Voyager Digital, a bankrupt cryptocurrency lender, has now been granted permission by the court to sell its assets to Binance.US.
After four days of debate between Voyager and the US Securities and Exchange Commission, US Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles granted the clearance on March 7.
Wiles permitted the trading platform to deal with the Binance.US and send reimbursement tokens to the affected Voyager clients, returning them around 73% of what they are due.
Wiles disagreed with several of the SEC’s claims regarding the transfer, according to a Bloomberg story dated March 7. The Judge stated:
“I cannot put the entire case into indeterminate deep freeze while regulators figure out whether they believe there are problems with the transaction and plan.”
At the hearing, Peter M. Aronoff, an attorney for the Department of Justice, stated that the agency is thinking about appealing Wiles’ ruling.
The judge’s ruling came just over a week after it was revealed that 97% of the 61,300 Voyager account holders supported the current Binance.US restructuring proposal.
The Race for Voyager Digital’s Assets
In particular, a lot of businesses competed for the bankrupt lender’s assets after its bankruptcy declaration. Companies like Binance including the now-bankrupt FTX, Alameda Research, and others expressed interest in assisting the lender in gaining stability.
Following the denial of FTX’s offer to buy the remaining assets from Voyager Digital, Binance.US declared that it will pay $1.022 billion for the insolvent company.
It is important to note that the trading platform’s proposal for Voyager ran into many challenges as in a bankruptcy court filing in New York, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claimed that several aspects of the reorganization plan broke securities law as well as Texas regulators were also hostile to the deal.
According to the regulators, Binance.US’s restructuring plan neglected to adequately inform unsecured creditors that they might only be entitled to a 24%–26% recovery rather than the 51% under Chapter 7.
