The stunning collapse of crypto exchange FTX has brought the spotlight on an Indian-origin executive who was in the close inner circle of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
The executive, identified as Nishad Singh, is under the scrutiny following reports that Bankman-Fried had secretly moved a whopping $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to another company he founded.
Mysterious Transfer
Preceding the collapse of the exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried transferred $10 billion from FTX to Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research, Reuters reported on Friday. A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion, the report said.
Nishad Singh worked at Alameda, according to reports. Singh was very close to Bankman-Fried and lived with the FTX founder along with 9 others.
“Gary (Chief Technology Officer Gary Wang), Nishad and Sam control the code, the exchange’s matching engine, and funds … If they moved them around or input their own numbers, I’m not sure who would notice,” a source told crypto news website CoinDesk.
Joining FTX
Singh, who graduated from the University of California Berkeley, had worked as a software engineer at Facebook before joining Alameda Research, according to The Mint. Singh’s LinkedIn profile says that he was the Director of Engineering at FTX. The executive has a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“It was in an apartment at the time, it was quite early. I think I first visited Alameda when it was like a month into its existence …. What was obvious that the things they wanted to do were really important and really fruitful,” Singh said in a podcast in 2020, recollecting his early days at FTX.
FTX filed for bankruptcy in the US after Binance walked away from a rescue deal. The Bahamas-based company went into tailspin following a flurry of customer withdrawals.
