AWS, Microsoft, Google Among Businesses Owed Money After FTX Collapse

AWS, Google and Microsoft are among creditors owed money after the FTX crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November.

Since the once-hyped company went south, founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas in December, with charges including campaign finance violations and money laundering offences. He has maintained his innocence.

In the meantime, Judge John Dorsey, overseeing the case, said names of creditors owed money should not be published until after a hearing in early January. Although names of individual investors have not been released, companies and institutional investors have been published [PDF].

Among them are a long list of enterprise tech companies presumably providing FTX's supporting technology.

Cloud providers AWS, Microsoft and Google are among them. Data analytics platform Looker – owned by Google – is also on the list, as is marketing software HubSpot, file-sharing outfit Dropbox, and code repository GitHub. Device manufacturer Apple and webhosting firm GoDaddy are also named.

• FTX audit finds $415m in crypto mysteriously vanished
• FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty on eight charges
• FTX CTO and Alameda Research CEO admit fraud, pair 'cooperating' with Feds
• FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried charged with fraud by just about everyone

It is impossible to say how much each company might be owed, although FTX has said $3.1 billion was outstanding to its top 50 creditors. Estimates suggest there are in the region of 1 million creditors, with the greatest two single claims being $226 million and $203 million.

In January, FTX liquidators said they had found $5.5 billion in remaining assets, but $415 million stolen in a November hack was still missing.

The report, presented by FTX debtors to its unsecured creditor committee, said that $1.7 billion in cash, $2.5 billion in crypto, and $300 million in securities had been recovered so far. The discovery of missing funds, FTX confirmed, represents "a substantial shortfall of digital assets at both exchanges."

Once one of the vital elements of the supposed "web 3.0", cryptocurrencies have taken a bashing of late. As well as knocking FTX down to size, the bludgeon of reality has hit Bitcoin, which saw around 60 percent wiped off its value in 2022. One estimate in June suggested that the collective value of cryptocurrencies fell $2 trillion from their peak.

The ramifications of the collapse continue. Tesla took a $34 million impairment charge on its Bitcoin investment, according to its most recent results. ®