FTX and Alameda’s massive investments will take a long time to unwind from crypto industry

Reading the spreadsheet detailing the investment portfolio of Alameda Research, the investment arm of fallen crypto exchange FTX, you wonder how they had time to do anything other than invest given the sheer number of deals recorded. Perhaps that was part of the problem.

FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now.

A spreadsheet first shared by the Financial Times showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio, with some FTX positions included. The document includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. (Like the Financial Times, TechCrunch has yet to confirm all data shared in the spreadsheet, meaning that when we discuss aggregates, we’re speaking directionally. We reached out to FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, for comment but haven’t heard back.)

This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.

“I scratched my head at the FTX investments/acquisitions (i.e. Dave Inc/Storybook) last year and thought maybe SBF (as a genius) saw the market differently, and maybe I was losing my touch,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, tweeted on Tuesday. “Looking at it all together in 2022: nope, they were idiots, they lit all the money on fire.”