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In the latest "JPMorgan-like" move, FTX's venture capital branch takes a 30% stake in SkyBridge Capital from Anthony Scaramucci who has been in trouble recently.
Having collaborated with Anthony and his team as part of our partnership for the SALT conference, we saw an opportunity to work more closely together to complement our two companies," said Bankman-Fried. "We look forward to working closely with SkyBridge on their crypto investment business and working with them on promising investments outside of cryptography."
The companies said some of the capital will be used to purchase $40 million in digital assets for SkyBridge's bottom line "as a long-term investment."
FTX Ventures and are acquiring a stake in @SkyBridge. Sam & I have gotten to know each other for the last two years and have partnered together on a few things (including @SALTConference@CryptoBahamas). We could not be more enthusiastic about the partnership. pic.twitter.com/jIcKfiDeCl
— Scaramucci.algo (@Scaramucci) September 9, 2022
, founded and led by Sam Bankman-Fried, has been seen as the “JPMorgan” of crypto bailing out crypto companies during this prolonged crypto winter. The crypto exchange provided a $250 million credit to a crypto lender BlockFi. In June, FTX also acquired a Canadian crypto asset trading platform Bitvo.
Another Sam Bankman-Fried-owned company Alameda offered to bail out a troubled crypto broker Voyager Digital.
SkyBridges troubled quarter
Anthony Scaramucci is a former White House communications director for the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, who held the post for only 11 days. He has also held positions with Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.
He launched SkyBridge Capital in 2005 as an investment company "specializing in hedge fund solutions and opportunistic investment vehicles" and invested in cryptocurrencies for the most part.
The fund has had some difficulties in the last little while. In July, Skybridge had to stop withdrawing one of its funds, the Legion strategies, which has $200 million worth of assets and is also exposed to ftx. But Skybridge's flagship company, Skybridge's multi-advisor hedge fund portfolios, also had problems maintaining their customers. The signature product was managed to the tune of $2 billion last March, lost nearly one-quarter of its revenues in Q2, Now the investors are looking for $890 million collectively.
The cash from the FTX transaction will be used to repay investors.
Despite the declining crypto market, the flagship fund continues to hold 22% of its assets and related products. Scaramucci recently said in an interview with DealBook that they still feel positive about the potential blockchain technology can bring.
I'm not intelligent enough to calculate market time. But we've done a lot of research, and we think that anyone who has done it will find that blockchain technology is a good thing and that it's the future."
