FTX Had Plans For Its Robinhood Shares

One thing we know is that, as his crypto exchange FTX and his trading firm Alameda Research were spiraling into bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried was desperately shopping all of their assets to potential bidders to try to keep them afloat. We also know what the list of assets looked like, and it was pretty grisly. “Hello, we have $2.2 billion worth of Serum tokens, do you want them,” Bankman-Fried apparently asked potential rescuers, but the correct answer was “absolutely not.” The list was a lot of venture-capital stakes and weird illiquid tokens that FTX had made up, stuff like that.1

The most conventionally attractive thing on the list — the biggest line item in the “liquid” column of the list of assets — was $472 million of “HOOD,” meaning the 7.6% stake in Robinhood Markets Inc. that Bankman-Fried bought in May. Technically those shares were owned by a vehicle named Emergent Fidelity Technologies Inc., which in turn was majority owned by Bankman-Fried and seems not to have had any official relationship with FTX or Alameda. (It did not file for bankruptcy with FTX this month.) But in the scramble to save his businesses, Bankman-Fried was willing to offer whatever he had, including the Robinhood shares that he owned personally.