According to a source familiar with the matter, Binance.US, the American branch of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is considering a bid for the insolvent lender platform Voyager Digital.
A prior auction, which concluded at the end of September last year, saw the now-defunct FTX emerge as the white knight, prevailing over competitors Wave Financial and Binance. CoinDesk also stated that Binance’s proposal for the U.S.-based Voyager was rejected because of national security concerns.
Voyager stated it has reopened the bidding process for the firm and is in active conversations with potential bidders in response to FTX’s announcement last week that it will file for bankruptcy. Wave Financial and trading platform Cross Tower are reportedly in the race.
Voyager’s native token VGX rose as much as 50% after CoinDesk’s story was published; at the time of writing, VGX was trading at $0.4066, up more than 40%.
Thomas Braziel, the managing partner of the investment firm 507 Capital, stated that the situation is compounded by the fact that Voyager would file a breach of contract action against the FTX estate.
“The problem is that the claim is only going to be against FTX US,” said Braziel in an interview. “I worry a lot of the collateral is going to be held in trust. So any cause of action they have could end up being behind all the customers. And the problem is that if customers aren’t going to be made whole, then what’s your unsecured claim going to be worth? It’s going to be worth bupkis.”
The CEO of Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, said earlier this week that his exchange is establishing an industry recovery fund to rebuild the sector.
Patrick Hillmann, chief communications officer at Binance, said that Binance was not seeking to be the ‘white knight’ of cryptocurrencies. In the corporate world, there are no Luke Skywalkers or Darth Vaders. This is a corporation with the most to lose as the market leader, searching for ways to reinforce the sector in the case of a black swan.