By James Davis
FTX’s Japanese subsidiary announced Monday that users could withdraw their funds today. The withdrawals will be processed through Liquid Japan, a crypto trading platform acquired by FTX last year.
The firm’s announcement comes after it suspended withdrawals in November 2022 as former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire went crumbling down.
How FTX Japan Users Can Assess Their Funds
FTX Japan revealed that all users eligible to withdraw funds had been informed about the process through email. They will be required to open a Liquid Japan account and confirm the remaining balance in their FTX Japan account.
The Tokyo-based exchange has alerted users that the withdrawal process may be slow due to the large volume of requests being submitted at once. According to Bloomberg, FTX Japan was holding around $144 million in users’ funds as of December 1.
Is There Hope for Other FTX Users to Recover Their Money?
While FTX Japan users get closer to recovering their funds, it appears like customers of other FTX subsidiaries will have to wait longer to access theirs because the bankruptcy proceedings are still ongoing in a Delaware court.
FTX filed for bankruptcy last November following a bank run fueled by a sharp price drop of the exchange’s native token FTT. As funds flowed out of the platform, FTX was made to admit that it didn’t hold sufficient one-to-one reserves of users’ assets and, therefore, could not honor further withdrawals.
A few weeks after the exchange filed for bankruptcy, its then-CEO Bankman-Fried was arrested and later charged with several financial crimes, including money laundering and wire fraud.
Launched last June, FTX Japan only operated for six months before its parent firm filed for bankruptcy protection. Bankman-Fried served as the firm’s boss when it started operating.
FTX Seeks to Sale Subsidiaries to Raise Funds
FTX filed a motion in December to approve the sale of four solvent subsidiaries, including LedgerX, FTX Europe, FTX Japan, and Embed Technologies. The move was an attempt to raise money to refund creditors who are still owed billions of dollars.
Further, the team overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy warned investors on Saturday about scam tokens claiming to represent debt belonging to the exchange’s customers. In a Twitter thread, FTX wrote that it had no affiliations with the individuals issuing those tokens.