FTX could relaunch - and one of its former VC backers may lead a $250 million funding round to revive the failed exchange, report says
Marco Bello/Reuters
- Tribe Capital may lead a $250 million funding round to reboot FTX, according to Bloomberg.
- Tribe's cofounder Arjun Sethi held talks with the failed crypto exchange in January, sources said.
- The VC firm and its partners could provide $100 million to fund the relaunch, Bloomberg said.
FTX could relaunch – and one of its former backers might round up hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of capital to aid its revival efforts, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Tribe Capital is considering leading a $250 million fundraising effort to help reboot the failed crypto exchange, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The venture capital firm's co-founder, Arjun Sethi, met with FTX's committee of unsecured creditors in January to discuss the informal proposal, which would be anchored by $100 million of cash provided by Tribe and its limited partners, per Bloomberg.
San Francisco-based Tribe was founded in 2018 and currently manages over $1.6 billion worth of assets.
It has previously invested in startups including crypto exchange Kraken and online checkout firm Bolt Payments, as well as FTX and its American partner site, FTX US.
FTX filed for bankruptcy in November after CoinDesk reported its sister trading firm, Alameda Research, held the exchange's native FTT token as a significant proportion of its portfolio. Rival exchange Binance then announced it would sell all of its holdings of the token, leading to customers pulling their funds from FTX.
FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas the following month and extradited to the US, where he's been charged with eight counts of fraud.
Restructuring expert John Ray III, who was appointed as Bankman-Fried's successor, will decide this quarter whether it's viable to relaunch the exchange, according to a presentation made in a bankruptcy court.
Tribe's proposal in January would relaunch FTX US, FTX Australia, FTX Japan, FTX EU, FTX International and LedgerX, Bloomberg said.
The revived exchange would continue to use the FTX name and include around nine million customer accounts, the publication reported.
FTX and Tribe Capital didn't immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment, made outside normal working hours.