FTX's 'Effective Altruism' Future Fund Team Resigns

The team behind the FTX Future Fund, one of the exchange giant's philanthropic arms, resigned on Thursday in an open letter, posted to Twitter by journalist Teddy Schleifer.

The group wrote that it was "devastated that it looks like there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor."

"We are so sorry that it has come to this," the letter said, adding: "To the extent that the leadership of FTX may have engaged in deception or dishonesty, we condemn that behavior in the strongest possible terms. We believe that being a good actor in the world means striving to act with honesty and integrity."

The decision adds to the fallout from FTX's dramatic liquidity problems. FTX fell under scrutiny last week after CoinDesk reported that the balance sheet of its sister company, Alameda Research was overly weighted with FTX's FTT token.

FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has tried to brand himself as the world's "most generous billionaire" and pledged to donate a significant amount of his wealth and make significant corporate donations. FTX ran two philanthropic arms.

The FTX Foundation, a traditional charity has donated to health, pollution and climate initiatives. The FTX Future Fund has supported moonshot projects in fields like biosecurity and A.I. safety focused on "long-term improvements for humankind." In March, FTX said it was going to deploy $1 billion through the Future Fund at a rate of $100 million a year.

During the bull market, some thought that Web3 wealth would power a new generation of philanthropy, similar to how Web2 spurred the creation of organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bankman-Fried has seen his personal wealth plummet by nearly 94% amid the rapid devaluation of FTX and FTT and vanished the Bloomberg Billionaires Index earlier this week. He might be worth even less now, given how one prominent VC that invested in FTX marked down its investment value to zero.