Binance’s Abandoned FTX Deal Would Have Given CZ $70B in Anthropic Alone

Published by James Harris on June 19, 2026June 19, 2026

Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik posted a portfolio breakdown on June 19 arguing that Binance’s abandoned FTX acquisition in November 2022 would, if completed, have handed CZ one of the most valuable venture portfolios in tech history. A Forbes analysis puts the combined value of Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal and FTX-linked investments north of $100 billion today.

The math is striking enough to linger on. FTX held an 8% stake in Anthropic, which was purchased for roughly $500 million and sits inside a company now valued somewhere between $600 billion and $900 billion, making that single position potentially worth over $70 billion. A 5% stake in Cursor was sold by the FTX bankruptcy estate back to its founders for $200,000 in 2023, before Cursor was acquired by OpenAI at a $60 billion valuation, implying that stake alone would be worth around $3 billion today. Bankman-Fried also accumulated roughly $60 million in SOL when it traded near $8, a position that peaked near $21 billion. The pattern here is less about crypto genius than about SBF having genuinely sharp instincts in early-stage AI and tech bets, something Scale Venture Partners partner Rory O’Driscoll acknowledged directly.

None of it matters, because CZ never intended to close the deal.

In his April 2026 memoir, Zhao writes that the letter of intent was “purely a formality” to examine FTX’s books, not a real acquisition attempt. He had no interest in owning FTX or in rescuing Bankman-Fried, who had been lobbying against Binance in Washington. Binance withdrew publicly on November 9, 2022, citing mishandled customer funds and regulatory concerns, and Zhao’s own FTT holdings, once worth $580 million, became effectively worthless in the collapse that followed. The counterfactual fortune is real on paper, but it required completing a transaction Zhao says he signed knowing he would walk away from.

What the thought experiment actually surfaces is how thoroughly the FTX bankruptcy destroyed value that had nothing to do with crypto. The Anthropic stake, the Cursor stake, the SpaceX exposure: these were conventional venture positions that got liquidated at distressed prices to repay creditors, transferring wealth from the FTX estate to buyers who understood exactly what they were getting. Svanevik’s framing calls it “a rare miss by CZ in hindsight,” but a more precise read is that the miss belonged entirely to the bankruptcy process, which converted long-duration, high-conviction bets into emergency liquidity at the worst possible moment.