New FTX CEO says the crypto exchange could be restarted: WSJ 

Update: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried responded on Twitter to John Ray III’s plan to restart the exchange.

“I’m glad Mr. Ray is finally paying lip service to turning the exchange back on after months of squashing such efforts! I’m still waiting for him to finally admit FTX US is solvent and give customers their money back,” Bankman-Fried said. 

The new leader of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX said he has set up a task force to explore restarting FTX.com, The Wall Street Journal reported.  

In an interview, FTX executive John Ray III said of the prospects of a restart: “Everything is on the table.”

The paper also reported that Ray would look into whether reviving FTX’s international exchange would recover more value for the company’s customers than his team could get from liquidating assets or selling the platform.  

Earlier this week, FTX identified $5.5 billion in liquid assets, part of what Ray called a “Herculean effort” to untangle the firm’s finances. FTX filed for bankruptcy in November, and U.S. authorities brought charges against its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried soon after.  

Ray and Bankman-Fried are at odds over the exchange’s bankruptcy filing. Bankman-Fried has said it was a mistake for FTX to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lambasted Ray’s process in handling it. Ray said that Bankman-Fried’s comments were “unhelpful and self-serving.” 

“We don’t need to be dialoguing with him,” Ray said in the interview. “He hasn’t told us anything that I don’t already know.”  

Bankman-Fried responded in a text message to the WSJ saying that the comment was shocking “from someone pretending to care about customers.”

The Justice Department has accused Bankman-Fried of using billions of dollars in customer funds of FTX customer funds for his personal use, to make political contributions and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by the crypto hedge fund founded by Bankman-Fried called Alameda Research. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission also brought their own charges. 

Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions. 
 

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