Sam Bankman-Fried wants to retain ownership of Robinhood shares worth $450M Sam Bankman-Fried wants to retain ownership of Robinhood shares worth $450M
SBF said he and Gary Wang originally owned the shares, adding that the shares are not owned by Alameda Research or any other entity implicated in the FTX bankruptcy.
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Updated: Aug. 14, 2023 at 2:14 am UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried wants to retain control of Robinhood shares worth $450 million on the basis that the bankrupt exchange has no “legal claims” over the assets, according to a Jan. 5 court filing.
SBF said he and Gary Wang originally owned the shares. He added that the shares are not owned by Alameda Research or any other entity implicated in the FTX bankruptcy.
According to the court filing, the FTX debtor’s argument that Alameda financed the shares’ purchase under suspicious circumstances was false, as they were memorialized in four promissory notes.
The SBF’s filing added that it was “improper for the FTX Debtors to ask the Court to simply assume that everything Mr. Bankman-Fried ever touched is presumptively fraudulent.”
In a Dec. 22 filing, FTX urged the court to freeze the Robinhood shares until they can be distributed among FTX creditors.
BlockFi agrees with SBF’s motion
Meanwhile, bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi also argued against FTX’s request to freeze the shares in a separate filing on Jan. 5.
According to the crypto lender, FTX does not have the right to the shares that were pledged as collateral for a loan that Alameda secured from the crypto lender. The lender
However, all parties still have to contend with the US Department of Justice. The DOJ said it would be seizing the shares as part of its action against SBF. The DOJ counsel told the court that they believed that the assets did not belong to the bankruptcy estate.
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FTX
FTX is a defunct cryptocurrency exchange, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, that was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and Zixiao “Gary” Wang in May 2019.
Alameda Research
Alameda Research was once a principal trading firm, operating as an arm of the failed crypto exchange, FTX.
BlockFi
BlockFi is a defunct cryptocurrency lender company which is currently in bankruptcy proceedings.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the former CEO, and co-founder of defunct crypto exchange FTX and Alameda Research.