The ghosts of FTX are returning to put pressure on the token market as bankruptcy courts are contemplating billions of dollars worth of coin sales.
FTX, the trading platform founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, in a court filing on Tuesday detailed plans to sell crypto tokens still held by the company, part of the process of returning cash to some of the company's creditors.
The proposal, which will be considered by the bankruptcy judge Wednesday afternoon, begins a delicate balancing act. While the parties in the case want to return money to FTX's creditors as quickly as possible, they also do not want to start a token fire sale that could tank the market. The potential sales come at an especially sensitive time, with token trading volumes near multi-year lows.
FTX recently revealed that it still owns more than $3 billion in digital assets, including around $500 million in Bitcoin, as well as more than $1 billion in digital assets.
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o Solana, a token that was not affiliated with FTX but that was defended by Bankman-Fried. By comparison, SOL's total market capitalization on Wednesday was about $7.5 billion, with about $300 million traded in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.com.
While the Bitcoin market can likely absorb the gradual selling made by the FTX bankruptcies mass, the SOL market is likely to feel a lot of pain, said Stรฉphane Ouellette, CEO of the crypto-institutional advisory platform.
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โYou can't sell Solana worth a billion dollars. It is not liquid at all,โ says Ouellette. "Things could get really bad."
Last week, SOL price has fallen up around 4% to $18.50, likely partly as a result of FTX's estate revealing it owned so much.
The bankruptcy estate does everything possible to limit the impact of sales on prices. The proposal would limit the companies' investment advisers to selling up to $100 million in coins in a given week, with the potential to sell more with written approval from some creditors. Under the proposal, the committee representing some creditors, as well as the bankruptcy trustee, would also approve plans to sell Bitcoin, Ether and some other tokens.
Other relatively low-liquidity so-called "altcoins" still held by the FTX estate include Aptos, XRP and Stargate Finance, according to a court filing on Monday.
โI don't know how they're going to sell these things. There are very few buyers of altcoins,โ Ouellette said.
Write to Joe Light at joe.light@barrons.com
