By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Mike Novogratz moved into the vacant position of white knight for the crypto industry on Friday, as his Galaxy Digital Holdings said it will buy digital asset custody platform GK8 out of Celsius Network's bankruptcy process.
The deal comes as a dwindling number of well-capitalized crypto empires pick over the carcasses of a growing number of investment and custody platforms that have failed this year as a sequence of interest rate rises knocked the floor out from underneath digital asset prices.
Celsius, wrong-footed by the collapse of the Terra/Luna network, filed for bankruptcy in July, citing extreme market conditions that punched a $1.19 billion hole in its balance sheet.
Novogratz's Galaxy offers a suite of financial services including trading, asset management, and investment banking among others to crypto-focused companies. It was still able to boast $1.5 billion of total liquidity and over $1 billion of cash at the end of the third quarter, albeit that was before the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and its affiliates.
In its third quarter statements, which showed a loss of some $68 million, Galaxy said it had total exposure to FTX of $77 million.
Novogratz has been scathing about FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in recent days, telling Bloomberg he thought the self-styled 'SBF' "delusional" and implying that his attempts to rationalize and explain how FTX went wrong could expose him to legal jeopardy in due course.
"I'm kind of surprised his lawyers are allowing him to speak," Novogratz said on Thursday.
The collapse of FTX and the sharp rise in interest rates has caused Novogratz to walk back his bold prediction that Bitcoin would reach $500,000 in the next five years. He now sees a long period of consolidation ahead.