FTX wasn't bankrupt? 🤔
New documents appeared on X (formerly Twitter) a few hours ago requesting a review of the FTX bankruptcy case. They feature a sworn affidavit from Dan Chapsky, the former Head of Data Science. He claims the following:
Two separate analyses conducted at the time showed that while the exchange was indeed suffering from a severe liquidity deficit, it remained solvent. Allegedly, there were enough assets to cover customer deposits, and users could have been made whole within months rather than years—if the company hadn't been forced into complex bankruptcy proceedings and abruptly shut down.
These are fascinating claims to surface after all this time. What do you think about this?
A Quick Reality Check
While Dan Chapsky's statement sounds compelling, it’s important to distinguish between solvency (having assets that equal or exceed liabilities) and liquidity (having cash on hand to pay people back right now).
The "assets" FTX held were often highly illiquid tokens (like FTT or Serum) or venture investments that couldn't be sold quickly without their value crashing to zero. So, while on a spreadsheet the numbers might have "balanced," in the real world, the money wasn't there when the "bank run" happened.
