John Ray, who took over as CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX prior to bankruptcy proceedings, has created a task force to consider reviving FTX.com.
According to a January 19 report in the Wall Street JournalHe said that everything was “on the table” when it came to the future of FTX.com, including a potential path forward with the exchange’s restart. FTX Trading, trading as FTX.com, was one of 130 FTX Group companies to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in November 2022.
Ray would have been considering reviving the cryptocurrency exchange as part of efforts to compensate users. FTX reported on January 17 that it had identified approximately $5.5 billion of liquid assets in its investigations, with more than $3 billion owed to its top 50 creditors. According to the FTX CEO, he took into account the opinion of some stakeholders who saw the exchange as a “viable business”.
The collapse of FTX and the subsequent criminal charges against many of its executives sent ripples through the crypto space in 2022. Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang have both pleaded guilty to fraud charges, while Ray’s predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried has largely denied many of the allegations. against him. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to appear in court in October for his trial.
Ray apparently enlisted the help of Wang and Ellison in locating some company assets, but he has often traded insults with Bankman-Fried. The former CEO claimed that he had been pressured by the law firm Sullivan & Crowell and the general counsel of FTX US to make Ray a director of FTX before the company’s bankruptcy. Ray has also said that Bankman-Fried no longer has any role on the exchange and cannot speak on his behalf.
“We don’t need to have a dialogue with him,” Ray said of Bankman-Fried. “He hasn’t told us anything I don’t already know.”
FTX US is solvent, as it always as been. https://t.co/XjcyYFsoU0 pic.twitter.com/kn9Wm9wxjl
—SBF (@SBF_FTX) January 18, 2023
SBF said in a Jan. 12 post about a “pre-mortem overview” of FTX that if the exchange were to “reboot,” it might be possible to repay clients with available assets.. The team handling the bankruptcy proceedings and Bankman-Fried publicly disagreed on their approaches to calculating FTX’s balance sheet, with the former CEO stating that FTX US was “fully solvent.”
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