- Ikigai CEO Travis Kling said the firm held “a large majority” of its hedge fund assets on defunct exchange FTX.
- The firm managed to withdraw a “very little” amount of its funds.
- Kling apologized for listing investors’ money and promoting FTX in the past.
- He said it’s going to be hard for crypto to bounce back “from this ordeal.”
Crypto asset management firm Ikigai Asset Management had “a large majority” of its funds on now-bankrupt exchange FTX, the company’s CEO Travis Kling revealed on Twitter on Monday.
Kling said that the California-based firm managed to withdraw “very little” of its hedge fund’s assets last Monday. This was hours after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that the exchange is going to sell its FTT tokens “due to recent revelations”, which sparked a bank run on FTX.
Kling also apologized for having “lost investors’ money” and endorsing FTX many times in the past. He said Ikigai is going to continue to trade the assets that they have available. He added that a decision on what to do with its venture fund, which was unaffected by the FTX fallout, would be made.
Ikigai was founded in 2018 and boasts to have more than 275 investors around the world. Its venture capital fund raised $30 million from the existing investors of its hedge fund earlier this year. It’s unclear what will happen with the firm’s hedge fund assets.
“I’m at a loss for words at the depth and breadth of the pieces of shit that permeate crypto. So many fucking sociopaths were granted the opportunity to do so much damage. It’s hard for me to imagine the space bouncing back quickly from this ordeal. Too many got burned too hard,” Kling said in an emotional Twitter thread. He said that if the crypto industry is to continue to develop and grow, it needs to do so in a decentralized and trustless way.
“If crypto is to recover and continue on its journey to make the world a better place, I believe the entire concept of trust has to be completely rearchitected. Bitcoin is trustless. Then we built all these trusted things around it, and those things have failed catastrophically,” he said. Kling added that the industry has let “way too many sociopaths [to] get way too powerful and then we all pay the price.” If his fund continues to exist, it pledges to “fight harder in this regard.”
Ikigai is one of the dozen crypto asset management companies that have been affected by the blowup of FTX. Venture capital giant Sequoia Capital has marked its $213.5 million investment in FTX to $0. Meanwhile, Sino Global Capital revealed on Tuesday that its exposure to FTX amounts to mid-seven figures. SoftBank has also marked down its $100 million investment in the bankrupt exchange to zero.
On the Flipside
- How much exactly Ikigai had on FTX is unknown.
- Ikigai and other firms still have a chance to get back their funds. However, this depends on the bankruptcy procedures and will probably take multiple years.
Why You Should Care
Ikigai is just one of multiple crypto firms that have been affected by the FTX debacle. The true extent of FTX’s impact on the industry is still unknown and numerous bankruptcies are likely in the near future.
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