Samsung Next: Why We Invested in FTX
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Samsung Next: Why We Invested in FTX
FTX has over 1 million users and a daily average trading volume of $15 billion, making it a unicorn in the cryptocurrency market, with a current market valuation of $25 billion.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Joan Kim
Translation: TechFlow
As one of the hottest startups in the world, it is rapidly emerging as a leading digital asset exchange, offering services in cryptocurrency spot trading, futures, tokenized equity prediction markets, and other novel digital assets.
Launched in May 2019, FTX Trading Ltd. is now at the peak of its growth. Since its inception, the company has quickly become one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, with trading volumes comparable to Coinbase. FTX boasts over 1 million users and an average daily trading volume of $15 billion, making it a true unicorn in the cryptocurrency market. The company currently holds a valuation of $25 billion—and achieves this with a lean organizational structure, employing only a fraction of the staff size of its competitors.
The investment community is taking notice. After Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Ventures, introduced us to the company, we joined 69 other investors in providing FTX with a $420 million Series B-1 funding round. Other participants in this round include the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, IVP, ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and BlackRock. This latest round follows a $900 million Series B fundraising just months prior.
FTX has built the premier infrastructure for a crypto derivatives exchange that traders demand. To serve both institutional and retail investors efficiently, FTX developed an innovative order book management system and API designed to ensure secure, liquid, and efficient fiat-to-crypto transactions. Its user base is growing rapidly across Asia, Europe, and North America. We expect this growth to accelerate further with the recent launch of FTX.us, the U.S.-regulated cryptocurrency exchange.
The FTX team is led by 29-year-old cryptocurrency prodigy Sam Bankman-Fried, the company's CEO. SBF is a prolific entrepreneur who launched FTX in 2019, just two years after founding his first company—trading firm Alameda Research—which now manages over $1 billion in digital assets and ranks among the largest market makers in both cryptocurrency and traditional financial markets.
Other key members of the leadership team include: CTO Gary Wang, who was previously a software engineer at Google before co-founding Alameda and FTX; Engineering Director Nishad Singh, who joined Alameda Research in 2017 after working as a software engineer on Facebook’s applied machine learning team; and Product Lead Ramnik Arora, who joined FTX after gaining experience at both Facebook and Goldman Sachs.
FTX is now poised to expand further into equities, prediction markets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and collaborations with video games. In the U.S., FTX.us will not only support deposit and withdrawal functions but also develop capabilities for customers to deposit external NFTs.
We believe FTX is at the forefront of Web 3.0. It is a fully regulated exchange headquartered in the Bahamas and is the only major cryptocurrency exchange in the world to undergo regular audits. The platform serves the entire cryptocurrency trading ecosystem—from retail and crypto-native investors to sophisticated day traders and experienced institutional traders—positioning it strongly for continued growth.
Joan Kim is an Investment Manager at Samsung Next Fund. Samsung Next’s investment strategy reflects solely its own views and does not represent the vision or strategy of any other Samsung business unit, including but not limited to Samsung Electronics.
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