After selling Anthropic for US$900 million, can FTX achieve full compensation?

Original title: "After selling Anthropic for US$900 million, can FTX achieve full compensation? 》

Original author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

On the evening of March 25th, Beijing time, WSJ  reported that FTX has It reached a deal worth a total of US$884 million with more than two dozen buyers to sell its shares in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which accounts for about two-thirds of its position.

According to court documents disclosed subsequently, FTX plans to sell 29.5 million Anthropic shares to 24 buyers, the most important buyer of which is the headquarters Abu Dhabi-based ATIC Third International Investment plans to spend US$500 million to buy 16.6 million shares. In addition, Jane Street also plans to pay US$100 million to buy 3.3 million shares. Fidelity's funds plan to use US$50 million to buy 1.5 million shares.

The transaction is still subject to final court approval, but given that Judge John Dorsey of the Delaware Bankruptcy Court in late February approved FTX to move forward with the sale , it is expected that the court will not be an obstacle to the final implementation of the transaction.

The unintentional intervention in 2022 has become a "life-saving straw" for creditors

With the rise of the concept of artificial intelligence, Anthropic's valuation has grown significantly in the past two years. Considering that FTX invested US$500 million as a lead investor in Anthropic's Series B financing, this investment The value-added expectation of equity investment is also regarded by many FTX creditors as the best hope for getting back their principal.

About Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI employees , developed Claude, an artificial intelligence chat application similar to ChatGPT, and is now widely regarded as one of OpenAI's biggest competitors.

Since its founding, Anthropic has received billions of dollars in venture capital through multiple rounds of funding.

In April 2022, Anthropic completed a US$580 million Series B round, of which FTX invested a total of US$500 million, including SBF himself. , as well as the participation of senior executives such as FTX co-chief engineer Nishad Singh and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

For a long time, there was no credible disclosure about the valuation of Series B financing , so the market has not been able to know the specific trading price and shareholding ratio of FTX before. However, in February this year, FTX disclosed the exact data when promoting the sale of Anthropic shares - the shareholding ratio was approximately 7.84 % .

At the end of last year, multiple media outlets, including The Information , reported thatAnthropic planned to raise capital at a valuation of more than $18 billion At US$75,000, calculated at this price, the approximately 7.84% stake held by FTX is valued at more than US$1.4 billion. This data is basically consistent with the sale price currently being promoted by FTX.

Back to FTX’s own debt issue.

When FTX filed for bankruptcy, its asset gap was approximately US$9 billion. In May 2023, FTX submitted information stating that "to date, approximately $7 billion in liquidity”. Although we do not know the specific method of holding and accounting for FTX (both gaps and liquidity have the possibility of changing due to fluctuations in asset values),but if we use the method of "burning a boat to find a sword" to calculate static data, Anthropic's equity Value can fill most of the remaining holes. In addition, considering the overall upward trend of the cryptocurrency market, judging from some on-chain data that have been marked as FTX-related addresses, FTX has been holding a large number of non-stable currency assets, and the value of these assets will also increase accordingly. Growth as the market goes up.

The estimated loss rate is gradually rising, with an increase comparable to Solana

According to the company specializing in bankruptcy claims According to data compiled by Cherokee Acquisition, an investment bank that provides liquidity for FTX claims, as of March 22, the estimated loss ratio (face value valuation of claims) of FTX claims has risen to 93%  (Bid) to 97 % (Ask).

It is worth mentioning that Cherokee Acquisition’s data is Updated once a week, Given that FTX has made definite progress in selling Anthropic shares, its debt face value valuation is expected to continue to rise when the data is next updated (March 29).

Looking back at the growth trend of FTX debt face value valuation over the past year or so,from November 18, 2022, the Bid quotation was only 6%, until today The face value valuation of the debt has increased by more than 15 times, a growth rate comparable to SBF's former favorite Solana (SOL).

Judging from the debt trading sentiment, the current market is quite optimistic that FTX will eventually complete nearly full debt repayment. For every user who was damaged by the FTX incident, this may be the best outcome.

At the end of the article, let’s talk about an episode.

In June 2023, FTX also almost "sold out" Anthropic.

Informed sources have revealed that Perella Weinberg, the investment bank responsible for handling the FTX bankruptcy case, has been considering selling FTX’s stake in Anthropic, which had just completed the The Series C financing was valued at "only" $4.1 billion... However, after months of investigating potential bidders, Perella Weinberg finally chose HODL.

Today’s market trends have verified the correctness of this decision.

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