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.
SkyBridge‘s 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.”
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