The Sam Bankman-Fried empire includes illiquid investments in billions

The business empire of Sam Bankman-Fried includes illiquid risk capital investments in billions of billions, as internal records of the Financial Times show, which underlines the uncertain relaxation of the customers of its collapsed FTX exchange.

The 30-year-old entrepreneur, once a star of the crypto industry, brought FTX International, his independent US arm, and his own trading company Alameda Research into a joint bankruptcy proceedings before the Federal Court of Delaware.

In the first submissions, both assets and liabilities of the group were given with $ 10 to $ 50 billion. The new CEO of FTX, John Ray, who was appointed chairman during the liquidation of Enron, said that the companies had "valuable assets" and the bankruptcy would maximize the return.

The extensive risk capital portfolio will increase the complexity of the insolvency procedure, which even includes more than 130 companies controlled by Bankman-Fried. The collapse of FTX is one of the most dramatic failures in the crypto industry, not only this year, but since the creation of Bitcoin more than a decade.

ftx and its associated companies have not yet announced the exact scope of their liabilities and assets as well as the probably existing shortfall. The recently deceased head of the institutional distribution of FTX, Zane Tackett, said on Friday on Twitter that the shortfall was on billions of dollars. FTX did not react immediately to a request for comment.

Every gap between assets and liabilities is influenced by the value that can be recovered from almost $ 5.4 billion, which FTX and Alameda have invested in almost 500 crypto companies and risk capital funds, as can be seen from the FT records.

The largest of these investments are $ 1.15 billion that Alameda has put in the KRYPTO mining group Genesis Digital Assets between August 2021 and April 2022, as the records show.

public mining companies sold a lot last year because the cryptom market decreased. The crypto mining index Hashrate, which depicts such shares, has fallen by 75 percent since August 2021. Genesis did not immediately answer a request for comment.

The records also list more than $ 1 billion, which were invested in around 40 funds that are operated by risk capital companies, including some that were investors in FTX, such as Sequoia Capital. These investments include a $ 300 million investment by Alameda in K5 Global, the company led by Michael Kives. The investment amounts to 30 percent of the General Partnership of K5, and $ 225 million of the total total are in Elon Musks SpaceX and Boring Company and other non-identified companies.

At the beginning of this year, texts that were published during Musk's legal dispute with Twitter showed that Kives Bankman-Fried proposed as a co-investor in the social media company. Musk was repellent to the FTX founder and finally took money from the head of the competing Stock Exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao.

other large bets listed in the records include a $ 500 million investment in Anthropic, a “security and research company” for artificial intelligence that was made by Bankman-Fried about Alameda at the beginning of this year. Anthropic did not react immediately to a request for comment.