Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX bid for bankrupt Voyager Digital heralds industry consolidation [60]
Although the FTX US $1.4B bid win for Voyager Digital gives hope for customers
Good afternoon, friends!
This past week saw the newsletter delayed slightly by unforeseen issues, but the news comes along apace – this means that today’s discussion will be a little shorter than most but we’ll try to get back to our in-depth editorial next week.
At the end of September, everyone may have noticed that billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has continued to buy stakes in “distressed” crypto properties after his FTX US exchange won the bid on bankrupt crypto brokerage Voyager Digital.
The agreement was for approximately $1.4 billion and consisted of the assets of the embattled brokerage, which would allow the users to move over to FTX US.
This followed a previous attempt to save Voyager with a loan of $485 million in June through Alameda Research, a trading outfit affiliated with FTX. At about the same time, Bankman-Fried also reached out to save BlockFi, the crypto lender, with a $640 million revolving credit line with an option to acquire in 2023.
At the time, Zac Price, CEO of BlockFi, said that the deal was much more than just about debt, but it also opened up “future collaboration and innovation” between FTX and BlockFi.
Even as brokerages and lenders were going bankrupt, in part due to the sudden downturn in crypto markets spurred by the then-called “crypto crash,” it’s looking like what Bankman-Fried is up to is consolidating cheap assets and bringing in customers where he can get them in the depressed market.
It may be no surprise when the markets spring back up again and adoption resumes, those same assets will suddenly be worth a lot more, as will the business ventures and services that operated them. So Bankman-Fried’s strategy of picking and choosing which parts of the industry to save and acquire amid centralized exchanges and lending could be a bellwether.
This news is good for Voyager Digital customers waiting to know what will happen to their frozen assets – although details are still scarce.
As usual, the bulletin news is up next and the long-form news is after the fold. See you next week!
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Blockchain Bulletin
Facebook, Instagram open NFTs for US users and add crossposting and sharing. Meta has opened up the ability for US users to add NFTs galleries to their profiles on Facebook and Instagram and crosspost their NFTs, now making it available along with 100 other countries, reported Cointelegraph.
A misconfigured node causes Solana to suffer another outage. The popular NFT-supporting network Solana has suffered its fourth major outage in 2022 due to a misconfigured node taking it offline for approximately 3 hours, reported Decrypt.
Blockchain Behind the Scenes
FTX wins bid to purchase assets of bankrupt Voyager Digital for $1.4B. Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX US wins the bid to purchase the assets of bankrupt Voyager Digital for $1.4 billion, bringing its customers over to the exchange.
Robinhood’s new Web3 wallet is now live for 10,000 iOS users in beta. The no-fee stock trading platform Robinhood has released its Web3 wallet for 10,000 iOS users in beta with support for the Polygon network, with USDC fiat-reserve funding capability.
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