Binance.US sailed away from its $1.3B deal with Voyager, now what?
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Earlier this week, Binance.US broke off its $1.3 billion deal to buy crypto broker Voyager Digital’s assets due to a “hostile and uncertain regulatory climate.”
The announcement comes about nine months after Voyager filed for bankruptcy. At the time, the U.S.-headquartered firm — and its two affiliates — said in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the Southern District of New York that it had between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and more than 100,000 creditors.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Voyager lawyers said the company reserves all rights for the $10 million good-faith deposit from Binance.US to Voyager, in addition to a reverse-termination fee owed by the U.S.-based crypto exchange.
“While our hope throughout this process was to help Voyager’s customers access their crypto in kind, the hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States has introduced an unpredictable operating environment impacting the entire American business community,” Binance.US said in a statement on Tuesday.
This back-out is the latest headache for Voyager, which has been trying to raise capital through asset sales so it can repay creditors after it filed for bankruptcy last year. The company also struck out with an agreement with FTX, which agreed to buy Voyager’s assets but then collapsed itself in November (and filed for bankruptcy, too).
Following Binance.US’ termination of the asset purchase agreement, Voyager said the “development is disappointing,” but its Chapter 11 plan allows the company to return cryptocurrency and cash directly to customers through its platform.
“Consistent with the plan, we will now move swiftly to return value to customers via direct distributions. We will provide more information on next steps and any actions customers need to take in the coming days,” Voyager added.
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The latest pod
For last week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Jesse Pollak, the lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase. Base is an Ethereum-focused layer 2 blockchain launched by Coinbase in February of this year.
Pollak previously led all retail engineering at Coinbase, including building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Wallet. In a past life, Pollak started Clef, a 2FA mobile app and was an engineer at BuzzFeed.
A number of crypto businesses, platforms, marketplaces and infrastructure firms have committed to building on Base. Those that plan to be involved include Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Etherscan, Quicknode, Aave, Animoca Brands, Dune, Nansen, Magic Eden, Pyth, Rainbow Wallet, Ribbon Finance, The Graph, Wormhole and Gelato, to name a handful.
We talked a lot about Base and where it’s headed in the future, as well as how regulation could affect the blockchain and the timeline for its mainnet launch; Pollak shared it’s aiming for 2023.
We also dove into:
Decentralizing Base
Developers growing internationally
Coinbase’s role in Base
Advice for developers
Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!
Follow the money
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Animoca Brands’ TinyTap raised $8.5 million for its educational games
This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.
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Binance.US sailed away from its $1.3B deal with Voyager, now what? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch