The relaunch of the collapsed exchange, FTX, and its international arm, Ftx.com, is now a possible scenario as the CEO John J. Ray III said that the management is moving ahead with its plans for the company reboot.
A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Wednesday, June 28, citing CEO John Ray, suggests that the bankruptcy management has started “the process of soliciting interested parties to the reboot of the exchange.”
According to the WSJ, the current CEO of FTX has begun soliciting interested parties to restart the FTX exchange. As part of any restart, FTX may be renamed, and negotiations include possible compensation to some existing customers. Blockchain technology company Figure has…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) June 28, 2023
Relaunch Likely to be Rebranded to Get Rid of Toxic FTX Name
According to the people familiar with the matter, the doomed crypto empire is in preliminary talks with potential investors to get support for the reboot of its flagship international platform, FTX.com. However, there are no such considerations on the table for FTX US.
The relaunch will likely be rebranded to eliminate the toxic FTX name and will be a joint venture. The management is meticulously planning to compensate the existing customer, and according to the WSJ sources, they might be offered stakes in the relaunched platform.
The report mentions Figure, a blockchain technology company, as one of many interested parties in the reboot, Figure was previously part of an investment group that vied for the opportunity to relaunch Celsius Network, another bankrupt crypto business. According to people cited in the report, other potential parties seeking to participate in the company relaunch must notify the bankruptcy management by the end of the week.
The idea of the ftx.com reboot initially appeared in January 2023. In April, FTX’s lead attorney Andy Dietderich also hinted about the revival of the exchange, although there was no particular path forward at that time. The report shows that Ray III has made significant progress since then.
But the realization of the company reboot, called FTX 2.0, still seems far away. Some sources suggest the exchange will file its restructuring plans in Q3 2023. Any decision on the relaunch plans is expected to be delivered by the summer of 2024, which is still a year away.
The news was enough to push the FTT token’s price to more than 40%. According to the data compiled by CoinMarketCap, FTT registered a monthly high of $1.85 on Tuesday, June 28. The token is changing hands at around $1.75, with a more than 35% increase in the last 24 hours as of writing.
In other developments to the exchange bankruptcy case, FTX debtors have sued Denil Friedberg, a former legal and compliance executive at FTX US and Alameda Research, for paying hush money to silence whistleblowers and seek to clawback all the benefits he received during his tenure at two firms.
The exchange Debtors are also claiming that they have recovered $7 billion of the $8.7 billion misappropriated funds.
