FTX's Fire Sale Leaves Billions on the Table

The FTX estate's decision to sell assets quickly during bankruptcy has been under scrutiny. The math is simple, but the implications are not. FTX and its trading arm Alameda Research held early-stage positions in some of the fastest-appreciating assets over the past three years.

One of the most painful losses for FTX was its 8% stake in Anthropic, an AI company behind Claude. The estate sold this stake for approximately $1.3 billion in 2024, but Anthropic's valuation has since ballooned to around $380 billion. At that number, FTX's original stake would be worth over $30 billion by itself.

This highlights the cost of a fire sale. The estate also held between 25 and 30 million SOL tokens, which were sold at roughly $64 per token for a total of approximately $1.9 billion in 2024. Solana currently trades above $130, making this batch of tokens worth well north of $3 billion.