FTX update, Alameda P&L edition

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The financial details of the FTX saga are not surfacing quite as quickly as the guilty pleas. But Monday brought some fun bits of information for those of us still gawking at the wreckage almost a year later.

The first was a presentation breaking down the asset-recovery efforts of FTX’s current management:

The $7bn figure matches the estimates provided by the management team earlier this year, so this breakdown isn’t exactly new, but there are some fun details nevertheless.

In the chart above, the “Digital Assets A” group is liquid crypto including Bitcoin, Ethereum and the relatively-not-illiquid Solana. The “Digital Assets B” appear to be shitcoins, more or less, with the biggest position $362mn of Serum (as of Aug. 31).

Also, big congrats to FTX after last month’s Grayscale court ruling, we guess? The biggest holding in FTX’s brokerage accounts is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which has more than doubled this year thanks to its narrower discount to NAV and Bitcoin’s rebound.

It has also received a handful of unsolicited questions about some of its stakes in other businesses, according to the presentation:

Management is also floating restarting FTX. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, the second court filing comes from the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF’s defence attorneys have asked the judge to ban testimony from Prof Peter Easton of Notre-Dame, who will be acting as an expert witness for the prosecution. (Part of their argument seems to be that he is not good enough at computers to be an expert.)

The government opposes that, of course, citing Easton’s expertise and the work he has done on the case thus far. Find the prosecutors’ filing here.

But what’s most entertaining is that the government goes ahead and shows the professor’s ongoing work calculating Alameda’s historical balances with FTX — basically the firm’s net P&L — from last year:

Ahahaha that is incredible! Let’s look a bit closer at that X-axis . . . 

So for one beautiful moment last year, Alameda booked (barely) positive performance. We think it’s nice that the terminally online young crypto founders got their wish fulfilled for a day.