By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Bitcoin prices climbed back above $16,000 by mid-morning in New York on Tuesday, after brokerage Genesis Capital played down a report suggesting that it was at risk of becoming the next domino to be knocked over by FTX's collapse.
Bloomberg had reported on Wednesday that the brokerage has been looking - so far without success - for up to $1 billion to fill a hole in the balance sheet of its lending unit left by the collapse of FTX. That's a much larger sum than the $175 million that it admitted to having trapped in FTX's system at the moment FTX collapsed. Data from Arkham Intelligence suggest that Genesis had received over $1B in FTT - the native token of the FTX network - over the last three months, which are now effectively worthless.
Bloomberg cited a prospective term sheet for the emergency loan that mentioned the risk of bankruptcy if it failed to secure financing. Genesis Capital subsequently eased the pressure on its liquidity unilaterally by suspending client withdrawals, a measure that remains in place.
"Our goal is to resolve the current situation consensually without the need for any bankruptcy filing," Reuters quoted a Genesis spokesperson as saying late on Monday, adding that it continues to have conversations with creditors.
The risk of contagion from FTX has been largely responsible for the decline in most crypto assets in recent days, as investors have moved to park their funds in fiat currency to sit out the turmoil. The market cap of Tether and other stablecoins, a rough proxy for overall changes in exposure to crypto, has been declining steadily over the last 10 days.
How much can be rescued from the wreck of FTX is still far from clear, but there were crumbs of comfort for its creditors on Tuesday as the Financial Times reported that its bankruptcy administrators had located more cash on the accounts of its subsidiaries, bringing the assets discovered so far to over $1.24B.
Edgar Mosley of Alvarez & Marsal, a consultancy firm advising FTX, said that the sum includes around $400M at accounts related to Alameda Research, the hedge fund owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and $172M at FTX's Japan arm.
By 12:05 ET (17:05 GMT), Bitcoin was up 0.9% at $16,180, near its intraday high.
Signs of opportunistic dip-buying were also visible in the stock market, where SEC disclosures showed that the ARK Innovation ETF (NYSE:ARKK) of Cathie Wood added to its holdings both of crypto exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) and of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. The latter was trading at its biggest-ever discount to the net asset value of its holdings on Monday, a sign of serious investor doubt about its balance sheet. Grayscale, a unit of Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group, maintains its assets are fully backed.