What happened
Today, 18 February 2025, the FTX estate pays creditors for the first time, to the plan's Convenience Classes only, through BitGo and Kraken (FTX, 7 February 2025). A Convenience Claim is an allowed customer claim of 50,000 dollars or less, or a larger one voluntarily reduced to 50,000 by ballot election (disclosure statement, D.I. 19143).
The plan was confirmed at a hearing on 7 October 2024, and Judge John T. Dorsey's confirmation order was entered the next day as D.I. 26404 (order confirming the plan). It became effective on 3 January 2025 (FTX, 3 January 2025).
These creditors receive approximately 119 percent of their allowed claims. Read that as FTX wrote it: 98 percent of the creditors of FTX by number will receive approximately 119 percent of the amount of their allowed claims (FTX, 7 October 2024). By number means the small claims. It is not 119 percent for every creditor, not of the dollars owed, and not of anything measured in coins.
What it changes
It settles what a claim was worth. Under 11 U.S.C. section 502(b) a claim is valued as of the petition date, here 11 November 2022. For FTX that is one table: the digital assets conversion table the court approved, republished as Appendix E to the disclosure statement, prices bitcoin at 16,871.63 dollars, a weighted median across selected exchanges over the 60 minutes before the petition time.
So one bitcoin on FTX is an allowed claim of 16,871.63 dollars. At 119 percent that pays about 20,077 dollars. Bitcoin's daily candle on Coinbase closed today at 95,607.40 dollars (Coinbase Exchange, 18 February 2025). The distribution is worth roughly 21 percent of the asset the claim began as.
Interest does not close that gap and is not meant to. The plan pays post-petition interest at a Consensus Rate of 9.0 percent, which the disclosure statement says corresponds to Delaware's pre-judgment interest rate as of the petition date. Interest compensates for time, not price.
That is the mechanism. Filing converts a bearer asset into an unsecured dollar claim and prices the conversion on the day of the filing. Every dollar of price movement afterwards accrues to the estate's dollar waterfall, not to the depositor. A recovery above 100 percent of a dollar claim cannot turn that claim back into the asset: the petition date is a valuation guillotine, and no percentage reaches back past it.
What it does not change
Nothing about bitcoin itself. Coins held under keys their owner controls were never claims, were never valued by anyone, and were spendable on every day of the last 27 months.
It also does not mean the estate was run badly. Principal in full plus 9 percent interest is an unusually good dollar outcome for unsecured creditors, and saying so is more honest than implying mismanagement.
The part most coverage will get wrong: this is not bitcoin returned to customers as dollars. There was no bitcoin to return. The disclosure statement says the debtors "did not hold on the Petition Date sufficient quantities of Digital Assets to return to all creditors 'in kind'", and that there "appeared never to have been reliable segregation nor reconciliation of customer entitlements to actual assets". The dotcom exchange shortfall was approximately 9.2 billion dollars. Today's payment was raised by monetising what did exist plus the venture book, including the estate's Anthropic shares, sold for approximately 884.1 million dollars in March 2024. Where a trustee does hold coins the outcome differs, which is why Mt. Gox distributed bitcoin itself last July.
Context
When FTX filed, we wrote that being made whole in a bankruptcy means whole in dollars on the court's date, which for a bearer asset is not the same as whole at all. That was a rule, not a forecast. Today it has two numbers attached: 16,871.63 against 95,607.40.
Chapter 11 did not create the difference between owning a coin and owning a claim on a company that owes you one. It revealed it, on a fixed date, at a fixed price. The remaining classes have no record or payment dates yet.