The worst is behind us. Or at least that’s what most people think. It’s certainly looking better than a year ago.
The woeful crypto winter filled with scams (FTX, Luna) and high-profile bankruptcies (BlockFi, Celsius) generated a long list of losers, from people who lost money to people who lost their face to the high-ranking execs that are either in jail or in litigation.
And the winners? Well, there is one clear winner in this, or perhaps we should say winners, plural, and that’d be the legal teams that oversaw these legal issues.
Crypto bankruptcy law firms have amassed a whopping $700 million in fees in recent years, as per a CoinTelegraph report.
Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm that’s currently managing the case involving FTX, has received approval for $254 million in fees.
John Ray III, the powerful attorney no one had ever heard of who took over as CEO of FTX after the start of Bankman-Friend’s legal trouble, billed $5.6 million, at an average hourly rate of $1,300.
FTX is apparently losing at least $1.3 million per day in legal fees.
Kirkland & Ellis, yet another company that helped with the three major crypto exchanges that filed for Chapter 11, invoiced over $120 million: $76 million for the Celsius case, $27 million for Voyager and $16 million for BlockFi.
We’re clearly in the wrong business.
We should start a company with a name like that, for example Bill & Get-Rich, hire lawyers that we’re gonna overpay, and then receive obscene fees from the next crypto company that goes bankrupt.
I don’t want to sound populist or anything, but the system is clearly broken. Because A, that’s way too much money, and B, lest we forget, this is your money and my money.
Because legal fees are paid using the company’s funds, ie users’ funds and fees generated from users’ actions.
One more penny for them means one less penny for the people who lost their money.
The main image for this story was generated using Perplexity
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