For example, when liquidating and auctioning SOL tokens in 2024, institutions like Galaxy Trading and Pantera Capital bought at low prices, after which SOL's price skyrocketed, with incredibly impressive profit-taking, while the original creditors could only watch the opportunity slip away. According to reports from the Financial Times and Cointelegraph, FTX is believed to have missed potential value appreciation of at least tens of billions of dollars in disposing of high-quality assets.
Why did such a concentrated and short-term "liquidation selloff" occur? John Ray's explanation was "timely fund locking to avoid volatility risk", but industry analysts point out that such a reason cannot explain why large-scale discounts were only targeted at familiar institutional friends, and many assets doubled in value in less than 6 months.
Conspiracy theories then emerged that the liquidation team quickly sold good assets to their familiar funds, collecting astronomical lawyer fees and closing cases rapidly, ultimately making a fortune. Assets originally belonging to creditors were transferred at low prices to those closer to the power center under a "reasonable and compliant" framework.
The value of shares, tokens, and options sold at low prices continues to grow; those who should have held this growth can only watch their future being snatched away through publicly disclosed PDFs.
Bankruptcy Liquidation or "Legal Plunder"?
No industry is better at forgetting than the crypto industry. The market has now fallen back into chasing AI, stablecoins, and RWA, and the 2022 crisis seems to have passed, but this liquidation process is far from over.
Over the past three years, FTX's assets have been sliced, packaged, and auctioned, stripping away an entire platform's future, leaving only an empty shell.
The scale and complexity of FTX's bankruptcy liquidation is enough to be recorded in global crypto history, but what truly deserves to be written into textbooks is perhaps the collective disillusionment of creditors with the legal trust system.
On one hand, the liquidation legal team represented by John Ray and S&C completely legally collected astronomical compensation, almost impossible to be judicially held accountable. On the other hand, they added a protective shield through disclaimer clauses, not needing to bear responsibility even if "malicious liquidation" is questioned in the future.
For tens of thousands of retail investors robbed by FTX's explosion, this is not redemption, but a second injury. You might miss the market trend, but being deprived of a fair chance to recover is the most cruel.
Currently, FTX's bankruptcy assets are estimated to be globally distributed with a total amount of $14.5 billion to $16.3 billion, but if users in regions like China cannot successfully claim compensation, it will mean another unresolved tragedy: some are completely excluded from the legal system, with their originally owned funds devoured by legal procedural complexity and bankruptcy lawyers' gray areas.
Moreover, the new plan submitted by the FTX team to the bankruptcy court buried hidden clauses exempting consultants, making it almost impossible for creditors to sue or appeal.
Perhaps for the industry, FTX's collapse is just another cycle's bottom, but for those trapped within, especially tens of thousands of Chinese retail investors, this is not just a loss of funds, but the end of hope.
Those lawyers and consultants praised as a "professional liquidation dream team" can decide the fate of billions of dollars with just a few lines, yet no one is left with any opportunity to turn the tables for these ordinary investors.
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