FTX's new management is seeking to recover millions of dollars in donations made by the crypto exchange and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, reports the Wall Street Journal.
At the end of September, FTX's charity arm, Future Fund, had committed more than $160 million to over 110 nonprofit organizations, including biotech startups and university researchers developing Covid-19 vaccines and working on pandemic studies, as well as nonprofit organizations in India, China and Brazil.
As per the report, Future Fund committed $3.6 million to AVECRIS, a company working on a genetic vaccine platform, and another $5 million were donated to Atlas Fellowship for scholarships and high-school summer programs in San Francisco.
A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried said that charitable donations were not made from customer deposits, but from trading profits.
The charity arm was announced in February 2022 planning to deploy over $100 million in its first year and reach up to $1 billion in donations.
1/ We're thrilled to announce the FTX Foundation's Future Fund. We make grants and investments to ambitious projects to improve humanity's long-term prospects.We plan to deploy >$100M this year, and potentially a lot more (in principle up to $1B).https://t.co/kIWdm48LZ4
Despite the decline in crypto prices, donations were kept. On Sep. 23, Future Fund's Twitter profile announced "a substantial fraction" of capital to be deployed on researches and initiatives working on risk management for artificial general intelligence (AGI), with prizes up to $1.5 million, as well as thousands of dollars in rewards for those who "best critiques of our views" about the future of artificial intelligence.
Related: Companies and investors may need to return billions
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