With every passing day, new revelations with respect to FTX’s current and past state of affairs are being made. Recently, it was brought to light that the top 50 creditors of the company are owed over $3 billion. Alongside, a court filing outlined that at the beginning of this week, FTX and its affiliates had a total cash balance of $1.24 billion. Amid all this, funders like Ripple are looking to aid the beleaguered exchange.
In a recent letter, the founder of the exchange—Sam Bankman-Fried, aka SBF—apologized to the staff. He said,
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, and I would give anything to be able to go back and do things over again.”
Also Read: Binance’s CZ on SBF: ‘Only a Psychopath Can Write That Tweet’
Is there still a chance to save FTX?
The letter penned by SBF further chalked out the $51 billion crash in collateral from $60 billion to $9 billion. Notably, the spring market crash roughly halved collateral to $30 billion, while liabilities were $2 billion. Then, a combination of a credit squeeze, a further selloff in virtual coins, and a “run on the bank” left collateral at $9 billion ahead of FTX’s November 11 bankruptcy. The estimate for liabilities had reached $8 billion by then. SBF said,
“I did not realize the full extent of the margin position, nor did I realize the magnitude of the risk posed by a hyper-correlated crash.”
The founder of the exchange also revealed that “potential interest in billions of dollars of funding” came in roughly eight minutes after he signed the Chapter 11 documents. He skeptically also opined that there was still a chance to save the company. Elaborating on the same, SBF said,
“Maybe there still is a chance to save the company. I believe that there are billions dollars of genuine interest from new investors that could go to customers making whole. But I can’t promise you anything will happen, because it’s not my choice.”
Also Read: FTX employees allegedly lose their ‘life savings’