San Francisco (The Hawk): SoftBank, a troubled Japanese investment company, is said to have written off roughly $100 million in investments made by its Vision Fund 2 in the now-defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
MarketWatch reports that SoftBank stated "it would not face a major markdown in the value of its stake" as the investment was now marked down to zero.
After the business secured $400 million in January and was valued at $32 billion, SoftBank backed FTX.
A $100 million venture capital investment by SoftBank in the cryptocurrency broker FTX has officially been made public.
According to quotes from Softbank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto, the $100 billion Vision Fund invested in FTX "as a tiny share in the company."
Goto stated during the release of the company's second quarter (Q2) results that "if any case of markdown but still that is very not important for us."
SoftBank is known for investing large sums of money in unsuccessful ventures, such as the $18.5 billion investment in WeWork.
The Japanese VC firm also invested $500 million in better.com, a digital mortgage lender that fired thousands of people under the leadership of Vishal Garg, an Indian co-founder and CEO.
FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, has acknowledged that "unauthorised transactions" have removed hundreds of millions of dollars from its wallets. The business has since shifted many of its digital assets to a new "cold wallet custodian," it claims.
FTX did not disclose how much it lost to unauthorised transactions when it filed for bankruptcy last week in the US, although sources said the loss could have reached $600 million.
(Inputs from Agencies)
