Collapsed crypto exchange FTX owes top 50 creditors $3 billion: Filing

Embattled cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes its creditors north of $3 billion, according to a new filing over the weekend.

A list of FTX’s top 50 unsecured creditors, which excludes their names and other identifiable information, shows that the largest of them all is owed more than $226 million. The second-biggest unsecured creditor is claiming over $203 million in unpaid debts from FTX.

In total, the unsecured claims — labelled as such as they were not secured by collateral — amount to $3.1 billion. FTX may have more than 1 million creditors, according to an earlier bankruptcy filing.

FTX’s disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO earlier this month as the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

FTX, once valued at $32 billion, collapsed in a matter of days after the CEO of Binance, a rival firm, said his exchange would liquidate its FTT tokens. FTT, the native token of FTX, plunged as a result, leading to a liquidity crunch at FTX.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice are reportedly investigating what happened.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were trading lower Monday. More than $260 billion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market since Zhao’s Nov. 6 tweet.

Bankman-Fried has been accused by his peers in the crypto industry of flagrant mismanagement and fraud.

His exchange allegedly used customer funds to make risky trades, according to earlier CNBC reporting.

In a damning account of FTX’s demise last week, its new CEO John Ray III said many of the FTX group companies “did not have appropriate corporate governance.”

On Thursday, FTX said it has credible evidence that the exchange had moved assets to the custody of the Bahamian government.

The company’s new chief is now seeking to sell or restructure its global empire.

Neither FTX nor Bankman-Fried were available for comment when contacted by CNBC Monday.

Crypto investors have been burned by a number of high-profile failures this year which have led to ripple effects. Earlier this year, the collapse of so-called stablecoin terraUSD had knock-on effects on a number of companies and contributed to the fall of major hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

The latest collapse to rock the market has raised questions over the opacity of big businesses in crypto, an industry often touted as more decentralized and transparent than traditional finance.

Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said the FTX debacle has added greater impetus for regulators to act on crypto.

“We should not wait until it is large and connected to develop the regulatory frameworks necessary to prevent a crypto shock that could have a much greater destabilizing impact,” Cunliffe said in a speech at Warwick Business School Monday.