FTX wants to zero out claims on ‘Sam Coins’
Crowded cryptocurrency exchange FTX has argued that the investor's claim should be zero-rated in the bankruptcy case for so-called “Sam Coins”.
In the year In a March 26 court hearing, attorneys representing FTX asked Delaware Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey to significantly reduce customers' claims for a handful of digital tokens closely linked to jailed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
FTX attorney Brian Gluckstein said customer claims for MAPS, OXY, decentralized exchange SERUM and BOBA should be significantly reduced or reduced to zero.
Gluckstein stated that the experts conducted a careful analysis of the claim date value of the assets to determine a reasonable discount on the assets.
“The clients hold values and claims on the digital assets, assuming a market that never exists and never exists.”
Sabrina Howell, an analyst at FTX, said that since the firm owns more than 95% of OxA and Map tokens – once closely tied to SBF – it will take decades to liquidate them.
Based on their analysis, FTX said the claims associated with the MAPS and OXY tokens – worth more than $600 million at current prices – should be considered worthless. Meanwhile, claims associated with SERUM tokens – $509 million – should be reduced by 58%.
However, FTX customers still holding these “sam coins” pushed back on these assessments and demanded that FTX's attorney's estimate be dismissed. The clients said the four digital assets are still worth more than $1.1 billion in total.
Judge Dorsey said it was difficult to formally measure the value of cryptocurrency and described digital assets as having “no inherent value.”
“The only value comes from the transactions themselves. As far as I can tell, cryptocurrency is traded on emotion and nothing else,” he said.
He said he will hear the arguments of both sides and take the matter under advisement before deciding how to value these crypto assets.
Related: Which Signals Can FTX Drop in the Market?
MAPS is the Solana-based native trademark for the Alameda-backed Web3 travel platform Maps.me. It has fallen 98% from its all-time high of $2 in May 2021, trading at $0.03 at press time, according to CoinGecko data.
OXY is a Solana-based oxygen defy broker token backed by Alameda Research, down 98% from its ATH, currently trading at $0.08.
SERUM is a decentralized token exchange supported by FTX. It is down 99.5% from its peak and is currently valued at $0.06 per token.
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud by the US government almost a year after the FTX collapse. Prosecutors recently proposed a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison, but lawyers say that unfairly casts him as a “depraved super-villain.”
Magazine: Can you trust crypto exchanges after the FTX collapse?
