FTX Ventures Acquires 30% Stake in Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

In the lat­est “JPMor­gan-like” move, the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of FTX is tak­ing a 30% stake in Antho­ny Scaramucci’s Sky­Bridge Cap­i­tal which has been strug­gling recently.

“After work­ing with Antho­ny and his team fol­low­ing our SALT con­fer­ence part­ner­ship, we saw there was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work clos­er togeth­er in ways that could com­ple­ment both our busi­ness­es,” Bankman-Fried shared in a state­ment. “We look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing close­ly with Sky­Bridge on its cryp­to invest­ment activ­i­ty and also work­ing along­side them on promis­ing non-cryp­to-relat­ed investments.”

The com­pa­nies said that a por­tion of the cap­i­tal will be used to buy $40 mil­lion in dig­i­tal assets for SkyBridge’s bal­ance sheet “as a long-term investment.”

FTX, 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 Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions to the 45th Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, Don­ald Trump, hold­ing the posi­tion for only 11 days. He also worked at Gold­man Sachs and Lehman Brothers.

He launched Sky­Bridge Cap­i­tal in 2005 as an invest­ment firm “spe­cial­iz­ing in hedge fund solu­tions and oppor­tunis­tic invest­ment vehi­cles” and has been large­ly invest­ing in cryptocurrencies. 

The fund found itself strug­gling late­ly. In July, Sky­Bridge had to halt with­drawals from one of its funds, Legion Strate­gies, which has $200 mil­lion in assets and also hap­pens to have expo­sure to FTX. But SkyBridge’s flag­ship ven­ture – the Sky­Bridge Mul­ti-Advis­er Hedge Fund Port­fo­lios – has also been hav­ing issues main­tain­ing clients. The flag­ship prod­uct man­aged $2 bil­lion in March this year, lost almost a quar­ter of its rev­enue in the sec­ond quar­ter, and now the investors are look­ing to col­lec­tive­ly with­draw $890 mil­lion from it. 

Money from FTX deal will be used to pay off the investors.

Despite the cur­rent down­trend in the cryp­to mar­ket, the flag­ship fund still holds 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 am not smart enough to time the mar­ket. But we’ve done a tremen­dous amount of research and we think any­one who has will see that blockchain tech­nol­o­gy is good and is the future.”

For Be[In]Crypto’s lat­est Bit­coin (BTC) analy­sis, click here.

Disclaimer

All the infor­ma­tion con­tained on our web­site is pub­lished in good faith and for gen­er­al infor­ma­tion pur­pos­es only. Any action the read­er takes upon the infor­ma­tion found on our web­site is strict­ly at their own risk.

Source link

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *