Galois Capital Shuts Shop After FTX Contagion

Crypto hedge fund Galois Capital has been forced to shut down after it was revealed that half of its assets were trapped on the FTX crypto exchange. 

$100M Stuck In FTX

The FTX catastrophe has claimed another victim. This time, it is one of the largest crypto-focused quantitative funds, Galois Capital. According to a recent report by Financial Times, the company, which handled around $200 million of assets in 2022, has stopped trading and unwound all positions. With almost half of the assets, i.e., around $100 million, belonging to the hedge fund still stuck in the now-defunct FTX exchange, the fund had to shut shop and return the remaining funds to the investors. 

FTX Contagion Continues

The FTX debacle has been the biggest blow to the crypto space in 2022, a year already littered with several bankruptcies and market crashes. Several other companies and funds had to shut shop due to their prolonged exposure to the crypto exchange, which filed for bankruptcy in November 2022. The situation has already been compared to the infamous Lehman Brothers catastrophe of 2008, where hedge funds had billions of dollars trapped on the exchange. FTX co-founder, Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with fraud by law enforcement, to which he has pleaded not guilty. 

Co-Founder Addresses Clients

Co-founder, Kevin Zhou, took to the company’s official Twitter account to confirm the report, saying, 

“Yes, it is true that our flagship fund is shutting down…Although we lost almost half our assets to the FTX disaster and then sold the claim for cents on the dollar, we are among the few who are closing shop with an inception-to-date performance which is still positive…Although this is the end of an era for Galois, the work we have done together for the past few years has not been in vain.”

Zhou gained fame as one of the first people to predict the possibility of the TerraUSD ecosystem crash before it happened. He has now addressed clients with the claim that the fund would return 90% of the money not trapped on FTX while temporarily retaining the remaining 10% until matters are resolved with regulators and auditors. He also claimed that the decision was made to sell the fund’s claim on FTX instead of going through an elaborate legal process since bankruptcy proceedings could last over a decade. According to him, the fund sold its claim for around 16 cents on the dollar.