Given the complex nature of the bankruptcy process, it could be years before any of FTX’s customers recover their funds, and they’re likely to receive only a small fraction of what they deposited. So the financial firms are competing to buy customers’ claims to those assets now at a discount and then profit when some portion of the funds are eventually turned over.

Wall Street brokers are offering to pay the crypto exchange’s customers pennies on the dollar for the bankruptcy rights to their trapped cash and cryptocurrency on the platform, before looking to sell those rights to specialist hedge funds. The investment bank Jefferies and the brokers Seaport Global and BTIG are among a number of Wall Street firms trying to assess the potential value of the trapped assets.