Following the announced resignation of the entire Future Fund leadership team on November 11, one of the companies that was supposed to receive a cash grant from it, SecureBio, lamented the fact that employees at his firm will now be out of a job unless emergency backup funding is procured.
"We don't think it is right that anyone should lose their jobs over a financial calamity totally unrelated to the excellent work they are doing," announced SecureBio co-founder Kevin Esvelt.
SecureBio had initially been awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop "better pandemic defenses," according to Coin Telegraph.
Another company, a biotechnology firm called Sherlock Biosciences, was supposed to receive $2 million from the Future Fund to study infectious diseases. HelixNano, a similar firm within the same field, was supposed to receive $10 million for vaccine research.
Then there is Our World in Data, which was supposed to be given $7.5 million to "track trends relevant to humanity's long-term prospects," whatever that is supposed to mean.
FTX was also involved in research to "debunk" the merits of ivermectin as a viable remedy for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
Another entity that was supposed to be on the dole of FTX's "philanthropic" efforts via Sam Bankman-Fried's (SBF) "Building a Stronger Future" initiative is ProPublica, which was to receive the first tranche of a $5 million grant this year, followed by more disbursements in 2023 and 2024.
Organizations that received money from FTX in the 90 days prior to its bankruptcy could be subject to a "clawback"
According to Molly Kovite, a lawyer and member of the "Effective Altruism" group, all of these organizations and others that received money from an FTX entity within the 90 days prior to its bankruptcy declaration could be forced to pay it all back through a process known as a "clawback."
Two days after Kovite announced this on November 14, Open Philanthropy, the philanthropic funder that Kovite represents, announced that it is seeking applications from grantees affected by the collapse of the Future Fund. Each application will be evaluated and provided funding at the group's discretion.
Meanwhile, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) are requesting that SBF, the former FTX CEO, and John Jay Ray III, the current CEO, provide more information about what happened to collapse the fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange.
Some 13 different requests for documents, lists and answers have been sent by these two, who are still awaiting answers on behalf of the American public.
"The public is owed a complete and transparent accounting of the business practices and financial activities leading up to and following FTX's collapse," the two lawmakers wrote, emphasizing that there has been an "apparent lack of due diligence by venture capital and other big investment funds eager to get rich off crypto."
"These developments justify our long-standing concerns that the crypto industry 'is built to favor scammers' and 'designed to reward insiders and to defraud mom-and-pop investors,'" they further added.
SBF and Ray have until November 28 to provide the requested materials, which also include "complete copies of all FTX and FTX-subsidiary balance sheets, from 2019 to the present."
Warren and Durbin also want SBF to provide an explanation for his business decisions as well as strange statements he has made on Twitter that appear to be encoded for secret communication.
The latest news about FTX and SBF can be found at Collapse.news.
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