FTXwatcher

Karma: 273

FTXwatcher Jul 19, 2024, 6:53 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Organizations that return FTX funds may be eligible to become creditors and get paid back
(Not a lawyer, not legal advice, but if anyone reads OP and does consult a lawyer, I think they should get advice on the below.)
You focus on answer #5 from Claude for why this may not apply. Do you have anything to say about #7, quoted below? That’s the reason I was expecting charities to have to give everything back.
Court determination of no value given: If the bankruptcy court determines that Organization B provided no value or consideration in exchange for the grant, it might deny creditor status.
Donations are usually made in return for ‘no value or consideration’; this is part of what makes them donations:
A donation is a voluntary transfer of property (often money) from the transferor (donor) to the transferee (donee) with no exchange of value (consideration) on the part of the recipient (donee).
It’s true that in general, avoidance actions or ‘clawbacks’ are designed to create equity among creditors who withdrew and those who didn’t, and this usually means those who withdrew retain some of the money. For example here’s a recent Matt Levine description, bold added:
And in fact US bankruptcy law has mechanisms for dealing with this: Section 547(b) of the bankruptcy code allows a bankruptcy estate to claw back some payments to creditors made within 90 days before bankruptcy, if the company was insolvent and those payments gave the creditors more than they would get in the bankruptcy. So if you withdrew 110 cents on the dollar a day before bankruptcy, and everyone else got back 70 cents after bankruptcy, you have to cough up 40 cents to share with everyone else. And this is true of Ponzi schemes too. Lots of Bernie Madoff’s investors did great, and then had to pay back their winnings to the other, less fortunate investors.
The issue I see is that if a nonprofit received a donation from insolvent FTX/Alameda, ‘what they would get in the bankruptcy’ is likely nothing. Insolvent companies are meant to be paying back creditors, not making donations.
However, if a nonprofit was holding other funds on FTX—perhaps it took in crypto donations via transfers to its FTX account, sold the crypto for USD, and withdrew the USD in the run up to bankruptcy—then yes absolutely check what you’re entitled to and speak to a lawyer before you settle anything.

FTXwatcher Apr 18, 2024, 7:28 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
I could have been clearer about what is being counted as what, but such FTX-related assets are all counted as illiquid in this categorisation / hypothetical. I agree that assets appearing to exceed liabilities in itself doesn’t necessarily mean much, was covered in OP in the first section.
All I’m counting as liquid here is:
- Roughly $1bn of the final SBF balance sheet
  - Mostly looking at $200m ‘USD in ledger prime’, $500m ‘locked USDT’, and $500m of HOOD shares.
- The $5bn returned to customers during the bank run
  - Since this was successfully returned, it’s almost liquid-by-definition.
  - I would assume this was overwhelmingly USD / stablecoins / BTC / ETH, since those collectively made up almost all of the final liabilities (SBF balance sheet over on top left)
- The $???bn returned to the lenders in June 2022
  - I speculated $10bn in prior comment, but again this is very much just a guess.
Anyway, it’s hard to put much weight on any of this because so much is uncertain, including the accuracy of that balance sheet.

FTXwatcher Apr 17, 2024, 11:10 AM
22 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
Caroline claims she was able to track their finances well enough to (a) establish that they couldn’t afford to buy out Binance and (b) calculate a -$2.7bn NAV-excluding SamCoins for Alameda and recommend against $3bn of venture investments, both in 2021. I gave some links for that in OP. Then they calculated out how to repay lenders in June 2022, creating the spreadsheet that was central to the eventual guilty findings. So I don’t think they were completely clueless when it came to 10 figure numbers or the big picture more generally.

I suppose I consider it almost a given that they did not have good financial controls on ‘mere’ 7-8 figure sums, because at this scale and complexity that would be a full time job for a professional, probably multiple professionals. Per Going Infinite, VCs knew this and tried to push Sam to hire a CFO; he mocked them as quoted in OP and refused. So in the end all four people permitted to know the true state of things had substantial other responsibilities and no accounting background.

FTXwatcher Apr 16, 2024, 5:53 PM
11 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
The framing sounds too generous, since I do not think there was any plan to transfer it at any point. But I can see a grain of truth here. As covered in OP, SBF seemed to think Alameda’s balance sheet by October 2022 was very roughly:
- $18bn of illiquid assets
- $6bn of liquid assets
- -$15bn of customer liabilities
Then the customers started to withdraw, $5bn in liquid assets was returned, then they more or less ran out and declared bankruptcy.
So what might this have looked like before returning money to crypto lenders in June 2022? I did not find any concrete figure for what the size of those transfers was, but I’ve generally assumed around $10bn. If so then the pre-return state was:
- $18bn of illiquid assets
- $16bn of liquid assets
- -$15bn of customer liabilities
- -$10bn of crypto lender liabilities
So on this hypothetical, at this point Alameda/FTX have liquid assets exceeding customer liabilities; in a crisis of confidence they can meet a full bank run from customers, though of course at cost of still going bankrupt and blowing up the lenders.
To be clear, this is all very rough and speculative. But I can readily imagine that Alameda had sufficient liquid assets to cover customer liabilities before they repaid their other major funding source. Of course the problems of the commingled assets, investing of customer assets, lying to everyone, and various other crimes would remain.