Employees of a charitable foundation created by the Sam Bankman-Fried crypto exchange to invest in the development of artificial intelligence questioned the legality of funding their activities.
Members of the Future Fund FTX team have announced that they have resigned. Employees of a charitable foundation created by the FTX exchange to invest in the development of artificial intelligence have questioned the legality of funding their activities.
‘When we learned of the recent FTX incidents, we were both horrified and very saddened. The thousands of FTX clients whose finances may have been in danger or ruined have our deepest sympathies.’FTX team
‘We are currently unable to carry out our duties or manage grants, and we have serious concerns regarding the reliability and morality of the commercial ventures that were supporting the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund. We decided to resign earlier today as a result.’FTX team
‘Although we don’t yet fully understand what went wrong, we are keeping up with the news online as it develops. But to the extent that the FTX leadership may have acted dishonestly or deceitfully, we strongly condemn that conduct. Being a good actor in the world, in our opinion, is making an effort to behave honorably.‘FTX team
Future Fund FTX is part of the FTX Foundation, a philanthropic foundation funded primarily by Sam Bankman-Freed. The Future Fund began operations in February, and the company plans to invest between $100 million and $1 billion in developing projects this year alone. In addition to the field of artificial intelligence, the fund considered supporting developments in the field of biorisk reduction, economic growth, as well as international relations.
We are excited to introduce the FTX Future Fund, a philanthropic organization that provides grants and investments to ambitious initiatives with the goal of enhancing the long-term prospects of humanity. Depending on how many exceptional possibilities we discover, we hope to distribute at least $100M this year and perhaps much more. We could theoretically deploy up to $1 billion this year.
Although we have a big list of projects we’d want to sponsor, it is not all-inclusive; we are open to a wide variety of ideas. We are especially eager to start up massively scalable projects, which have the potential to generate annual revenue in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. We are particularly interested in the safe development of AI, the reduction of catastrophic biorisk, the enhancement of institutions, economic development, great power relations, effective altruism, and other related topics.
UPDATE: As of March 21, we are no longer accepting submissions for our first open funding round. We don’t know if or when we will start taking applications again, and we don’t currently have any plans to do so. If we choose to resume accepting applications, we will make this choice known via a post on the EA Forum and on our Apply page.
In a statement signed by five members of the Future Fund FTX team, it is likely that the foundation will not be able to disburse many of the already confirmed grants. Despite the fact that already former employees of the company do not have full information about the ongoing events, they noted that they could not continue to work due to the dishonesty of FTX management.
On November 10, it became known that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an investigation into the head of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried. The regulator of the Bahamas froze the accounts of the operator of the FTX crypto exchange, and the issuer of the stablecoin Tether blocked 46 million USDT on its crypto wallet.
Following a request from law authorities, stablecoin issuer Tether has frozen $46 million worth of USDT stored on the Tron blockchain by defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
The wallet belongs to FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that stopped accepting withdrawals earlier this week due to liquidity issues, according to Tron block explorer Tronscan. According to a Tether executive, requests from LE—an acronym for law enforcement—to temporarily freeze assets while an investigation is ongoing have begun to come in.
