(Bloomberg) — Anthony Scaramucci said he’s investing in an organization arrange by Brett Harrison, the previous president of defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX US.
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Scaramucci will likely be using his own money for the enterprise to indicate support for Harrison, he said in an email.
Harrison had been searching for funding for a crypto software company at a valuation of as much as $100 million, Bloomberg News reported last month. The proposed idea was for software that crypto traders could use to jot down algorithms for his or her strategies and to access various kinds of crypto markets, each centralized and decentralized, two people acquainted with the matter said on the time.
“Anthony has been a real mentor and friend to me since I joined the crypto industry two years ago,” Harrison said in a reply to questions by Bloomberg News. “I’m honored to have him as an investment partner, and know his guidance will likely be invaluable as I begin this latest chapter.”
FTX Ventures, the enterprise capital unit of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-imploded crypto empire, announced in September it took a 30% stake in Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital and that the firms would expand their collaboration on enterprise and digital asset investing. Amid FTX’s descent into chapter 11, Scaramucci said SkyBridge would work to repurchase that stake — and he later said he’d done some checks on Bankman-Fried before the deal but that it was “not enough.”
Harrison worked at FTX US for about 17 months, stepping down in September. Prior to that, he had been at Citadel Securities and quantitative trading firm Jane Street, where he had worked with Bankman-Fried.
Scaramucci commented concerning the investment in a reply to a Twitter thread by Harrison about his experiences at FTX US.
“Brett was a fantastic developer and deeply understood FTX’s product,” Bankman-Fried said in a comment to Bloomberg News about Harrison’s Twitter thread. “While I strongly disagree with much of what he said, I actually have no desire to get right into a public argument with him, nor do I feel prefer it’s my place to litigate his job performance in public, unless he were to authorize me to achieve this.”
Bankman-Fried added, “I feel bad about what happened to all of FTX’s employees, and want him the very best.”
–With assistance from Annie Massa and Hannah Miller.
(Adds comment from Sam Bankman-Fried in last two paragraphs)
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