Voyager Named Binance.US in Conditional $1.022 Billion Asset Deal

Voyager Digital announced on December 19, 2022 that its operating company had selected BAM Trading Services Inc., doing business as Binance.US, as the highest and best bidder for its assets. A notice filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on December 19 confirmed that Voyager Digital LLC and Binance.US had signed the asset purchase agreement on December 18.

The proposed transaction was valued by Voyager at approximately $1.022 billion. That headline did not mean Binance.US was paying $1.022 billion in fresh cash for the failed lender. It combined Voyager’s estimated $1.002 billion cryptocurrency portfolio with $20 million of additional consideration. The distinction mattered for creditors trying to understand how much new value the buyer was contributing and how much of the number represented assets already inside the bankruptcy estate.

A valuation tied to a moving portfolio

Voyager said the cryptocurrency portfolio would be valued at a date still to be determined and estimated it at $1.002 billion using then-current market prices. The December 19 announcement did not identify the exchanges, pricing agent, coin-by-coin quantities or exact observation time behind that estimate. Crypto prices move continuously, so $1.002 billion was a company estimate, not an independent closing valuation or a guaranteed recovery amount.

Binance.US also agreed to make a $10 million good-faith deposit and reimburse specified Voyager expenses up to $15 million. Those terms supported execution of the agreement, but the announcement did not present them as amounts to add to the stated $1.022 billion valuation. Voyager’s claims against Three Arrows Capital would remain with the bankruptcy estate, with any future recoveries intended for creditors rather than transferred to Binance.US.

The proposed structure aimed to return cryptocurrency to customers in kind, subject to court-approved distributions and the assets supported by Binance.US. That phrasing left important questions unanswered on December 19: which tokens the exchange could support, what each account holder would recover, when distributions could begin and how unsupported assets or jurisdictions would be handled.

The agreement was not a completed sale

The December 19 court filing was a notice of successful bidder, not an order approving the transaction. Voyager scheduled a hearing for January 5, 2023 and said the sale would proceed through a Chapter 11 plan requiring a creditor vote, court approval and other closing conditions. The company identified April 18, 2023 as the closing deadline, subject to a one-month extension, after which Voyager could move to another method of returning value.

Those conditions were central, not boilerplate. Customers still lacked a final distribution percentage, and the estate had not completed a transfer of assets or accounts. The verified development on December 19 was selection and documentation of a bidder after renewed negotiations—not delivery of customer funds.

Why the second sale process mattered

Voyager had entered Chapter 11 restructuring on July 5, 2022. An earlier process produced a September agreement with FTX US, but FTX’s own November bankruptcy prevented that route from being completed. Binance.US therefore represented a second attempt to use another centralized crypto platform as the distribution channel for a failed lender’s customers.

That sequence exposed an institutional problem at the center of the 2022 crypto contraction: bankruptcy estates were trying to return volatile, multi-asset portfolios while prospective industry buyers were themselves subject to rapidly changing confidence and liquidity conditions. The Binance.US proposal offered a documented path and $20 million of incremental consideration, but it did not erase counterparty, court, execution or market-value risk.

As of December 19, the defensible conclusion was narrow. Voyager had a signed, conditional agreement and a named bidder; customers did not yet have completed distributions, an approved plan or certainty about the value and form of their eventual recovery.