- Customer mistakenly deposited Solana year after FTX bankruptcy
- 31-year-old FTX user is asking bankruptcy judge to be repaid
FTX customers who deposited digital assets before the cryptocurrency exchange imploded in 2022 have waited years to get their money back. That includes one user in Prague who made a costly blunder: he accidentally deposited tens of thousands of dollars worth of Solana tokens on FTX a year after it went bankrupt.
Lukas Bartusek, 31, said he inadvertently transferred 2,000 tokens to an old FTX account in October 2023, nearly a year after Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange went bankrupt, according to a Monday filing in Delaware bankruptcy court. After realizing his mistake, Bartusek said he was informed he’d need a court order to allow a withdrawal from the account.
Prices for Solana, a token once backed by Bankman-Fried, have increased significantly since Bartusek deposited the tokens with FTX, amid a broader rise in cryptocurrency values. The price of one Solana token was worth about $31 on Oct. 23, 2023, when he invested, but was trading around $198 on Tuesday.
The tokens were worth about $63,700 at the time of the deposit, according to the document, but would be worth more than $396,000 under Tuesday prices. The filing said FTX “knowingly and willingly accepted” the deposit.
Bankrupt companies, generally, aren’t permitted to return funds to individual creditors without a judge’s permission. Advisers who took over FTX after its collapse won court approval to repay customers, with initial distributions are expected to begin later this month.
Bartusek made a withdrawal request for the tokens on Oct. 22, 2023, through a crypto wallet account at a different exchange called BTSE, according to Monday’s filing. He then “inadvertently deposited the 2000 SOL to an older personal FTX account” the following day, the filing said.
“Some people utilize several different crypto wallets, so depositing into one wallet that happens to be in bankruptcy is not difficult to imagine,” an attorney for Bartusek, Jack Shrum, said Tuesday.
Bartusek’s predicament adds to the stories of frustrated creditors burned by Bankman-Fried’s exchange or other failed crypto platforms. The process has been particularly challenging for crypto customers like Bartusek who live in other countries and were unwittingly dragged into US bankruptcy proceedings during the crypto downturn in 2022.
A spokeswoman for FTX declined to comment.
The case is FTX Ltd, number 22-11068, in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
Written by: Jonathan Randles @Bloomberg
The post “FTX User Accidentally Deposited 2,000 Tokens Year After Collapse” first appeared on Bloomberg