Voyager’s $500M Crypto Liquidation Is Almost Complete
Most has been sold, but Voyager still has hundreds of millions of dollars in ether, shiba inu and its own native token left to go
J illustration/Shutterstock.com modified by Blockworks
Bankrupt crypto lender Voyager has almost finished liquidating its monumental crypto portfolio in a bid to make customers whole — but it still has about $166 million to go.
Blockworks compiled Arkham Intelligence data to recreate Voyager’s crypto holdings as of Jan. 1 — just days before it significantly ramped up deposits to crypto exchanges — to see exactly how the process has gone.
Voyager has so far pulled $433 million in stablecoins (mostly USDC and a small amount of USDT) from crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance US year to date, having initially sent mountains of ether (ETH), polygon (MATIC) and shiba inu (SHIB), among dozens of other tokens.
An additional $18.2 million USDC was received from market maker Wintermute, which also runs an over-the-counter trading desk. Voyager has sent Wintermute amounts of ETH, SHIB and MATIC, as well as smaller amounts of sushiswap (SUSHI), aave (AAVE) and yield games guild (YGG).
(For the purposes of this report, crypto sent to exchanges is considered “sold.”)
Voyager at the start of the year:
- held about $546 million in Ethereum-bound crypto across dozens of tokens; with
- ether making up 46% of those funds, followed by USDC (15%) and SHIB (13%); and
- kept 187.7 million VGX (then worth $56 million), 10% of its Ethereum token portfolio.
As well, 6,905.61 BTC ($171 million) sat in a Bitcoin address that once handled some Voyager withdrawals until Wednesday, when it was sent to an external address which has been linked to Coinbase. It’s unconfirmed whether the address belongs to Voyager’s estate, so it’s currently excluded from the charts. Blockworks has reached out to Voyager’s bankruptcy lawyers Kirkland & Ellis for comment.
Voyager already sold all its MATIC, worth $53M
Binance’s US arm has fought for the right to acquire Voyager’s assets. The firm filed for bankruptcy last July under the weight of exposure to Three Arrows Capital and associated market volatility around that time, initially triggered by the demise of algorithmic stablecoin Terra.
Voyager said it had $1.3 billion in user crypto to liquidate at its first day bankruptcy hearing in July 2022, although an exact breakdown of its portfolio wasn’t provided. Considering the volatile and illiquid nature of some cryptocurrencies tied to Voyager’s estate, it’s likely their true value was much lower. Voyager also may have other assets on other blockchains not contained in this analysis.
Still, Voyager spent the following months hoovering crypto from various blockchain addresses to two primary Ethereum wallets. Initial estimates suggested Voyager has upwards of 100,000 creditors, to whom Voyager owes between $1 billion and $10 billion.
As of this Wednesday, Voyager had 52,553 ETH ($86.7 million) left in its addresses, which means it has sent 75% of its initial ether stash for liquidation. And by raw number of tokens (not including stablecoins), Voyager addresses have sent almost 66% of all its cryptocurrency to exchanges so far this year.
The firm has already deposited all of its MATIC, BNB, ontology (ONT), ocean protocol (OCEAN), wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) and yearn finance (YFI) to exchanges, holdings which together were worth $42.5 million at the time of their outflows, nearly all of that MATIC.
Loads of shiba inu still left to unwind
Ether aside, Voyager’s largest non-stablecoin holdings are now SHIB and VGX. Its addresses started the year with 9 billion SHIB and 181.8 million VGX — worth $73 million and $54.3 million at the time, respectively.
Voyager has since sent almost 66% of its SHIB to exchanges, alongside 69% of its VGX. But thanks to increased crypto prices, Voyager’s remaining SHIB is still worth $32.6 million and its VGX $18.2 million.
VGX was intended as a utility token that also paid loyalty rewards. Users could pay for withdrawal fees and the like with VGX while earning tokens by referring new users, staking VGX and even as cashback rewards via Voyager’s debit card.
But with Voyager now defunct, VGX’s value proposition is effectively moot, much like other ‘zombie’ coins.
So much selling might suggest that Voyager has been influencing token prices downward, but it doesn’t seem so.
Practically every token of which Voyager has offloaded a material amount of crypto has seen increased prices since Jan. 1, despite all the liquidations.
All in all, Voyager’s bankruptcy estate has done quite well. What was a near-$550-million crypto portfolio is now worth $700 million — after selling two-thirds of those assets.
And in a bear market, no less.
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