The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) may have lost $95 million it invested in the insolvent crypto platform FTX, but claims this will have a "limited impact" on the plan..The OTPP released a statement that it invested $75 million in FTX International and FTX US in October 2021. It also made an additional $20 million investment in FTS US in January 2022. The investments were done in order "to gain-small scale exposure to this emerging area.".The $95 million investment represents just 0.05% of the plan's total net assets. In 2020, the OTPP was estimated to have $221.2 billion in assets..Last week was one of the most tumultuous ones for crypto in recent memory, as the fifth largest crypto exchange by volume went bankrupt. 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and investment firm Alameda Research, saw his net worth fall from $17.2 billion to virtually zero in just a few days..Trust in FTX began collapsing after leaked documents revealed that over $5 billion of Alameda Research's $14 billion balance sheet was in FTT, a token issued by FTX. With the value of FTT having fallen from $80 in early 2022 to just $25, concerns were raised that FTX might be insolvent..Rival exchange platform Binance then began selling its FTT reserves, sending the price tumbling. After concerned crypto investors began attempting to pull over $6 billion in funds from FTX, the platform froze user withdrawals. FTX, Alameda Research and about 130 of its other companies then filed for bankruptcy..Binance had been musing a purchase of FTX, but pulled out of the deal due to concerns that the platform had been trading user funds. This sent the crypto markets tumbling further, with Bitcoin falling to a two-year low of $17,000..To make matters worse, on Saturday it was revealed that hackers were withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars from FTX..The OTPP is the second Canadian pension fund to be damaged by volatile crypto markets. In August 2022, Canada's second-largest pension, fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, wrote down about $150 million of its investments in crypto lending firm Celsius after it filed for bankruptcy..Other big-name backers of FTX included BlackRock, SoftBank, and Temasek. Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most successful venture capital firms, will mark down its investment of $214 million in FTX to zero.."We are in the business of taking risk,” it told investors. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”
