solana rallying hard, customers are unsurprisingly asking the question: Why shouldn’t they be paid out in crypto?
Some creditors are pushing heavily for claims to be in-kind. Law firm Moskowitz and Boies, which represents creditors in a class action lawsuit against the estate’s bankruptcy lawyers, filed an objection to estimate the claims when the exchange went bankrupt. This motion was backed by FTX creditor activist Sunil Kavuri, who runs an FTX customer ad-hoc committee voting block of over 1,300 creditors with over $680 million of claims.
This surplus appears to be part of the reason the plan for FTX 2.0 was scrapped. With creditors seemingly made whole, there’s less incentive for the estate to take on the additional risk of restarting the exchange—and that’s not for a lack of buyers.One of my most peculiar experiences this week was getting a tip that an unnoticed GitHub comment revealed that the Ethereum Foundation had received a confidential voluntary request from a state authority.