FTX holds $1.24b cash balance

FTX has a total cash balance of $1.24 billion, a court filing by advisers on the stricken crypto exchange’s restructuring showed ahead of US bankruptcy hearings set for later yesterday.

The collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has left an estimated 1 million creditors facing losses totalling billions of dollars.

Its cash balance as of Sunday was “substantially higher” than previously thought, Edgar Mosley of Alvarez & Marshal said.

It includes around $400 million at accounts related to Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and $172 million at FTX’s Japan arm.

FTX had previously said that it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The details of FTX’s cash balances came ahead of a hearing on FTX’s so-called first-day motions set for yesterday before a US bankruptcy judge. Bankman-Fried secretly used $10 billion in customer funds to prop up his trading business, and that at least $1 billion of those deposits had vanished.

FTX’s fall from grace has sent shivers through the crypto world, driving bitcoin to its lowest level in around two years and triggering fears of contagion among other firms already reeling from the collapse in the crypto market this year.

Major US crypto lender Genesis said on Monday it was trying to avert bankruptcy, days after FTX’s collapse forced it to suspend customer redemptions.