FTX CEO Says Company Set to Spend Billions on Acquisitions: Bloomberg

Sam Bankman-Fried said his company is awash with excess liquidity and drawing on this, FTX Derivatives exchange is set to make a number of strategic acquisitions moving forward.

As contained in an interview with Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried said the company, now valued at over $32 billion following a $400 million funding round in January this year, has excess liquidity through which it is choosing to say it can be viewed from an acquisition angle.

“FTX is a profitable company,” he said in the interview. “You can look at the amount that we’ve raised over the last year or two -- it’s a few billion dollars. That gives maybe a sense of where we are in terms of cash that was explicitly viewed from a potential acquisition angle.”

As is the deal or trend with many crypto trading platforms around today, acquisitions of smaller firms are not uncommon. These acquisitions are financed by money, and Bankman Fried is both a co-founder and the exchange’s Chief Executive Officer. By putting funds where his mouth is, Bankman Fried recently took a 7.6% position in the commission-free stock trading platform, Robinhood Markets Inc.

The Robinhood backing complements the acquisition of LedgerX, a fully regulated and licensed startup by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to offer derivative products. While FTX will still pursue the age-long style of building out its most coveted products, it believes adding new offshoots can help its massive growth push faster.

“It’s always something that we’re going to be open to and keeping our ears to the ground on,” Bankman-Fried.

Beyond acquisitions, FTX is making a whole lot of bold moves in the global arena as it is inking several partnerships and sponsorship deals that are largely helping to bolster its business optics across the board. While FTX’s acquisition spree has been confirmed, it will come as no surprise if other mainstream competitors follow suit.

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