FTX Wants SBF’s $450M Robinhood Stake Frozen After BlockFi Sues

BlockFi wants to collect on a 7.6% stake in Robinhood, collateral pledged by Alameda in the early days of FTX’s collapse

article-image

OpturaDesign/Shutterstock, modified by Blockworks

share

FTX has asked a US court to freeze $450 million in Robinhood shares following a competing claim from embattled crypto lender BlockFi.

BlockFi declared bankruptcy and sued a Sam Bankman-Fried holding company over his Robinhood stock last month. The firm says Alameda had pledged the stake in November as part of a billion-dollar collateral package intended to back loans worth $680 million.

Both FTX and Alameda were beginning to unravel at the time, leading the lender to seek additional security. BlockFi now wants to collect the 56 million shares, which have reduced in value some 40% since it was pledged.

BlockFi owes an estimated 100,000 creditors up to $10 billion; its critical FTX bailout from June snuffed by the fraud scandal.

But at this point, it’s not exactly clear who really owns the stock. Bankman-Fried himself is staking a claim, as is an FTX creditor, per a Thursday motion filed in US bankruptcy court in Delaware. 

In May, Bankman-Fried disclosed he held a 7.6% stake in Robinhood, at the time worth $605 million, through a firm Emergent Fidelity Technologies, of which he is a majority owner. The company is incorporated in Antigua & Barbuda.

The former FTX CEO had been looking for a source of payment for legal fees, according to the motion.

“Emergent is a special-purpose holding company that appears to have no other business,” FTX said in its filing. The firm, now run under veteran insolvency specialist John Ray, reckons the Robinhood shares will be conclusively estate property once its evidence has been finalized.

As such, FTX wants an automatic stay on the stock in a manner fair to creditors until its formally solved, filing a Thursday motion in the US bankruptcy court in Delaware.

If courts don’t determine the FTX estate owns the stock, then it should extend the stay to Emergent itself and “ensure that all creditors — including BlockFi and the others — can participate in an orderly claims process before this Court.”

The filing calls out ex-Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison for pledging the collateral package despite the shares being technically owned by Emergent, allegedly with “knowledge and encouragement from Bankman-Fried.”

A hearing on the matter had not been scheduled at the time the motion was filed.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

Ethena Labs is leaping from its flagship synthetic dollar, USDe, to a full product suite—USDtb, iUSDe, and the Arbitrum-based Converge Chain—designed to marry crypto-native yields with TradFi-grade compliance. Our analysis shows how expanding into CME, ETF options, and tokenized Treasuries could lift protocol revenue from sub-$500 million in a bear case to several billion dollars if favorable regulation and institutional adoption align.

article-image

The L1’s Interwoven Stack is the most opinionated tech stack yet

article-image

Bitcoin is still rising, 11 years after the documentary film The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin

article-image

Arch Labs CEO told Blockworks that the team plans to launch a native token, but declined to give details

article-image

CEO Mike Silagadze tells Blockworks that the US is “open for business” and why its DeFi bank offering is the first of many

article-image

Doing one thing well and leaving everything else out is often what disruptive technologies do best