The $500 million stake sale of FTX in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup has been put on hold, which has further added a potential delay to the efforts of the bankrupt crypto exchange to fill a $2 billion hole that remains in its balance sheet. Bloomberg went on to report that on the 27th June, the advisory investment bank of the exchange, Parella Weinberg Partners, incidentally put a pause on the sale of Anthropic, despite multiple parties being more than interested in the purchase of the stake. As it turns out, the sale of the stake would have been quite a significant monetary recovery for the exchange. A report on the 26th June by John Ray, a restructuring chief for the crypto exchange alleged that $8.7 billion in user funds were being misappropriated, of which around $7 billion has been recovered.
FTX Had A Lot Of Buyers For Anthropic
Before the pause, several buyers had been reportedly interested in the Anthropic slice that FTX held. In early June, Semafor had reported that the exchange was pitching the AI firm to potential investors. The exchange held around $500 million worth of Anthropic stock during bankruptcy in November, which is now expected to have a much greater worth than the AI boom which is in full swing. On the 23rd May, the token hit a total valuation of $4.6 billion, and managed to raise around $450 million in its latest round of funding.
At a certain point of its bankruptcy, FTX had quite a huge stake in the AI firm, and had also invested $1.15 billion in Genesis Digital Assets, a crypto miner. The report also claimed that the exchange had around $2 billion to go before it potentially recovered all the assets.
