Singapore’s Temasek writes down $275M funding in FTX • TechCrunch

FTX’s traders are persevering with to cope with the fallout from the cryptocurrency’s chapter. In an announcement at present, Temasek, the funding agency owned by Singapore’s authorities, stated it write down its full funding in FTX, “regardless of the result of FTX’s chapter safety submitting.”

Temasek invested $210 million USD in FTX worldwide, giving it a minority stake of about 1%. It additionally invested $65 million for a minority stake of about 1.5% in FTX US, in two funding rounds from October 2021 to January 2022. The agency stated the full value of its funding was 0.09% of its internet portfolio worth of $403 billion SGD (about $293 billion USD).

Temasek made some extent of noting that its funding in FTX was not an funding in cryptocurrencies. “To make clear, we at the moment don’t have any direct publicity in cryptocurrencies,” it stated.

As an alternative, the rationale it invested in FTX was as a result of it wished to again a “main digital asset change offering us with protocol agnostic and market impartial publicity to crypto markets with a charge earnings mannequin and no buying and selling or steadiness danger sheet.”

It additionally stated that its due diligence course of for FTX took about 8 months, from February to October 2021, and concerned a evaluation of FTX’s audited monetary assertion, which it stated confirmed the change to be worthwhile.

However with FTX’s collapse, Temasek now says “it’s obvious from this funding that maybe our perception within the actions, judgement and management of Sam Bankman-Fried, shaped from our interactions with him and views expressed in our discussions with others, would seem to have been misplaced.”

Temasek’s announcement comes a couple of days after SoftBank stated it was writing down its $100 million funding in FTX, which was as soon as valued at $32 billion. Sequoia additionally stated it was writing down its different investments.

FTX’s different traders embrace BlackRock, Tiger International, Perception Companions and Paradigm.