The SEC says FTX made two $100M investments using customer funds in fintech company Dave in March 2022 and blockchain startup Mysten Labs in September 2022
- FTX and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried made two $100 million venture investments using customer funds through an FTX subsidiary, the SEC said in a pair of complaints.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after the SEC charged Sam Bankman-Fried with defrauding investors and diverting FTX customer funds to Alameda since at least May 2019 (the December fraud complaint), the agency is now naming specific destinations for that money: a pair of $100 million venture checks written through an FTX subsidiary — one to digital banking app Dave, one to blockchain startup Mysten Labs.
The Dave investment was already public as a March 2022 $100M convertible note from FTX Ventures that made FTX US Dave's exclusive crypto partner; what is new is the SEC's claim that the source was customer funds, which converts a routine funding announcement into evidence in a fraud case and pulls both recipients into the bankruptcy estate's orbit.
First-order effects
- Dave and Mysten Labs are now publicly identified as recipients of allegedly misappropriated customer funds, exposing both to clawback claims by the FTX estate and to association risk with their own investors and partners.
- Bankman-Fried faces an expanded factual record in the SEC's case: the complaints move from the general allegation of diversion to specific transactions with dates, amounts, and counterparties.
Second-order effects
- Other companies that took FTX Ventures money face renewed diligence from their own backers and boards, as limited partners ask whether any crypto-exchange-affiliated capital carried similar provenance risk.
- FTX's estate litigation — including its $1B+ suit against Bankman-Fried and executives over 'pet projects' — gains concrete recoverable assets to target, sharpening the incentive to unwind or resell these stakes.
Third-order effects
- If exchanges' proprietary investment arms are shown to be funded from customer balances, regulators and creditors will push toward structural separation of custody from trading and investing — the same commingling theme running through the parallel CFTC misappropriation suit.
The trend: The FTX collapse is turning every dollar of its venture portfolio into a test case for whether crypto exchanges can co-mingle customer deposits with corporate investing.