FTX’s bankruptcy estate sold Alameda Research’s early stake in Anysphere for just $200,000 in 2023, matching the original cost of the investment. Less than three years later, the same position illustrates one of the starkest missed upside stories tied to the FTX collapse, as Anysphere—the company behind AI coding assistant Cursor—has surged in value and now sits at the center of a strategic deal involving SpaceX.
An Early Bet That Went Nowhere for Creditors
Back in April 2022, Alameda Research, the trading affiliate of FTX, invested $200,000 in Anysphere’s $400,000 pre-seed round. At the time, the startup was an early-stage company building what would later become Cursor, one of the most widely adopted AI-powered code editors in the market.
That investment was made only months before FTX unraveled. In November 2022, the crypto exchange collapsed after revelations that Alameda had drawn on customer deposits. As the bankruptcy process moved forward, the estate began liquidating assets to help fund creditor recoveries. In 2023, the Anysphere stake was sold for the same $200,000 Alameda had originally paid, effectively turning what could have been a breakout venture position into a flat exit.
Cursor’s Growth Repriced the Story
Since then, Anysphere has become one of the standout names in AI software development. The company later raised $900 million in a funding round led by Thrive Capital, bringing its valuation to $9 billion. At that mark, the stake sold by the FTX estate would have been worth an estimated $500 million, according to the source material.
Operationally, the company’s growth has been equally striking. By April 2026, Cursor had surpassed 1 million daily active users and was generating more than 150 million lines of enterprise code per day. The platform also counted 67% of Fortune 500 companies among its customers and had crossed $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue. Fundraising conversations in the days before SpaceX’s announcement reportedly valued Anysphere at more than $50 billion, showing how dramatically the company’s market standing had changed in a short period.
SpaceX Steps In With a $60 Billion Option
On April 21, SpaceX and Anysphere announced a strategic partnership that immediately reframed the company’s future. Under the agreement, SpaceX secured an option to acquire Anysphere outright for $60 billion. Alternatively, SpaceX could choose to pay $10 billion to jointly develop coding AI models using its Colossus supercomputer infrastructure.
According to the report, the partnership is intended to combine Cursor’s AI-native code editing capabilities with SpaceX’s compute resources. The two companies described the goal as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” suggesting a broader ambition beyond developer tooling alone.
A High-Profile Example of Bankruptcy Opportunity Cost
The Anysphere sale has quickly become a notable example of the opportunity cost embedded in emergency asset liquidations. Wu Blockchain highlighted on April 22 that Alameda’s investment had been made roughly seven months before FTX’s collapse and was later sold at cost by the estate’s liquidators. In hindsight, the sale looks less like a neutral disposal and more like a lost venture-style upside event that creditors never got to participate in.
For observers of the FTX case, that matters because the bankruptcy estate has otherwise made significant progress in creditor distributions. The report notes that the estate has completed several rounds of distributions, with recoveries for many claimants exceeding 100% in nominal dollar terms. In early 2026, a $2.2 billion distribution was approved for senior creditor classes. Even so, the Anysphere transaction stands out because it highlights how difficult it is for bankruptcy administrators to balance certainty, liquidity, and future upside when disposing of private-market assets.
Why the Case Draws Broader Attention
The story resonates beyond FTX because it sits at the intersection of three powerful themes: crypto insolvency, venture investing, and the AI boom. A relatively small check written by Alameda into a tiny startup became, in retrospect, a potentially massive asset. Yet because the position was embedded inside a fast-moving bankruptcy and sold before the market had fully recognized Cursor’s commercial traction, creditors did not benefit from the later repricing.
It also underscores how private startup holdings can be particularly difficult to value during distressed proceedings. In public markets, mark-to-market signals are immediate. In venture investing, value often becomes visible only after a major funding round, strategic partnership, or acquisition process. In this case, the gap between the 2023 sale price and the later implied valuation was vast enough to make the disposal especially controversial in the court of public opinion, even if no formal review has yet been disclosed.
What Remains Unclear
As of the cited report, it has not been disclosed whether the sale of the Anysphere stake will face any review in the ongoing FTX proceedings. That leaves open questions about whether stakeholders will revisit the decision or simply treat it as one of many difficult calls made under bankruptcy constraints.
What is clear, however, is the scale of the divergence. A $200,000 startup investment that was sold for cost has become part of a company valued in the tens of billions, with SpaceX holding a $60 billion acquisition option. For the crypto industry, the episode is a reminder that the long tail of the FTX collapse is still producing consequential stories—not only about fraud and recovery, but also about the opportunities that vanished along the way.