According to people familiar with the situation, FTX and Binance have made the highest offer for the assets of unconventional cryptocurrency lender Voyager Digital Ltd, VYGVQ -5.89%, but no offer has yet been approved. The Wall Street Journal Report.
According to sources, the current offer from Binance is around $50 million, which is slightly higher than a rival offer from FTX.
2019-founded Voyager ran a crypto lending platform that accepted deposits from customers, paid interest on those deposits, and then leased properties to other parties. In 2019, it went public through a reverse merger. The company’s market value at the stock’s high in 2021 was $3.9 billion.
Voyager claims to have total assets of $5 billion and total liabilities of $4.9 billion when it files for bankruptcy in July 2022.
So what does this mean?
Some of the beneficiaries of the crypto decline include FTX and Binance. Both have been successful in increasing their trading market share. Sam Bankman-Company, Frieder FTX, has been actively acquiring volatile assets during recessions.
On September 13, Voyager’s assets were laid up took. Wave Financial, a manager of cryptocurrency investments, and trading platform Crosstower are two other bidders.
It is also possible that a different bidder will submit a new competing offer. The winning bid will be revealed at a hearing in New York on September 29, but it could happen sooner.
Where does this all start?
Voyager, which is based in New York and does business in Toronto, filed for bankruptcy in July after a flood of claims that the company’s cash reserves were depleted as a result of the halt in cryptocurrency sales. At the time of filing, its stock price had fallen more than 95% since 2022.
Because it gave away $1.1 billion, it was unable to meet withdrawal requests and instead reduced and eventually closed them. Voyager lent more than $650 million to Three Arrows Capital Ltd., a hedge fund, more than half of the total.
A British Virgin Islands court issued a liquidation order for Three Arrows in June, after creditors filed a lawsuit against the business following the failure of stablecoin TerraUSD.
Trading company Alameda Research was another debtor, and at the time of the bankruptcy, they owed Voyager $377 million in cryptocurrency.
In its bankruptcy filing in July, Voyager claimed that the company also sold a portion of itself to Alameda, which held a 9.5% ownership position.
Alameda gave Voyager two lines of credit in June, one for $200 million in cash and the other for 15,000 bitcoins. Alameda was Voyager’s largest creditor at the time of the bankruptcy, with $75 million in unsecured debt.
Alameda agreed repayment About $200 million Voyager had a court filing on Sept. 19 for $160 million in borrowed cryptocurrency.
FTX and Binance are vying to buy Voyager’s assets at the bankruptcy auction, which was held in New York last week, according to previous reports. The final results of the auction are expected to be released on September 29, although this date may be earlier.
