Crypto Hedge Fund Ikigai Caught in FTX Collapse, Large Majority of Firm’s Total Assets Stuck on Exchange: Founder

The crypto hedge fund Ikigai says most of its assets are stuck on the collapsed FTX digital asset exchange.

Ikigai founder and Chief Investment Officer Travis Kling tells his 89,900 Twitter followers that they attempted to withdraw investor funds from the platform but failed in retrieving them in their entirety.

“Unfortunately, I have some pretty bad news to share. Last week Ikigai was caught up in the FTX collapse. We had a large majority of the hedge fund’s total assets on FTX. By the time we went to withdraw Monday morning, we got very little out. We’re now stuck alongside everyone else.”

Kling says they began communicating with their investors about the issue on Monday, but that it’s unclear what will become of the funds.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to happen next. In the very near term, Ikigai is going to continue trading the assets we have left that are not stuck on FTX. We’re also going to make a decision about what to do with our venture fund, which was unaffected by FTX.”

Kling says the collapse of FTX has shaken the crypto industry and for it to recover a new approach is needed to restore trust.

“If crypto is to recover and continue on its journey to make the world a better place, I believe the entire concept of trust has to be completely rearchitected. Bitcoin is trustless. Then we built all these trusted things around it, and those things have failed catastrophically.”

The crypto Ikigai Asset Management firm was founded in 2018 and later launched a venture fund called the Ikigai Trust Revolution Opportunities Fund to invest in early-stage Web3 projects.

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