BlocksInform
Yueqi Yang
The bankruptcy filing by crypto broker Voyager Digital Ltd. Provides a road map of the company’s relationships, including borrowers, lenders and investors.
It turns out Alameda Research, the trading firm co-founded by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, is all three.
As a lender to Voyager, Alameda is owed $75 million under a credit line it offered to the troubled platform last month. But Alameda also owes Voyager $376.8 million on a loan, the filing shows. Alameda is also one of Voyager’s largest shareholders, with a more than 9% stake, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Alameda’s multiple roles exemplify its extensive influence in crypto, and helps explain why Bankman-Fried is such a key player in the industry. Bankman-Fried founded the firm in 2017 to execute crypto arbitrage trades before moving on to run the now-giant crypto exchange FTX. The ties also underscore the interconnected nature of crypto, a feature that has accelerated losses across the industry during the market’s meltdown this year.
“There is a lot of incestuous activity among crypto-lending firms,” said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. “In traditional finance there is more public disclosure and regulatory oversight of these arrangements. There are mechanisms in place (not always effective) to manage conflicts of interest. But crypto is different.”
The multiple roles played by Alameda point to the extent of “recycled capital” in crypto, which masks the health of institutions in the space, said Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University. “It is likely to lead to overly large exposures and exacerbates interconnectedness among institutions.”
Two most interesting things in the Voyager bankruptcy petition:
(1) Voyager's second largest exposure is to Alameda Research. So there's some recycled capital. Voyager loans Alameda $377M, & Alameda reloans Voyager $75M. Plus Alameda is Voyager's largest shareholder (9.5%). 1/
— Adam Levitin (@AdamLevitin) July 6, 2022
As Voyager ran into potential liquidity problems stemming from Three Arrows, it secured a credit line worth about $485 million from Alameda in mid-June, of which it has drawn $75 million, the maximum amount in any 30-day period. The lifeline was only a partial solution that couldn’t save Voyager, the filing says. Meanwhile as a borrower, Alameda is still on the hook to repay Voyager despite its bankruptcy proceedings.
These kinds of relationships can complicate disputes during time of stress. CoinFlex, a crypto exchange, recently accused its own investor and client Roger Ver for failing to pay $47 million in a margin call. Ver denied the claim, and their dispute played out in public on social media.
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— With assistance by Muyao Shen, and Jeremy Hill
