Pantera Capital wins another bid for discounted Solana tokens in FTX bankruptcy auction
California-based venture capital firm Pantera Capital has reportedly won another bid for discounted SOL tokens from a collapsed exchange.
Pantera Capital, a Menlo Park-headquartered crypto venture capital firm, has won another pack of discounted Solana’s SOL tokens in an auction organized by the administrators managing the bankruptcy case of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange.
According to a Bloomberg report, the firm won 2,000 SOL tokens (currently valued at ~$288,000 at market price) earlier this week. Although it remains unclear at what discount the firm won the tokens, the sources claim they were sold at a “higher price than the roughly $60 price garnered at the previous auction.”
It’s understood that Pantera was “among the winning bidders,” though it’s unclear who else participated in the auction. In the previous auctions, the FTX estate reportedly sold roughly two-thirds of a $2.6 billion hoard of Solana tokens to Pantera and Galaxy Digital, another crypto-focused investment firm.
It’s expected that the 41 million SOL tokens the FTX estate is selling are locked according to a pre-agreed vesting period, meaning they’re not available to trade in the market. However, it remains unclear whether these tokens can be traded via over-the-counter (OTC) transactions.
At its peak during the bankruptcy proceedings, FTX held about 60 million SOL tokens and 21,482 BTC.
FTX collapsed in November 2022 amid allegations of embezzlement and misappropriation of billions of dollars in customer funds involving its owners and affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research. Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to reimburse $11 billion.
