FTX Estate Paid $948 Million in Professional Fees by January 2025

The FTX bankruptcy estate paid $948 million in professional fees through Jan. 2, 2025, court-supervised figures show, with costs still running years after the exchange's Nov. 11, 2022 collapse. Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell received about $249 million for legal work, and financial adviser Alvarez & Marsal collected about $306 million.

The numbers illustrate a central operational reality of the case: every dollar billed to professionals reduced the pool of estate assets available for creditor repayments. The fee examiner, Katherine Stadler, reviewed bills for duplicate or excessive charges throughout the process and advised the court on what to approve.

Who received the money?

The estate's spending spread across several categories of professionals:

• Sullivan & Cromwell, the lead law firm, received roughly $249 million for legal work that included litigation and court matters.
• Alvarez & Marsal received about $306 million for financial services.
• Lawyers and advisers hired by the creditor committee received approximately $110 million. The committee represented creditors' interests and retained its own professionals, whose fees — like all other professional charges — were paid from estate assets.

At Sullivan & Cromwell, partners charged as much as $2,165 per hour. The estate billed by the hour across lawyers, financial advisers and other consultants working on its affairs.

Why did the work cost so much?

FTX entered bankruptcy with poor accounting records and funds spread across more than 130 affiliated companies. Reconstructing accounts and tracing assets formed a substantial part of the effort to unwind the exchange. That groundwork fell to hourly-billing professionals, and the meter ran continuously.

The caseload showed in the headcount. During the first three months of the case, 242 lawyers billed time, according to filings reviewed by the fee examiner. Bills for that period totaled $88.8 million, and Stadler recommended approval of $85.1 million — a cut of roughly $3.7 million.

The pace did not slow. By June 2023, fees had topped $200 million within the case's first seven months.

How does that compare with Celsius?

For comparison, fees in Celsius' first six months of bankruptcy totaled $87 million. FTX's first-seven-month figure of more than $200 million ran at well over twice that pace, though the periods measured differ slightly. The comparison anchors the scale: FTX produced one of the most expensive professional-fee records among crypto bankruptcy estates of the era.

What continued after the fee tally closed?

Costs persisted in a different form after the Jan. 2, 2025 cutoff for the fee tally. The FTX Recovery Trust, the estate's successor vehicle, recorded $85 million in operating expenses in the first quarter of 2026 — nearly matching, in a single quarter, the Celsius six-month figure.

Two other cost streams remained active alongside the trust's operations. Nearly $2 billion in claims were disputed, and lawsuits continued seeking to recover money transferred before FTX collapsed. Both processes drew on the same underlying estate.

The two headline figures measure different kinds of costs. The $948 million covers professional fees paid through Jan. 2, 2025; the $85 million covers operating expenses for the first three months of 2026. Together with disputed claims and recovery litigation, they show a bankruptcy that kept consuming resources years after the filing date.

For creditors, the arithmetic is straightforward: professional compensation, trust operating costs and litigation outcomes all draw from the same finite asset pool, and the recovery process was still running as of the first quarter of 2026.