Reading the spreadsheet detailing the investment portfolio of Alameda Research, the investment arm of fallen crypto exchange FTX, you wonder how they had time to do anything other than invest given the sheer number of deals recorded. Perhaps that was part of the problem.
FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now.
A spreadsheet first shared by the Financial Times showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio, with some FTX positions included. The document includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. (Like the Financial Times, TechCrunch has yet to confirm all data shared in the spreadsheet, meaning that when we discuss aggregates, we’re speaking directionally. We reached out to FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, for comment but haven’t heard back.)
This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.
“I scratched my head at the FTX investments/acquisitions (i.e. Dave Inc/Storybook) last year and thought maybe SBF (as a genius) saw the market differently, and maybe I was losing my touch,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, tweeted on Tuesday. “Looking at it all together in 2022: nope, they were idiots, they lit all the money on fire.”
One of the biggest investments saw a total of $1.15 billion poured into crypto mining firm Genesis Digital Assets. (This is not related to Genesis Trading, which froze its lending unit amid the FTX collapse.) The capital arrived in several tranches, per the sheet. It’s unclear why Alameda poured that much money into a crypto mining business, though it’s tough times for miners: They continue to feel pressure as cryptocurrency prices remain low and energy prices rise.
While many listed funding rounds had been previously announced, the extent of the investments had never before been aggregated in one place for the public eye. The resulting recording is a hodgepodge of deals, sizes and types concerning mainly crypto entities but also some traditional financial institutions, publishers, betting platforms and funds. Anthony Scaramucci’s investment firm Skybridge Capital, for example, is on the list; the firm has been trying to buy back its 30% stake since FTX collapsed.
Many valuations are represented in the spreadsheet tower: Some 23 companies listed as venture investments by Alameda, FTX and six other subsidiaries had unicorn valuations at the time of investment, meaning that they were worth $1 billion or more. How those valuations have held up since, and whether any have been written down, is not immediately clear.
The sheet indicates that FTX Ventures put $50 million into Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape NFTs, at a $4 billion valuation. Alameda Ventures (under the name Maclaurin Investments) put $10 million into Circle at a $3.5 billion price tag. That deal might have looked good when Circle was set to go public in a SPAC combination that would value it at $9 billion. However, we learned this week that Circle’s blank-check combination was scrapped.
Around 60 of the listed deals are in companies worth $100 million or more. Around 80 are in companies worth $50 million or more. Those numbers would rise if we had valuation entries for all listed investments, which we do not.
The spreadsheet also lists investments into funds and other corporate entities; the FTX-Alameda crew was busy in many forms of deal-making, from putting a listed, combined $200 million into two Sequoia funds to equity tokens, SAFEs and straight-up token buys.
Given the sheer volume of the deals listed in this spreadsheet, it appears that a sizable portion of the crypto boom was predicated at least partially on FTX-derived capital. While it would be simple at this juncture to say that FTX was hyping its own supply, it’s worth noting that other venture players have taken similarly aggressive postures. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is a leading investor in web3 companies and is active in lobbying for favorable regulation for the crypto space, similar to FTX and SBF. Capital in the crypto space is often doing a little bit more than just buying shares.
What happens to the listed stakes is not yet clear. Robinhood, in which Bankman-Fried bought a material stake, recently said that it is not sure what will happen to that chunk of its equity. For the startups present on the list, entities swimming in less liquid waters, the issues could prove thornier.
The FTX implosion is still shrouded in confusing, conflicting claims. Bankman-Fried is adamant that it was all a big whoops, while many in the larger crypto community appear prepared to accept little less than his legal defenestration. We’ll see. But what the spreadsheet makes plain is just how deep FTX’s roots in the crypto industry were.
