Some former customers of the bankrupt crypto firm FTX Trading Ltd. are pushing a U.S. judge to change how they will be repaid, arguing that proposed rules unfairly leave them out of a yearlong rise in the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, Bloomberg News reported. More than 80 individual customers have filed letters attacking a plan to peg the value of their digital assets to the date FTX filed bankruptcy — Nov. 11, 2022 — and pay claims in U.S. dollars instead of returning the crypto coins. The customers had some form of crypto trapped on the FTX platform when company founder Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down amid fraud allegations. Nearly a year later, he was convicted of orchestrating a massive fraud that led to the collapse of his FTX exchange. Since the collapse, a team of bankruptcy experts, lead by chief restructuring officer John J. Ray III, has been trying to recover as much cash and as many crypto assets as possible. The team won court approval to sell crypto held on the platform in order to create a pool of billions of dollars that can be returned to customers. The size of each customer’s claim will be based on the price of the crypto coin they held on the FTX platform when the company filed its chapter 11 petition in Wilmington, Delaware. For Bitcoin holders, that means they will be owed $16,871 for each of their former coins, according to court records. The current price surged past $49,000 at one point on Thursday after trading began on the first U.S. exchange-traded funds that invest directly in the biggest cryptocurrency.
