Note that the day before, news broke in the cryptocurrency industry about another company that had also previously filed for bankruptcy. We’re talking about the Celsius Network’s bandwagon platform, which faced a liquidity crisis due to the decoupling of stETH from regular Etherium.

As a result, Chief Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn ordered the company to pay back $44 million to users. In July 2022, Celsius filed for bankruptcy and disclosed that Celsius’ total liabilities were between $1 billion and $10 billion. The number of creditors of the platform at the time was more than 100,000 units.

The logo of Celsius’s lending platform

Glenn also ruled that Celsius could not refund cryptocurrency if the user’s transfer volume was no more than the equivalent of $7,500.

What were FTX and Alameda invested in?

According to Decrypt’s sources, the trading firm made more than 500 investments early last month. Most of these were projects in decentralised finance and Web3, meaning there’s not much here. Other investments, however, are noteworthy.

For example, Alameda invested $25 million in 80 Acres, a company specialising in growing and selling lettuce and strawberries in the Ohio region, doing so in exchange for an undisclosed amount in the company’s equity. The firm also gave half a million dollars to Equator Therapeutics, which is developing a weight loss drug. Another $1.5 million was invested in reproductive medicine agency Ivy Natal.

Ivy Natal

There are even stranger items on the list of investments. Alameda shelled out $1 million for a 5 percent stake in Fern Labs Inc. - a New York-based chemical company that appears to be selling fake versions of lotions once sold by the long-defunct beauty brand Goubaud de Paris.

The firm also bought a 25 per cent stake in Chinese news portal ODaily for $5 million. Another 30 percent stake in BlockBeats, the digital Chinese news outlet Web3, was bought for $3.56 million.

According to Bankman-Frieda, Alameda’s financial decisions were controlled solely by the company’s CEO, Caroline Allison. She has a mixed record, with Allison dating Sam and living with other FTX executives in a luxury mansion in the Bahamas. That said, she was spotted in New York over the weekend, which means she is not in Hong Kong or Dubai as previously thought.

Caroline Ellison in New York

On her blog, Allison has described the practices of polyamory, fraud and even racial theory. It’s a highly unusual set-up, which makes it no wonder Alameda has had so many bizarre investments. It’s all capital that could have been deployed to fix the company’s financial situation. Still, Allison must have been aware of the dire situation inside Alameda long before the collapse of the Bankman-Fried crypto empire, but the choice was to invest.

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In total, Alameda Research’s venture capital arm had a total investment of around $5.3 billion. A detailed list of investments if needed can be found here.

Investments of the venture capital arm of Alameda Research

And this is what the breakdown of investments by category looks like. As you can see, Alameda management has allocated $385 million, or 7.3 percent of the total portfolio, to buying tokens.

Alameda Research’s venture capital division investments by category

Sam made another announcement the day before – he had hired lawyer Mark Cohen, known for his courtroom defence of Ghislaine Maxwell. She is a British socialite who was sentenced to prison last year for trafficking minors and an affair with Jeffrey Epstein. That said, Sam admitted in an interview with Twitter Spaces that he doesn’t yet know how to pay all of Cohen’s fees and services. Here’s his line.

As far as paying the legal fees, I’m still sorting that out. I am not sure if I will be able to pay all the legal fees.

Recall that Bankman-Fried is currently under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the US Department of Justice, but so far Sam has not been criminally charged. He had earlier claimed that he still had one bank account with about $100,000. In this context it is really interesting how exactly he is going to finance his defence in court and how FTX will ever be able to pay off his clients and creditors. However, it is also possible that Sam has lied about his finances.

Lawyer Mark Cohen


As the case against the FTX founder and Alameda Research proceeds, we believe there are more interesting details to come. In the meantime, former users of the cryptocurrency exchange are left to see what the money was used for, which could include their amounts. We may not have long to wait for more information: after all, Sam Bankman-Fried will testify as early as mid-month.