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FTX’s $200K Fire Sale: How the Fallen Crypto Giant Missed a $500M AI Payday

FTX’s $200K Fire Sale: How the Fallen Crypto Giant Missed a $500M AI Payday

Published:
2025-05-06 14:10:36
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Another day, another ’what were they thinking?’ moment from the FTX bankruptcy saga. The collapsed exchange sold its stake in Anysphere’s red-hot Cursor AI for peanuts—just $200,000—before the startup’s valuation skyrocketed. That’s a half-billion-dollar oops.


The AI Gold Rush FTX Slept Through

While Sam Bankman-Fried’s team was busy liquidating assets at garage-sale prices, Cursor AI went on to become one of the most coveted developer tools in Silicon Valley. The AI coding assistant now boasts enterprise clients and rumored acquisition interest from tech titans.


VCs Laugh All the Way to the Bank

FTX’s loss became someone else’s windfall—the kind of misfire that makes hedge fund managers cringe over their morning espresso. But hey, when you’re busy unraveling one of history’s greatest financial frauds, who has time to check a term sheet?

FTX’s Cursor AI Investment

FTX’s Anysphere (Cursor AI) Investment Sales. (Source: Gautham Elango)

On April 5, Anysphere completed a funding round that pushed its valuation to $9 billion. The round brought in $900 million and included major investors like Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Accel.

In January this year, the company raised $150 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Since then, Cursor’s user base and revenue have grown rapidly, with the firm reportedly pulling in around $200 million in April alone.

Based on Anysphere’s current valuation, Alameda’s original $200,000 investment would now be worth close to $500 million.

That unrealized gain could have been used to compensate FTX creditors, many of whom are still waiting to recover their lost assets.

FTX’s undervalued sales

Meanwhile, this isn’t the only instance of undervalued sales during FTX’s asset liquidation process.

For context, the bankrupt exchange management had parted with token contracts linked to the SUI blockchain, which could have yielded nearly $3 billion in returns.

Instead of holding the contracts, FTX sold them in March 2024 for just $1 million, well below their current value of around $3 billion. The failed exchange also sold $95 million of Mysten Labs shares alongside its SUI contracts.

Despite these missteps, FTX’s estate has seen better outcomes elsewhere. One example is the $1.4 billion sale of its $500 million stake in AI firm Anthropic Holdings, which brought in significant liquidity.

The proceeds from these asset sales are being used to reimburse creditors. The failed firm completed the first round of repayments in February. The second round, targeting customers with claims over $50,000, is expected to begin later this month.

|Square

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