A legal billing document reveals that John J. Ray III billed over 6.5 hours last month in what appears to be an “FTX restart”.
Last month, FTX attorney Andy Dietderich declared at a Delaware court hearing that the FTX “dumpster fire is out“. He also confirmed that FTX was negotiating options with stakeholders for restart, with a decision to come by late June.
A new document suggests that a reboot of FTX – dubbed ‘FTX 2.0’ – may be well underway.
John J. Ray III is the new CEO of FTX. He is American attorney who specializes in recovering funds from failed corporations such as Enron.
While the prospect of a restart is speculative, Ray’s expense filing explicitly details various stages of an “FTX restart”, including bidder lists and exchange fortifications.
In April, FTX had recovered $7.3 billion in cash and liquid crypto assets – an increase of more than $800 million since January.
Read more: Is FTX on the road to recovery?
Reviving the FTX exchange will require significant capital and effort. At last month’s hearing, Dietderich said that the FTX customer interface was only weakly connected to the finances behind the scenes, stating: “the app worked beautifully, but in truth it was a facade.”
Following the news, FTT (the native token of FTX) increased by 13% (CoinGecko).
Recovering funds from FTX has been convoluted. It is understood that former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried left the exchange in such disorder that the new FTX administration resorted to combing through QuickBooks and Slack chats to uncover the company’s financial position.
Last month’s court filing read: “Approximately 80,000 transactions were simply left as unprocessed accounting entries in catch-all QuickBooks accounts titled Ask My Accountant. Further complicating matters, QuickBooks entries were often made months after transactions occurred, rendering impossible real-time financial reporting and risk management.”
It’s unclear what a recovery would mean for customers who have been unable to access their deposits since the collapse.
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