Bankrupt Crypto Firm Voyager Sold to FTX for $1.4B

Crypto, Voyager, restructuring, bitcoin

Voyager Digital will sell its assets to cryptocurrency exchange FTX for $1.4 billion, the struggling crypto lender announced late Monday (Sept. 26).

The sale came “after multiple rounds of bidding in a highly competitive auction process that lasted two weeks,” according to a press release.

PYMNTS had reported that 22 parties had shown interest in purchasing Voyager, including the crypto exchange Binance, which at one point had offered a slightly higher bid than FTX.

Voyager said FTX’s bid is based on the fair market value of all Voyager cryptocurrency “at a to-be-determined date in the future,” an estimated $1.3 billion at current prices, plus “additional consideration that is estimated as providing approximately $111 million of incremental value.”

Voyager filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July, a week after suspending withdrawals and two weeks after getting a $485 million bailout from FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s company Alameda Research.

Read more: Crypto Lender Voyager Heads to Bankruptcy Auction

FTX and Alameda had proposed purchasing Voyager in July, but a lawyer for Voyager countered that bid was a “low-ball bid dressed up as a white knight rescue” and would actually cost the company money in the long term.

See more: Alameda to Return $200M Voyager Digital Loan

Alameda also said it will return $200 million in cryptocurrency borrowed from the company. Court documents showede Alameda would pay about 6,500 bitcoin and roughly 51,000 ether, and Voyager would return the collateral connected to the loan. Alameda had tweeted over the summer that it was “happy” to return the loan.

As PYMNTS reported, Voyager and its affiliates Voyager Digital and Voyager Digital Holdings sought Chapter 11 voluntarily to restructure and “create a path” to resume operations and “return value to customers.”

At the time of the filing, Voyager had more than $650 million in claims against Three Arrows Capital, a Singapore-based crypto hedge fund, which is in liquidation. According to the news release, those claims “remain with the bankruptcy estate, which will distribute any available recovery on such claims to the estate’s creditors.”

The news comes just days after Voyager announced the resignation of Chief Financial Officer Ashwin Prithipaul, who stepped down “to pursue other opportunities,” according to a company news release last week. CEO Stephen Ehrlich will do Prithipaul’s job until a replacement is named, Voyager said.

Read more: Bankrupt Crypto Lender Voyager’s CFO Ashwin Prithipaul Resigns

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