By Mark Ackman
On Friday, Amy Wu announced that she was no longer working for FTX Ventures, having resigned from her position.
She had formerly been a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and submitted her resignation the same day that FTX filed for bankruptcy.
The collapse of the crypto exchange has sent shock waves throughout the crypto industry and Sam Bankman-Fried has stepped down as the chief executive, amidst rumors of mismanagement of client funds and fraud.
Wu’s statement
The venture capital arm of FTX had been launched in January by Sam Bankman-Fried with an investment of $2 billion and Wu had been hired in the same month to lead it.
Since then, a number of multi-million dollar deals have been made by FTX Ventures. At the time of joining, Wu had said that FTX could have a big impact on the industry as well as the world.
She had said that it was one of the most impactful companies that she had worked with. FTX Ventures made an investment of $100 million in Dave this year in March.
This is a financial services app and the investment was part of the deal with its American subsidiary, FTX US, which would help the platform in offering crypto services.
Other investments
Some of the other investments that FTX ventures made included the games developer Faraway, Yuga Labs, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and makers of Mini Royale: Nations, which is based on Solana.
FTX Ventures also bought a 30% stake in the investment firm SkyBridge Capital in September, which is led by Anthony Scaramucci.
In the same month, the venture capital arm also participated in a fundraising round for Doodles, which has become a popular NFT project.
The round was led by Seven Seven Six, the venture capital firm of Alexis Ohanian, and FTX invested $54 million in said round.
Wu has been a supporter of NFTs and Web3 gaming. She had talked about how gaming and NFTs could work together at Messari Mainnet last year.
She said that the game economy could be substantially deepened if there is trading of in-game items in as NFT items, whether it is done in a closed ecosystem of the publisher, or outside of it.
The volumes of liquidity are significantly higher and this allows players to spend as much money as they want.
The situation
Wu’s resignation from FTX Ventures puts an end to her short run, but it has been an active one. She had previously issued statements about calling out bad actors in the crypto industry.
In light of the allegations of mismanagement and fraud that have been made against FTX, these appear to be quite relevant.
Back in February, Wu had said that there were constant concerns that Web3 would eventually become centralized, similar to what had happened with other industries as well as the internet.
She had said that it was a good thing that people were paranoid and they should call out any bad actors in the industry.