The FTX crypto exchange received an undisclosed sum from the pension fund as part of a $420 million funding round in October 2022.
According to a recent article from The Globe and Mail, OTPP invested in FTX a year ago when the company was worth $25 billion.
In October 2022, the pension fund, along with 69 other investors, acquired its first stake in FTX as part of a $420 million funding round.
The FTX exchange was not listed among investments worth more than $200 million in the fund’s annual report for 2021, according to OTPP spokesperson Dan Madge, who declined to say how much the fund invested in the troubled company.
Its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, a section of its portfolio devoted to high-risk, high-growth investments, was where the investment came from.
Around 333,000 active and retired Ontario teachers’ pensions are managed by the OTPP, which currently has $242 billion in assets under management.
Jo Taylor, the CEO of OTPP, told Reuters in September that FTX carried the lowest risk of any cryptocurrency exchange and that the fund’s investment had done well despite market volatility.
The situation is now reversed, as FTX is close to being fully acquired by rival exchange Binance as a result of liquidity problems.
The investment problem facing OTPP is the second of its kind; in August, a significant Canadian pension plan encountered a comparable predicament.
After Celsius Network sought bankruptcy protection in July of this year, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) was forced to write off its $150 million investment in the cryptocurrency lender.
In late 2021, during a $400 million funding round that gave Celsius a $3 billion valuation, CDPQ made an investment in the company.
Charles Emond, the CEO of CDPQ, announced the write-off while pointing out that the fund had entered the cryptocurrency market too soon and that they had concentrated more on Celsius’ potential than the actual situation.
