FTX was once one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, handling billions in daily trades and positioning itself as the future of digital finance. Founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, it promised security, transparency, and innovation.

Then, in November 2022, it all collapsed.

A liquidity crisis exposed an $8.9 billion shortfall in customer funds, revealing a web of financial mismanagement that led to bankruptcy overnight. Bankman-Fried was arrested, investors and users were left in limbo, and what was once a trusted financial platform became one of the biggest scandals in history.

By mid-2023, FTX had become synonymous with corporate fraud. Headlines painted a grim picture, and public confidence in the company was beyond repair.

Late on a Friday afternoon, an inbound request landed in our inbox. It was from Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), the turnaround firm leading FTX’s restructuring and recovery of assets. They had a court-mandated deadline to launch a web app for customer repayments in just three weeks. The system had to be built from scratch. And they had heard we were the best.

By Sunday, contracts were signed. By Monday morning, we were all-in designing and building the FTX Claims Portal, a system that would allow hundreds of thousands of creditors to verify their balances, submit claims, and eventually get their money back.

For context, this wasn’t just another bankruptcy case for A&M. This was their biggest project ever, even larger than their administration efforts with Lehman Brothers after its 2008 collapse. The sheer scale of the financial disaster, the number of creditors, and the complexity of untangling the mess left behind made this one of the most high-profile corporate turnarounds in history.

It was also one of the highest stakes projects we had ever taken on.

For us, the stakes were clear. Nearly $16 billion dollars was owed to hundreds of thousands of people and any remaining confidence in the process had vanished. If this system didn’t work, it would only reinforce the skepticism and frustration of those who had already lost faith. If it did, it could prove that even in the messiest situations, the right technology could help untangle billions of dollars and make things right.

A&M had one urgent priority: re-engage FTX’s former users and give them a clear path to claim their money. But there was a problem.

FTX’s existing backend was a disaster. The company had collapsed so quickly that user data was disorganized and inconsistent. Not to mention most of the original team had already left, leaving few sources to help decipher the information.

We were handed millions of lines of undocumented legacy code, built by multiple teams across different countries with no shared standards. It was clear this couldn’t be rewritten from scratch, we had to make it work.

We needed to build a seamless, transparent system on top of an extremely fragile and inconsistent legacy codebase.

To move quickly, we focused on three core pillars:

User trust: FTX had lost nearly all credibility, so the Claims Portal needed to feel secure and transparent. Every step had to reassure users that their claims were accurate, their identities were protected and their money was actually on its way.

Security & Verification: Identity verification (KYC) was critical to prevent fraudulent claims, but it also had to be frictionless for legitimate users. We integrated multiple layers of verification while keeping the process smooth.

Scalability & Adaptability: The Portal wasn’t a one-time launch. It had to evolve through multiple bankruptcy phases, from balance verification to claims submissions, settlement voting, and, ultimately, distributing billions of dollars in recovered funds. We built it with the flexibility to scale and adapt to new legal and financial requirements over time. We also had to work around regional compatibility issues, such as replacing tools like Google Captcha in markets like China. Small but critical details that made the platform truly global.

The first version of the Claims Portal had to go live fast. We had just three weeks.

With a tight deadline and a constantly shifting legal framework, we ran an intense development sprint. Every feature had to meet legal, financial, and technical scrutiny, all while integrating with a backend system that wasn’t designed for this level of transparency.

On top of that, the codebases from FTX’s various regional exchanges—including the US, EU, Turkey, and Japan—had been merged haphazardly. We had to carefully consolidate and extend them into one unified system, all while preserving compliance with each jurisdiction’s requirements.

Despite the challenges, we successfully hit our feature complete milestone as scheduled. But getting the first release live was just the start, the real work was still ahead of us.

Behind the scenes, one of our engineers deprecated over 500,000 lines of dead code, a precision effort that required surgical attention to avoid breaking core exchange logic. These types of cleanups made the system more secure, faster, and maintainable for future updates.

From Claims to Cash: How the Portal Evolved

Since launch, the Portal has gone through multiple critical updates, each unlocking a new phase of the bankruptcy process:

Balance Verification: Giving creditors access to their accounts so they could confirm what FTX owed them.

Claims Submission: Allowing users to officially file claims, with built-in fraud prevention and verification layers.

Settlement Voting: Enabling creditors to vote on restructuring plans, influencing how funds would be repaid.

Payments & Distribution: The final and most complex step—integrating with financial partners to start sending real money back to users.

Every stage required deep collaboration between our team, A&M, FTX, Sygnia, legal counsel, and third party integrations with companies like BitGo and Kraken. Requirements changed. Timelines shifted. We adapted.

Engineering decisions were made hand-in-hand with legal teams. Compliance reviews happened daily, and many features went through rapid iteration cycles to align with ever-evolving court mandates. The result: a system that balanced legal precision with technical agility.

On February 18, FTX began its first round of payouts, over $300 million distributed to creditors.

By the end of the process, it’s expected that 98% of creditors will recover 120 to 130 percent of their claim amounts, accounting for interest.

For a company that was once considered beyond saving, this outcome was almost unthinkable. But the system worked.

The Claims Portal became the backbone of the largest corporate repayment process in history.

Most of the time, we design products to make people’s lives easier, to create something new, or to push an industry forward. But every so often, a project comes along where the stakes feel different. Where it’s not just about launching a great product—it’s about restoring something that was lost.

This was one of those projects. Big thank you to the partnership with FTX and A&M—especially Raj, Kumanan and Azmat, Or and Itay and all at Sygnia, Kraken, BitGo, and all the people who collaborated to make this happen.

"We couldn’t have done it without you."

"You’ve been with us every step of the way."

We’re proud of what we built. More importantly, we’re proud of what it helped accomplish.

A system that worked. Money returned to real people. And proof that, even in the messiest situations, great design can help rebuild trust.

Unraveling FTX