Hey Peeps!
On February 21st, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an official objection into Bankruptcy Court proceedings against Voyager's purchase agreement with Binance.
The FTC filed this objection as the purchase agreement, between Binance and Voyager, would allow for Voyager officials from being held responsible for any “fraud, willful misconduct, or gross negligence".
Within the objection, the FTC also announced an ongoing investigation into Voyager's "employees, directors, and officers, for their deceptive and unfair marketing of cryptocurrency to the public".
These last few months have been quite an up-and-down journey for customers of Voyager.
Since the company filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, on July 6th of 2022:
- FTX won the bid to purchase Voyager for $1.311 billion.
- The Voyager/FTX purchase agreement was canceled after the collapse of FTX.
- Next, Binance.US won the bid to acquire Voyager for $1.02 billion.
- On January 4th of 2023, the SEC filed an objection in court due to an investigation into Binance.
- Despite the SEC investigation, Bankruptcy Court approved the purchase agreement between Binance and Voyager on January 13th.
- This means that the SEC, and now the FTC, have filed official objections against the purchase agreement between Binance.US and Voyager.
"Although Debtors exclude claims for 'actual fraud, willful misconduct, The FTC does not consent to a release of its claims for injunctive or monetary relief against the Debtors or other nondebtor third parties, such as Debtors CEO. and gross negligence' from the releases, the releases do not track the language of the Bankruptcy Code, which excludes all debts under Section 523(a)(2), including debts for 'false representation,' and 'false pretenses' as well as debts under § 523(a)(2)(B). By not excluding, inter alia, false pretenses and false representations, the release can be read to interfere with causes of action by a governmental unit like the FTC. This is impermissible. Accordingly, the Court should deny entry of the release and injunctions, or clarify the scope of the release and injunction excludes all fraud-related debts within the scope of Bankruptcy Code Section 1141(d)(6)." - Katherine Johnson, FTC Attorney
After seeing this news, and looking at all the other obstacles in the way, I am starting to believe this deal is dead in the water.
As you may know from my previous articles on Voyager, I am unfortunately a customer of Voyager who had lost a decent amount of assets on the platform.
However, I am grateful that this happened as I learned a valuable (not to mention expensive) lesson when Voyager went bankrupt.
This lesson was finally understanding the importance of the classic expression "Not your Keys, Not your Coins".
I had seen this message all over but I never really thought that it would ever affect me, until it did.
All this to say that I now keep 99% of my crypto assets on my Ledger hardware wallet, or Exodus non-custodial wallet, and I highly recommend to everyone to do the same.
What are your thoughts on this news?
Do you think this kills the Binance/Voyager deal?
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:)