FTX Real Estate’s discounted token sale continues to gain attention. Investors have been buying up millions of tokens across multiple projects, convinced that these assets are undervalued and could offer long-term upside. I recently bought Worldcoin ( world
+9.21%
) and Metaplex (MPLX), and my colleague Tim Copeland had Solana (
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) token sale earlier this year.
SOL was FTX’s largest holding, with 41 million locked tokens currently valued at approximately $6 billion. The estate sold these tokens in batches in April and May at significant discounts ranging from $64 to $110 per token. SOL is currently trading around $142, and investors who bought the token from properties like Pantera Capital, Galaxy Trading, and Figure Markets are already seeing paper profits. Over the past year, SOL has surged 527%, rebounding from its low of around $10 since the FTX collapse in November 2022.
“We are only interested in purchasing assets from bankrupt estates that are of very good quality, that we want to own for the long term, and that we believe there is meaningful upside here,” said Cosmo Jiang, portfolio manager at Pantera Capital. . told me
Jack Platts, founder of Hypersphere Ventures, agreed. “We are a fundamentals-based investor, and we are looking for projects led by visionary founders with high distribution potential that can attract tens of millions of users in the future,” he said. So whenever an opportunity arises, such as a sluggish seller, we are interested in examining it to see if it is consistent with our fundamental views on cryptocurrency adoption.” Platts has invested in “several” tokens that Hypersphere sells on FTX Real Estate. However, Hypersphere was an early investor in Worldcoin, which backed a $25 million Series A round in 2021.
The lure of FTX discount tokens
As I reported earlier this week, FTX Real Estate, along with Tim, planned to auction off 22.3 million locked WLD tokens worth about $38 million at a discounted price. These tokens will be unlocked daily until 2028. However, several sources have expressed concerns about the lock-up period for WLD tokens. Additionally, Figure Markets initially attempted to purchase WLD tokens, but ultimately decided not to bid due to concerns about the limited liquidity of the tokens and expectations of the property, sources told us at the time.
Despite these concerns, WLD sales have proven to be quite competitive. A source with direct knowledge of the matter said the WLD was sold at auction “for as low as $1.” Currently, WLD is trading at around $1.78 after peaking at around $11.75 in March of this year. Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI, aims to solve the problem of global identity in the world of artificial intelligence. WLD investors appear to be betting on Altman, which transformed OpenAI into one of the most valuable startups of all time by achieving a $157 billion valuation in its latest $6.6 billion venture capital round earlier this week.
Last month, we reported that FTX Assets sold MPLX tokens to Wave Digital Assets, and that several cryptocurrency funds, including Pantera Capital and ParaFi Capital, subsequently acquired the tokens at a discount. FTX assets originally held 72.6 million MPLX tokens. Of those, 62.6 million were sold privately over the past few months, representing the entire block of unlocked MPLX held by the estate at the time. Additionally, 2.5 million tokens were moved out of FTX wallets in August, leaving only 7.5 million tokens available for sale.
There are still several well-known tokens remaining in the FTX asset, including: worm-hole 
female
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And Pyth is both “quite large” in size, a source with knowledge of the matter told me. According to The estate’s largest holding, Arkham Data, which is FTX’s native FTT token, is currently worth about $675 million, but the token is highly illiquid and may not be sold as the estate has marked it as zero. Sources said the estate does not expect to sell the FTT through the auction process and, even if it does, it is unlikely to get much value.
Nonetheless, FTT has surged nearly 100% in the past 30 days. However, the token’s peak 24-hour trading volume of about $360 million is well below the paper value of the real estate FTT token, which is worth about $675 million, according to Arkham. “This must be trading like a meme,” Hypersphere’s Platts said.
Overall, the appeal and profit potential of discounted tokens makes these investments a risk worth considering for many.
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