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Nishad Singh was FTX’s Director of Engineering and had a 7.8% stake in the crypto exchange.
The 27-year-old has been out of the public eye even as other top execs make headlines for their role in FTX’s collapse.
Singh received a $543 million loan from Alameda Research, per bankruptcy filings.
Since FTX’s downfall last month, one of the firm’s key executives, Nishad Singh, has remained out of the public eye even as other top figures have ended up in the crosshairs of investigations into the exchange.
Singh was FTX’s director of engineering, and had a 7.8% stake in the company.
FTX filed for bankruptcy protection last month, and investigations and charges against top executives at the firm are related to the misuse of customer funds by the firm’s affiliate trading arm, Alameda Research.
“FTX Group’s collapse appears to stem from the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals,” John Ray, FTX’s new chief executive officer said during bankruptcy proceedings.
While most of the attention in the media has been paid to Bankman-Fried, there were other executive involved in what prosecutors have called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American History,” including Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang. Both have pleaded guilty to charges they defrauded investors and are cooperating with prosecutors.
Singh was reportedly one of few people who had knew that FTX was misusing customer funds, along with Bankman-Fried, Ellison, and Wang.
Singh’s nearly 8% stake, which also included FTX subsidiary FTX.US, was worth about $572 million in March of this year. He previously received a $543 million loan from Alameda as well, according to bankruptcy filings.
“Gary is scared, Nishad is ashamed and guilty,” Bankman-Fried told a Vox reporter after the firm filed for bankruptcy. “It hit [Nishad] hard.”
Singh was a high school friend of Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabe. The former executive worked for a time as an engineer at Facebook (now Meta) before Bankman-Fried recruited him for Alameda, according to Singh’s LinkedIn page, which has been taken down.
“In addition to building out much of our technological infrastructure and managing most of our dev team, his treatment of employees has earned him sole membership in our Slack group ‘Kings of Kindness,'” Bankman-Fried previously wrote in a blog post.
Singh was likely one of the five coworkers that Bankman-Fried referenced as a billionaire, Bloomberg reported, citing an interview with the disgraced founder from earlier this year. In 2012, Singh also set the world record for fastest 100-mile run by a 16 year old, according local newspaper The Mercury News.
A year after Singh became FTX’s director of engineering, he became a steady donor for the Democratic Party. He gave $8 million to federal campaigns of Democratic candidates in the 2022 election cycle, according to nonprofit OpenSecrets.
“Currently, I’m sort of lucky that I can get fulfilled in many ways at this job – one of which is doing something that’s probably pretty good from an effective altruist perspective,” Singh previously said in a podcast.
Singh could not be reached for comment.
On Thursday, Bankman-Fried was released on $250 million bail and was sent to live in his parents’ California home as he awaits trial.