SBF is still swearing up and down that he can pay back US customers

• Sam Bankman-Fried doubled down on his claim that FTX's US affiliate "was and is solvent."
• The collapsed crypto exchange's new bosses said FTX US didn't have enough to return to customers.

The disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried repeated his claim that the US arm of his crypto empire is solvent — meaning it has enough cash to repay customers who lost money when the exchange collapsed.

"FTX US is solvent, as it always as been," he tweeted on Tuesday, sharing a link to a Substack post where he questioned recent calculations made by bankruptcy lawyers.

The company's new bosses have said FTX US, the failed crypto group's US exchange, held just $181 million worth of crypto, which wouldn't be enough to make investors whole.

"Investigation has confirmed shortfalls at both International and U.S. Exchanges," the exchange's lawyers, from Sullivan & Cromwell, said in a presentation on Tuesday.

But Bankman-Fried said that they hadn't included $428 million of cash held by FTX US in their calculations and that that amount of cash would be enough to pay back the exchange's US-based former customers.

"These claims by S&C are wrong, and contradicted by data later on in the same document," he wrote on Substack. "FTX US was and is solvent, likely with hundreds of millions of dollars in excess of customer balances."

This isn't the first time Bankman-Fried has said FTX US isn't facing the same solvency issues as his broader crypto empire.

"This was about FTX International," he tweeted on November 10 while addressing the exchange's solvency crisis. "FTX US, the US based exchange that accepts Americans, was not financially impacted by this shitshow. It's 100% liquid."

FTX US filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a day later, on November 11, alongside FTX International and Alameda Research, its sister trading firm, among other companies under the FTX umbrella.

Authorities in the Bahamas arrested Bankman-Fried the following month and extradited him to the US. Federal prosecutors have charged him with eight counts of criminal activity including fraud, money laundering, and violating campaign-finance laws.

The former crypto billionaire writes his tweets and Substack posts from his parents' home in California, where he has been made to stay by a US judge while he's awaiting trial on bail.

Read more: FTX lost $415 million worth of crypto in hacker heists, the collapsed exchange's new bosses say