Bahamas Court Opens Limited Path for FTX Wallet Disclosure

On December 29, 2022, the Supreme Court of The Bahamas established a limited route for sharing information about digital assets held in wallets controlled by the Securities Commission of The Bahamas. The order addressed a dispute over whether the court-appointed provisional liquidators of FTX Digital Markets Ltd. could give information to representatives of FTX companies undergoing Chapter 11 proceedings in the United States.

The court affirmed that the Commission itself could lawfully provide assistance only to qualifying domestic or overseas regulatory authorities. It also indicated that the joint provisional liquidators could share certain wallet information with the US Debtors’ representatives under highly confidential conditions.

The Commission’s December 29 release also attached a striking figure to assets transferred weeks earlier: more than $3.5 billion, measured using market pricing at the time of the November 12, 2022 transfer. That was a regulator-supplied valuation, not an independently reconciled balance-sheet figure.

What the order changed

The immediate development concerned access to records rather than the ownership or distribution of assets. The Bahamian liquidators said they needed FTX Digital Markets records to perform their duties, while the US Debtors had resisted broader access amid an increasingly public jurisdictional conflict.

The December 29 order created a controlled information-sharing channel. It did not determine which FTX entity owned the transferred tokens, validate customer balances, resolve claims between the Bahamian and US estates or authorize distributions to creditors. Those distinctions mattered because control of a wallet is not the same as legal ownership of every asset in it.

The Commission said its executive director, Christina Rolle, filed a third affidavit describing the regulator’s actions. According to the Commission’s chronology, it suspended FTX Digital Markets’ registration under the Digital Assets and Registered Exchanges Act on November 10, 2022 and placed the company into involuntary provisional liquidation.

The custody claim and its limits

The Commission said information about cyberattacks, restricted employee access to FTX Digital Markets’ Amazon Web Services environment and other circumstances led it to conclude that the assets faced a significant risk of imminent dissipation. Acting under a Supreme Court order, the Commission directed the November 12 transfer of assets under the custody or control of FTX Digital Markets or its principals into Commission-controlled wallets.

The Commission valued the transferred assets at more than $3.5 billion using market prices at the transfer time. The December 29 release did not publish a token-by-token inventory, pricing venue, liquidity adjustment or replicable valuation calculation. Consequently, the figure established what the regulator represented to the court and public; it did not establish what the portfolio could have realized in an orderly sale.

The Commission also said that any burning and replacement minting required by particular token protocols did not create additional tokens. It said the assets would remain under its temporary control until the Supreme Court directed delivery to their owners or transfer to the provisional liquidators for administration.

Why it mattered

FTX’s collapse had become a cross-border insolvency problem layered onto a custody and cybersecurity crisis. The December 29 order showed that access to wallet information—basic evidence needed to identify, value and administer digital assets—had itself become contested.

For customers and creditors, the disclosed headline value could not be treated as an expected recovery. Recoveries would depend on asset composition, ownership, token liquidity, competing estate claims, expenses and later court decisions. No event-day record established a distribution amount or timetable.

Later context

On December 30, 2022, the US Debtors disputed the Commission’s valuation. They identified approximately 195 million FTT, 1,938 ETH and miscellaneous coins, estimating the portfolio at approximately $296 million at November 12 spot prices and approximately $167 million at 2:00 p.m. EST on December 30. They expressly cautioned that the FTT position might not have been sellable at quoted spot prices. That later challenge does not alter what was disclosed on December 29, but it confirms that the portfolio’s composition, ownership and realizable value remained unresolved.