FTX’s failed trading arm, Alameda Research, asked a court to claw back $445 million from Voyager Digital, which it said SBF’s empire paid to the crypto lender before collapsing into bankruptcy.
In a court filing, FTX lawyers said the hedge fund paid Voyager $249 million in September and $194 million a month later, which were preceded by a $3.2 million interest payment in August.
Alameda Research seeks to recover those loan payments from the troubled digital asset manager since they were made close to FTX’s bankruptcy filing. Under certain circumstances, federal laws consider such payments eligible to be ‘recoverable’ and thus could be used to repay FTX’s own creditors.
“The collapse of Alameda and its affiliates amid allegations that Alameda was secretly borrowing billions of FTX-exchange assets is widely known. Largely lost in the (justified) attention paid to the alleged misconduct of Alameda and its now-indicted former leadership has been the role played by Voyager and other cryptocurrency ‘lenders’ who funded Alameda and fuelled that alleged misconduct, either knowingly or recklessly,” FTX’s complaint states.
In September 2021, Voyager secured a credit facility close to $380 million from the quant trading firm. Then in June 2022, the US broker entered into an agreement with Alameda Ventures to extend the previous credit facility, which was intended to help it meet customer liquidity needs.
Bankman-Fried-led Alamada offered to extend a credit line of $200 million in cash and USDC alongside a 15,000 BTC revolver. The move came just a few days after Alameda provided the same type of a loan to crypto lender BlockFi, citing the need to meet customer liquidity requirements in these challenging times.
Nevertheless, the US dollar value of Alameda’s loans have almost halved as the loan was denominated in crypto tokens rather than fiat money.
The news comes a few weeks after Alameda criticized Binance’s $1 billion acquisition deal, saying the proposal “ignores fundamental requirements and protections of the Bankruptcy Code.”
Voyager defended its plan to sell assets to Binance.US and responded to objections raised by the US state and federal regulators. In a separate filing, the bankrupt crypto lender described the claims of Alameda Research as “hypocrisy and chutzpah based on unverified speculation.”
Voyager explains that Binance.US’ bid is structurally similar to the FTX US’ proposal. Binance had emerged before as one of the highest bidders for Voyager Digital’s assets. Following FTX’s collapse, Voyager reopened the bidding process and its board was reportedly in active discussions with alternative bidders.
