Binance.US will buy Voyager Digital’s crypto assets and customer deposits in a $1.02 billion deal.This comes after a plan to buy FTX and Voyager Digital fell through because FTX went bankrupt and Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested.
Reuters says that Binance.US works as a “de facto subsidiary” of the international Binance business, even though it is officially independent.
In July 2022, Voyager filed for bankruptcy after the crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) didn’t pay back a big loan that Voyager had given them. At the time of filing, the cryptocurrency exchange had about $1.3 billion in assets, but 3AC owed it over $650 million. By the end of 2021, the exchange will have $5.8 billion in assets.
In a press release, Voyager said that Binance.US was “the highest and best bid for its assets after a review of strategic options with the main goal of maximizing the value returned to customers and other creditors in a short amount of time.”
Binance.US is supposed to be separate from Binance around the world, but Reuters has said that Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao set up Binance.US in 2017 in part to act as a “regulatory inquiry clearing house” to catch and handle concerns from federal regulators.
More than 1.7 million Voyager users were waiting to find out what would happen to their crypto. When FTX’s deal was announced, users were to get an account credit and custody of certain cryptocurrencies that FTX supported. But FTX went bankrupt a few weeks later when a multibillion-dollar hole in its balance sheet became public. Voyager and many other companies that FTX wanted to buy were left in the lurch.
It is not yet clear how Voyager’s planned purchase will affect Binance’s stake in the bankruptcy of FTX-Alameda.
