A new lawsuit has been filed by trading company Alameda Research against Voyager Digital for recovering funds of about $445.8 million.
Alameda Research was founded in 2017 by the co-founder of the FTX crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried.
In November 2022, a day before FTX filed for bankruptcy, it emerged that the crypto exchange had lent customer funds to Alameda Research in order to prop up the company.
The lawsuit
The new lawsuit was filed by FTX lawyers on January 30th in the District of Delaware on behalf of Alameda Research.
The lawsuit has been filed in US Bankruptcy Court and is related to the loans that Voyager had made to the trading firm before the crypto broker had also filed for bankruptcy in July last year.
According to the filing, Voyager had asked for repayment of all the loans outstanding to Alameda and they had been repaid fully before FTX and Alameda had also filed for bankruptcy in November.
The filing said that the allegations of Alameda borrowing funds of FTX’s customers worth billions is quite widely known.
They said that while the attention directed towards the misconduct allegations associated with Alameda is justified, there are other things that have become lost in the fiasco.
They referred to the role that Voyager as well as other crypto ‘lenders’ had played in fueling the misconduct Alameda and funded the company, whether recklessly or knowingly.
The concerns
The court document also highlighted that the business model of the bankrupt crypto lender was quite similar to a ‘feeder fund’.
The filing said that the company had raised funds from retail investors and invested them in crypto investment funds like Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and Alameda Research, with little or no due diligence.
This was evident by the fact that Voyager had lent cryptocurrency worth hundreds of millions to Alameda Research in 2021 and 2022.
All loans repaid
The document detailed that Alameda had repaid all of the loans it had gotten from Voyager. It highlighted that a sum of $249 million had been paid in September and a payment of $194 million was made in October.
An interest payment had also been made by the trading firm in August worth $3.2 million. According to FTX lawyers, these funds are recoverable.
The attorneys highlighted sections of the Bankruptcy Code, namely 503 and 507, which dictate that the funds can be used for paying off the creditors of the exchange.
The American entity of FTX, FTX.US, had won a bid of $1.46 million to acquire Voyager last year in September in order to help it out of bankruptcy.
The case is complicated even more by the fact that Alameda Research had also been a shareholder of Voyager Digital.
The news of the lawsuit filed by Alameda against the digital asset manager comes after a court granted the troubled crypto broker approval for selling some of its assets earlier this month to Binance US.
The said deal for selling the assets has been priced at about $1 billion.