The Met returns $550,000 in donations from Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto exchange

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has agreed to return a $550,000 donation it received last year from crypto exchange FTX, just months before the company’s dramatic fall in November.

The deal was made public on Friday via a court document, according to Coindesk. FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings are currently proceeding in the United States Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

“The Met wishes to return the donations to the FTX Debtors, and the FTX Debtors and the Met have entered into good faith and arm’s length negotiations regarding the return of the donations,” the filing states.

The museum originally received $300,000 in March, followed by another $250,000 in May. The gift was awarded through West Realm Shire Services, FTX’s US entity. It will be returned in full within one month of a judge’s approval.

The documents also noted that FTX paid out a total of $93 million in donations between March 2020 and November 2022, with 180 politicians apparently receiving a large gift. The well-documented interest of the company’s disgraced former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in “effective altruism” may have been the motivation behind these generous donations, but now FTX is reportedly scrambling to recoup the funds. so that they can be used to repay its creditors.

Although the mainstream art world has shown signs of adopting NFTs and blockchain technology in the past year, the collapse of FTX is one of the major events that has pushed the relationship between the art world art and the crypto industry into more troubled territory in recent months.

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