Wall Street brokers are circling the ruins of FTX, 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.

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.

The practice is common in bankruptcy, allowing investors to get some of their money back sooner by passing on the rights to specialist firms willing to fight a legal battle in pursuit of profit.

Still, given the uncertainty of the bankruptcy process and even whether any of the FTX funds are obtainable, the going price for the claims is just a few cents on the dollar.