Despite Lockup Concerns, Investors Snap Up Discounted WLD Tokens From the FTX Estate

Investors have snapped up millions of tokens across multiple projects, betting that these assets are undervalued and could offer long-term upside.

FTX’s discounted token sales continue to attract attention as investors seek undervalued assets with long-term upside potential. Recently, Worldcoin ( WLD 6.14% WLD 6.14% See Details ) and Metaplex (MPLX) tokens were sold by the estate, while earlier this year, Solana ( SOL 2.11% SOL 2.11% See Details ) tokens were also up for grabs at a discount.

Among FTX's largest holdings were 41 million locked SOL tokens, now valued at about $6 billion. The estate sold these tokens in batches during April and May at a significant discount, ranging from $64 to $110 per token. With SOL currently trading around $142, investors who bought the tokens from the estate, like Pantera Capital, Galaxy Trading and Figure Markets, are already seeing paper profits on their investments. Over the past year, SOL has surged by 527%, rebounding from its lows of around $10 following FTX's collapse in November 2022.

"We're only interested in buying assets from bankruptcy estates that we think are super high quality, want to own for the long term and that we think have meaningful upside from here," Pantera Capital portfolio manager Cosmo Jiang told TechCrunch.

Jack Platts, founder of Hypersphere Ventures, shared a similar perspective, saying, "We're fundamental-based investors, looking for projects led by visionary founders that have high distribution potential to bring on the next tens of millions of users. So whenever opportunities arise, such as distressed sellers, we're interested in exploring them to see if any align with our fundamental view on crypto adoption." Hypersphere has invested in "several" tokens sold by the FTX estate, according to Platts, though he declined to name them or disclose the purchase prices. Notably, Hypersphere was an early investor in Worldcoin, having participated in its $25 million Series A round in 2021.

Earlier this week, we reported that the FTX estate planned to auction 22.3 million locked WLD tokens, valued at approximately $38 million, at a discounted rate. These tokens will unlock daily through 2028. However, a couple of sources expressed concerns about the length of the WLD token lockups. Additionally, while Figure Markets initially intended to purchase the WLD tokens, they ultimately chose not to bid due to concerns about the token's limited float and the perceived expectations from the estate, a source told us at the time.

Despite these concerns, the WLD sale turned out to be quite competitive. A source with direct knowledge of the matter told me that the auction saw WLD selling "in the low $1s." Currently, WLD is trading around $1.78, having peaked at about $11.75 in March this year. Worldcoin, co-founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman, aims to tackle the global identity challenge in the world of artificial intelligence. WLD investors appear to be placing their bets on Altman, who has transformed OpenAI into one of the most valuable startups ever, achieving a $157 billion valuation in its latest record venture capital round of $6.6 billion earlier this week.

Last month, we also reported that the FTX estate sold its MPLX tokens to Wave Digital Assets, from which several crypto funds, including Pantera Capital and ParaFi Capital, subsequently acquired those tokens at a discount. The FTX estate originally held 72.6 million MPLX tokens; of those, 62.6 million were sold privately over the past several months, representing the entire block of unlocked MPLX held by the estate at that time. Additionally, 2.5 million tokens were moved from the FTX wallet in August, leaving only 7.5 million tokens available for sale.

The FTX estate still has a couple of well-known tokens remaining, including Wormhole W -1.37% W -1.37% See Details and Pyth, both of which are "pretty large" in size, a source with knowledge of the matter told me. According to Arkham data, the estate's largest remaining holding is FTX's native FTT token, currently valued at around $675 million, but the token is highly illiquid and may not get sold since the estate marked it to zero. The source told me they don't expect the estate to sell FTT through an auction process, and if they do, it's unlikely they'll receive much value.

Still, FTT has surged nearly 100% over the past 30 days. However, the maximum 24-hour trading volume of the token was around $360 million, significantly lower than the paper value of the estate’s FTT tokens, which stands at about $6

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