Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX could be rebooted as early as next year, with lawyers from the investment bank handling the proceedings expected to make a decision on how to proceed by mid-December.
In a Tuesday court hearing reported by The Straits Times, Kevin Cofsky of Perella Weinberg Partners, the firm representing FTX, said they were in the midst of negotiating with bidders to restart the FTX exchange.
“We are engaging with multiple parties every day,” Cofsky said in the hearing.
The binding offers are from three different bidders, each of which proposes a different option for the task at hand. One option is to sell the entire exchange, which would include a valuable list of the nine million plus FTX customers, while another option would bring on a partner to help reboot the trading platform.
A plan to restart was first discussed earlier this year, when FTX’s lead bankruptcy attorney Andrew Dietderich revealed that the firm was considering the idea in an April court hearing, while also disclosing that the bankruptcy estate had recovered $7.3 billion worth of assets.
Those plans began to appear more and more realistic after several well-funded parties expressed interest in funding the effort, and lawyers for the FTX bankruptcy estate listed hours-long evaluations of the proposed restart as billable items.
In a reorganization plan submitted in August, FTX proposed returning value to creditors with proceeds from the sale or recapitalization of the rebooted exchange. FTX’s native exchange token FTT surged sharply following the news, despite the liquidators noting that FTT would not play a role in the exchange restart.
At the time, FTX’s official committee of unsecured creditors (UCC) demanded that they should decide who runs FTX 2.0 and called for the creation of a “regulatory-compliant” recovery token for the new exchange.
