Voyager entered Chapter 11 as the Three Arrows default hit its balance sheet

Voyager Digital Holdings, Inc. and two affiliates filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on July 5, 2022, moving a major retail crypto platform from a withdrawal freeze into court-supervised reorganization. The lead petition in case 22-10943 was filed and entered at 11:29:36 p.m. Eastern.

The petition estimated more than 100,000 creditors and placed consolidated assets and liabilities in the same broad range: $1 billion to $10 billion. Those figures were check-box estimates covering the debtor group, not precise valuations or audited recovery calculations. Chapter 11 also did not itself determine what customers owned, how claims would be ranked, or how much anyone would recover.

A counterparty failure reached the platform

Voyager tied the filing to market stress and the default of Three Arrows Capital, the crypto hedge fund commonly called 3AC. A company release distributed at 1:10 a.m. Eastern on July 6, but carrying a July 5 dateline, said Voyager Digital, LLC had issued a default notice over a loan of 15,250 bitcoin and $350 million in USDC. Voyager described its claim against 3AC as exceeding $650 million.

That exposure mattered because Voyager had already suspended trading, deposits, withdrawals and loyalty rewards on July 1. By the July 5 filing, customers could not exit the platform while the value and legal treatment of its assets and liabilities were being moved into bankruptcy court.

Voyager's release supplied a June 30 balance-sheet snapshot: approximately $1.3 billion of crypto assets on the platform, more than $350 million of customer cash in a for-benefit-of-customers account at Metropolitan Commercial Bank, and more than $110 million of cash and crypto assets owned by Voyager. The company expressly called the June 30 amounts preliminary, non-reviewed and unaudited. They should not be combined as though every category were interchangeable cash available to repay crypto customers.

The proposed recovery was not a promise

Voyager proposed that customers with crypto accounts receive a combination of cryptocurrency, proceeds from any 3AC recovery, shares in a reorganized company and Voyager tokens. The proposal was subject to change, creditor process and court approval. The company separately said customers with U.S. dollar deposits would obtain access after reconciliation and fraud-prevention work with Metropolitan Commercial Bank.

Nothing filed on July 5 established a final distribution percentage, a timetable for restored withdrawals or the value of the proposed equity and tokens. Nor did the filing resolve whether particular customer crypto should be treated as customer property or as a bankruptcy claim. In a July 6 notice, Louisiana's Office of Financial Institutions highlighted the novelty of those questions and said Voyager's filings described customer crypto as pooled rather than maintained in a separate wallet for each customer.

Why the filing mattered

The bankruptcy made crypto credit contagion concrete for retail users. A concentrated institutional loan had failed, and a platform that marketed trading, custody and yield-bearing accounts had halted access before seeking Chapter 11 protection. The connection showed how counterparty risk could travel from a hedge fund to an intermediary and then to customers, even without a blockchain or exchange protocol failing.

The petition is strong evidence of the filing date, debtor identities, case number and the broad creditor, asset and liability ranges. Voyager's figures for platform assets and its 3AC claim remained company-supplied estimates as of June 30, while Reuters' July 6 report provided contemporaneous confirmation of the filing and its market context. No cryptocurrency price or percentage market move is asserted here because venue, trading pair and UTC-window data are not needed to establish the central event.