FTX and its debtors announced on Tuesday the sale of its crypto derivatives exchange subsidiary LedgerX to M7 Holdings, an affiliate of Miami International Holdings (MIH), for a total consideration of about $50 million.
Miami International Holdings is a US-based exchange conglomerate owning several trading platforms. It holds a US license to operate a commodities exchange and acquired the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX) in 2020. Now, the acquisition of LedgerX will allow the company to enter crypto trading.
The debtors of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange will receive the proceeds from M7 Holdings, which won the bankruptcy auction for the purchase.
“We are pleased to reach this agreement with MIH, which is an example of our continuing efforts to monetize assets to deliver recoveries to stakeholders,” said John J. Ray III, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Restructuring Officer of the FTX Debtors.
New FTX filing today shows Kroll sent several documents to Office of the US Trustee, staff attorney Juliet Sarkessian.
Among those documents were several relating to the sale of LedgerX, including a fully redacted Bidding Objector Service List and a fully redacted Interested… pic.twitter.com/L2bpPesEjt
— Surfing the Waves (@wave_de_la_surf) April 18, 2023
Liquidating FTX Assets
FTX purchased Ledger Holdings, the parent company of LedgerX, through its American subsidiary, FTX US, in 2021 in a reported deal of $298 million. LedgerX is a crypto derivatives exchange with three licenses from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), allowing it to list futures contracts for commodities, provide clearing services and broker futures trades. FTX rebranded the platform to FTX.US Derivatives.
LedgerX’s holding company also owned crypto hedge fund LedgerPrime, which returned external capital last September.
Despite being owned by tainted FTX, LedgerX operated independently with limited exposure to its parent. According to Coindesk, LedgerX generated trading and clearing revenue of $1.2 million in 2022 and posted a negative EBITDA of $17 million.
The FTX management sought the court’s approval to sell LedgerX and three other subsidiaries, its European and Japanese entities, and the equities trading platform Embed Technologies. It argued that all of these platforms, acquired recently by FTX, are facing regulatory backlash despite minimum exposure to the parent, and they need to be sold to retain their value. The US court granted permission…
