Releasing the names of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX’s 9 million customers could harm a “potential reboot” of the company, attorneys for the creditors committee argued on Wednesday.
It’s the latest development in an ongoing dispute over whether the names of FTX’s creditors ought to be made available to the public. Beyond privacy concerns, lawyers for the creditors committee are now arguing that revealing those names could further harm the value of the company, and therefore harm creditors.
“There were an awful lot of retail investors here and so there is inherent value within those lists and that’s uncontroverted—I think everyone agrees with that,” Paul Hastings partner Kris Hansen, an attorney representing the creditors committee, said during a court hearing in Delaware.
“So in balancing that, we looked at it and said we’ve got two major tasks here,” said Hansen. “One is to assess the value associated with these assets from a sale perspective and to assess the value associated with these assets for a potential reboot is how we’ve been referring to it on our side. The reboot is complicated,” he said.
Hastings’s referral to the “value” of the list has to do with one of the arguments being