FTX

FTX was a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019 that grew into one of the world’s largest trading platforms before collapsing in November 2022 (Reuters). At its peak, in January 2022, the company was valued at $32 billion, with investors including SoftBank and BlackRock (Reuters). The exchange’s downfall came when a CoinDesk report on November 2, 2022 exposed the composition of the balance sheet of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s affiliated trading firm, revealing its heavy reliance on FTX’s own FTT token — prompting a run that saw $6 billion in customer withdrawals in 72 hours (Investopedia; Reuters).

Less widely covered than the collapse itself is what became of one of Bankman-Fried’s largest bets: a $500 million investment in the AI lab Anthropic, made in 2021. According to Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Bankman-Fried “directed a reported $500 million from FTX’s coffers” for the stake — but Amodei had “sufficient red flags” about Bankman-Fried to give him non-voting shares and keep him off the board, a decision Amodei later said was vindicated when Bankman-Fried’s behavior “turned out to be much, much, much more extreme and bad than I ever imagined” (Big Technology). After FTX’s bankruptcy, the estate liquidated that stake for roughly $1.3 billion and put the proceeds toward repaying creditors — one of the most consequential single asset recoveries in the bankruptcy (crypto.news).

The Anthropic investment and its sale

In 2021, Bankman-Fried bought into Anthropic for $500 million through the FTX subsidiary Clifton Bay (Unchained). Sources differ on the exact ownership figure: Unchained reported an 8% stake bought in 2021, while Big Technology reported 13.56% and crypto.news reported that the initial position was nearly 14% before later Anthropic fundraising diluted it to 7.84% (Unchained; Big Technology; crypto.news). The $500 million figure itself is consistent across all three accounts, and the discrepancy in percentages reflects dilution between the investment and the sale.

Anthropic, which Amodei said Bankman-Fried backed partly as an “AI bull interested in safety,” thus became a creditor-side asset when FTX failed (Big Technology). The bankruptcy estate’s first attempt to sell the shares, in June 2023, was halted; the U.S. Bankruptcy Court then approved the sale on February 22, 2024 (crypto.news). Judge Dorsey’s approval cleared the way for the estate’s two-step liquidation: in March 2024 it sold two-thirds of the position for $884 million to 24 buyers, with ATIC Third International Investment Company — an entity aligned with the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund Mubadala — taking the largest block at close to $500 million, alongside Jane Street at nearly $100 million, funds managed by Fidelity at $44 million, and the Ford Foundation among the others (Unchained).

The estate then sold the remaining 15 million shares in June 2024 at $30 per share, netting more than $452 million; venture capital fund manager G Squared emerged as the top buyer with 4.5 million shares for about $135 million, joined by Fund FG-BLU and more than a dozen hedge funds and investment firms (crypto.news). Combined, the two sales brought in approximately $1.3 billion — more than double the original investment — with proceeds directed toward creditor recoveries (crypto.news; Unchained). Notably, prosecutors at Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial had blocked the defense from introducing evidence about the Anthropic stake’s value — the same asset whose appreciation became one of the estate’s largest sources of recovery (Unchained).

Rise and collapse

Bankman-Fried, then 30, set up Bahamas-based FTX in 2019 and led it to become one of the largest exchanges, briefly accumulating a fortune reported at near $17 billion (Reuters). His relationship with Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao shaped the company’s trajectory: Zhao bought 20% of FTX for about $100 million roughly six months after its launch, only for Bankman-Fried to buy that stake back for about $2 billion in July 2021 as their rivalry hardened into public competition (Reuters).

The collapse sequence began with CoinDesk’s November 2, 2022 report on Alameda’s balance sheet, which showed the trading firm’s books were dominated by FTT — the token FTX itself had issued (Investopedia). On November 6, Binance announced it would liquidate its FTT holdings of roughly 23 million tokens, then valued near $529 million, accelerating the panic (Investopedia). FTX suffered $6 billion in withdrawals in 72 hours, and Binance’s briefly announced rescue takeover fell apart after due diligence, with the rival exchange citing U.S. investigations into FTX as part of its reason for walking away (Reuters). FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, and new chief executive John J. Ray III — brought in to manage the restructuring — described the company’s failure as a “complete failure of corporate controls” (Investopedia).

Trial, sentencing, and appeal

Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial ran from October 2 to November 2, 2023, ending with guilty verdicts on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy (Investopedia). On March 28, 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion (Investopedia).

His legal fight continued into 2026. The Second Circuit affirmed the conviction on June 12, 2026, applying Kousisis v. United States to reject his argument that the absence of proven customer losses negated the fraud (Unchained). On September 10, 2026, his lawyers — the petition reportedly submitted by Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher — filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to review both the conviction and the $11 billion forfeiture, according to CNN’s reporting cited by Unchained (Unchained).

The petition’s central claim is evidentiary: it argues the trial court let prosecutors suggest customers suffered large losses while blocking the defense from showing that FTX and Alameda held enough assets to repay them (Unchained). Bankman-Fried separately argues the forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause (Unchained). The long odds are real — the Court accepts only about 1% of the thousands of petitions it receives each term (Unchained). In parallel, Bankman-Fried requested a pardon from President Trump in June 2026, and the Senate responded in July 2026 with a unanimous resolution opposing any clemency (Unchained).

Creditor repayments

The bankruptcy court’s repayment plan was approved on October 7, 2024 and became effective on January 3, 2025 (Investopedia). Repayments began on February 18, 2025, with the FTX estate releasing $1.2 billion to smaller claim holders in its “Convenience Class” — claims under $50,000 — the first step in a program the estate said could exceed $16 billion in total (CryptoNews.net). Creditors and customers were projected to receive between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion overall (CryptoNews.net).

A point of friction: claims are valued at November 2022 prices, the point of collapse, which left many creditors dissatisfied given the subsequent rise in crypto prices (CryptoNews.net). To fund the program, the estate sold 41 million SOL tokens in three auctions through April 2024 (CryptoNews.net). “The start of these distributions is an incredible and important milestone for FTX,” said John J. Ray III, plan administrator of the FTX Recovery Trust (CryptoNews.net).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not name FTX’s other co-founders or detail the exchange’s Hong Kong origins, because no fully read source verified those points. It does not resolve the reported Anthropic stake percentage to a single figure — sources report figures from 7.84% to 13.56%, a range explained by dilution from later Anthropic fundraising — though all agree the investment was $500 million and the sale returned about $1.3 billion. It does not claim the Supreme Court will hear Bankman-Fried’s September 2026 petition, and it claims no knowledge of whether any pardon will be granted. It does not state how much any individual creditor will ultimately receive, since the repayment program values claims at November 2022 prices and distributions are staged. It does not characterize the 2021 Binance stake buyback beyond the reported $2 billion figure, and it does not repeat unverified estimates of what the Anthropic stake “would be worth today” at later valuations — those are speculative extrapolations, not verified facts.