Sam Bankman-Fried's defunct exchange would be sitting on roughly $114 billion in assets today if the bankruptcy estate's lawyers had held onto early positions in Anthropic, Solana, and SpaceX, according to a Cointelegraph analysis posted April 23. The figure is a counterfactual, not a live balance sheet, but it lands at an awkward moment for an estate that spent two years telling creditors a rapid sell-down was the only responsible path.
The three positions did most of the work. FTX Ventures was an early Anthropic backer at a valuation well under $5 billion; Anthropic's most recent private rounds have valued the company in the hundreds of billions. The estate's SOL holdings, at one point more than 41 million tokens, were distributed to buyers in structured OTC deals at prices in the tens of dollars. SOL traded at $86.62 as of April 23, 2026. SpaceX, another venture position, has roughly tripled in private-market value since the liquidators exited.
Why the estate sold in the first place
Bankruptcy law does not reward patience. Once FTX filed Chapter 11 in November 2022, the estate's obligations were fixed in dollar terms at the petition date, when bitcoin was around $16,000 and SOL was below $15. Any upside in the assets above those petition-date dollar values accrues to the estate, not to customers, under US bankruptcy precedent. The Sullivan and Cromwell team running the wind-down had a fiduciary duty to convert assets into cash quickly enough to pay creditors and fund the case, not to run a venture fund.
That logic produced a legally clean outcome and a commercially catastrophic one. Customers are being made whole at petition-date dollar values plus interest, which is the legal standard, but the tokens and equities that backed those claims have appreciated far beyond what the estate collected when it sold them.
The $114B number and where it comes from
Cointelegraph's post does not publish a full methodology, and the $114 billion figure should be read as a back-of-envelope exercise rather than an audited mark. Public court filings from the FTX estate disclose the approximate size of the Anthropic, Solana, and SpaceX positions at various points; applying current private-market marks and the live SOL price to those positions is the kind of math anyone can run. It produces a big number because Anthropic alone has moved by an order of magnitude since 2023.
What it does not produce is a usable claim. Creditors are paid in the order of the confirmed plan, at the petition-date valuation, and the distinction between "estate wealth" and "creditor recovery" has been core to every update from the administrators.
What this revives in the SBF narrative
The counterfactual is being cited in the same threads that argued, during the original trial, that FTX was solvent and that the estate's fire-sale dynamics exaggerated the hole. Legally, that argument did not land: a jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven counts in November 2023, and customer funds were commingled regardless of what the assets later became worth. But the number does give his remaining supporters a fresh rhetorical hook.
It also gives the estate's critics an opening. Several creditor groups challenged specific SOL sales at the time, arguing the structured OTC deals priced the lockup discount too aggressively. Those objections were mostly overruled. The $114 billion figure will not reopen any of them, but it puts a price tag on decisions that were contested in real time.
The crypto-market read
For the broader market, the story is less about FTX and more about how much of the 2023 to 2026 bull run was quietly funded by distressed sellers. The FTX SOL distributions, Mt. Gox BTC releases, and US government seizure sales pushed meaningful supply into buyers' hands at prices that look cheap in hindsight. BTC sat at $78,269.74 as of April 23, 2026, up 4.97% on the week; ETH was at $2,366.42. The Fear and Greed index printed 61, in Greed territory.
Anyone using a crypto card to spend from a SOL or ETH position today holds tokens that, in many cases, passed through a distressed-seller funnel on their way to the current holder. The FTX numbers are the cleanest illustration of what that transfer was worth.
Overview
The $114 billion counterfactual is not a live balance sheet, and it does not change what creditors receive. It is a reminder that the legal framework for bankruptcy favors speed over upside capture, and that the 2023 to 2025 distressed-seller cycle handed large gains to the buyers on the other side.
