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"Voluntary Chapter 11" in Delaware. Figures.

That gets them out from bankruptcy in the Bahamas, which is much tougher than US law. The Bahamas still has classic tough bankruptcy laws, where there's no debtor-in-possession reorganization. It's straight to liquidation, with a court-appointed receiver in charge.

This should be, and may be, converted to a straight liquidation. Chapter 11 can be useful for restarting companies that actually do something, like General Motors. There, much of the value is in the ongoing business. FTX, going forward, has no ongoing business. Lawyers for creditors will be making that argument.

Note that Bankman-Fried is still employed by FTX, "assisting".

Current banners at FTX.com: "FTX is currently unable to process withdrawals. We strongly advise against depositing. Deposits of TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT are disabled. All onboarding of new clients has been suspended until further notice."

"We have reached an agreement with Tron to establish a special facility to allow holders of TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT to swap assets from FTX 1:1 to external wallets. This functionality will be enabled at 18:30 UTC, November 10, 2022."




Actually, the Bahamas already froze their stuff and that subsidiary is not part of the Chapter 11. Looks like Australia did the same. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/sam-bankman-frie...


>"We have reached an agreement with Tron to establish a special facility to allow holders of TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT to swap assets from FTX 1:1 to external wallets. This functionality will be enabled at 18:30 UTC, November 10, 2022."

These centralized coins are hilarious. How can you negotiate a special facility to swap to those assets when they're presumably gone? Also now that they've filed for Chapter 11 won't all these 'activities' and withdrawals be frozen?


Justin will conjure more out of thin air, and be probably views it as more profitable to encourage as many sheep into his ecosystem as possible, even if that means covering losses.


> We strongly advise against depositing

Wait, withdrawls are completely frozen and the company is done for, but they are still accepting deposits?!


I'm not familiar with any of the listed currencies, but in a properly-designed cryptocurrency a deposit to a given public key is just any transaction[0] that includes a output to that public key. There's no such thing as accepting or not accepting deposits, at most they could actively refund them, which bankruptcy presumably prevents them from doing.

IOW, they're saying: "If you give us money, we will (/may) be forced to give it to our creditors rather than back to you, so don't do that.".

0: IE, a message published by Alice to the effect of "[Alice's public key] gives [Bob's public key] X [coin]s. [Alice's signature for this message]", published on the distributed ledger. Note that Alice can create and publish such a message without any input from Bob.


They've at least turned off signups.

There are still people who believe. This is the top comment on FTX on Coinmarketcap, posted yesterday:

$FTT -- Take a screenshot of this post

1. Someone is going to buy out FTX and this exchange is not shutting down. By someone I mean Elon Musk kind of people.

2. No. FTT isn't going to wipeout if we talk about the fall, most of the cryptos have all fallen significantly. So a crypto going down from $24 to $3 doesn't mean the are going out for good.

3. $8 Billion Dollars as some here are fidgeting to understand isn't a large number if you look at the entire market cap of the crypto sitting at $800 Billion and $3 Trillion sometime back.

There are people who truly believe. And there are those who exploit that belief.


So sad, it’s like the people who sell their shoes for one more bet at the track..


The thing is, if there are enough believers they will validate each other in the short term by re-inflating the hype bubble


This sound suspiciously close to what has happened by getting so many retail traders into the market in the last few years.


I don’t think it’s possible to stop someone from depositing something into a wallet/key. That’s an issue with things like doxxing or spreading humiliating media of someone. You can push anything via the protocols to any address.


How would they be able to stop people making deposits?


By no more accepting deposits?


I can transfer cryptocurrency to any address of yours right now, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it.


Hadn't really thought about it before. But sounds like a good way to frame someone for a crime.


You can even add turbocash to the mix lol


I don’t think you have a choice to accept a deposit or not, do you? You can’t stop people sending you coins. And sending them back costs you money so you wouldn’t do that.


What address do you think people would send to? You can't send to some random address that you think is owned by an exchange and have it show up in your account. They give you an address to send to when you say you want to make a deposit. How did you think it worked?


> They give you an address to send to when you say you want to make a deposit. How did you think it worked?

And then people can keep sending to the same address. The way crypto works there’s no way to stop someone doing that I’m afraid - just how it works.

They could send it back (spending money) but you can’t stop it being sent.


They can either send it back or add it to their ledger. You are conflating sending to an address with an exchange keeping a balance. A cryptocurrency and an exchange are two very separate things.


Most users will have stored their deposit addresses in other exchanges and wallets rather than look them up and enter them each time.


many other exchanges and wallets force users to store an address book of addresses associated with them. this user experience will result in deposits to their old addresses at FTX. there is nothing FTX can do to prevent that.


They can send it back just as easily


yes, could. in practice even functioning exchanges opt not to bother. it is a poor practice we should call out, this is definitely something that a regulatory framework could address and carve out procedures for. (people could do spam attacks, so there is a line on how much to bother)


Once there are regulations that are penned and enforced by a centralised authority what is the use of cryptocurrency?


running and using an exchange to custody assets is entirely optional and also not the point of cryptocurrency

the regulations apply to people that chose to do that and don't apply to people that use cryptocurrency


Wait, why does a Bahamas based company get to choose the jurisdiction where its bankruptcy proceedings are held? Surely if they are a Bahamas company they are beholden to Bahamas bankruptcy laws?


Background on multi-jurisdiction bankruptcies.[1] It's complicated. A lot depends on who makes the first legal move.

[1] https://www.financierworldwide.com/forum-managing-cross-bord...


The former Enron Chairman has stepped in to be the new FTx CEO. Seems fitting.

https://blockworks.co/news/ftx-ceo-bankman-fried-resigns-ban...


For anyone who may be confused this is the CEO who cleaned up the Enron mess. Not Jeffrey Skilling who was the CEO who helped make it happen.


How was his compensation negotiated? Obviously, you would need to be paid a lot to wade into this shit show but at the same time, every dollar paid to him is a dollar out of a creditor's pocket. What are the incentives on every side driving this negotiation?


Withdrawals halted yet one of the FTX hot wallets had hundreds of thousands of BUSD and USDC going out earlier today.


If you're in the Bahamas you can withdraw. People on Twitter with millions in FTX have been paying Bahaman citizens to KYC their accounts so they can withdraw. This is obviously highly illegal.


What makes it/why is it illegal?


Getting a mule to attest they own an account they do not obviously is illegal, and does an end run against KYC laws


Ah, I didn’t realize they were pretending to be someone else, I just assumed they were being given permission by the owners in some way.

If I had a chunk of money there it seems like it would be less risky to buy a plane ticket.


A few of my buddies were able to change out 1000 or so dollars each to BTUSD or something like that. Not really into crypto so I don't know the details but they just exchanged 100$ at a time or so and it took a few hours for each transfer to confirm


> Chapter 11 can be useful for restarting companies that actually do something, like General Motors. There, much of the value is in the ongoing business. FTX, going forward, has no ongoing business.

I was looking for a diplomatic way to write "and nothing of value was lost...", but you nailed it.


A financial firm with nominal billions in outstanding debts and credits seems like the worst thing to shut down with a straight liquidation. Nothing says "these creditors get nothing" like the need to immediately firesale numerous crypto tokens moving the price dramatically.




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