Just one year ago, an individual named Chris McCann in a post on his LinkedIn account said: “Why we loved FTX: Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange summed up in one quote: “FTX is geared for speed. Everything the firm does seems to be toward this end”, Mario Gabriele”.
A June 30, 2022 report in a website named Blockworks quoted Chris McCann stating:
“Sam [Bankman-Fried] has an impressive character,” Chris McCann, partner at Race Capital, told Blockworks in an interview.
“We didn’t know how big this thing would possibly get. It probably surprised us on the upside,” he said about Race’s early excitement about investing in FTX.
“We thought he had a decently good shot of winning the entire derivatives market. I didn’t know he’d probably win the whole crypto market and maybe even beyond that, because he’s trying to go after even general stocks and finance now, so it’s really impressive.”
McCann shared Race’s initial deal memo that highlights early opportunities in FTX, offering a glimpse into the early days of Bankman-Fried’s idea to create a crypto futures and derivatives exchange. The memo shows FTX grew daily trading volume from $50 million to $150 million in under two weeks in 2019.
Now it trades about $2 billion a day on average.
“Sam has always been a very aggressive, forthright, assertive type of person,” McCann said. “He’s not afraid of making very bold, decisive decisions when nobody else wants to. I know we’re a very biased party here because we are investors in FTX. But even outside of that, there’s no other exchanges or financial institutions I can think of in a position to do something like this.”
He pointed to extensive layoffs at Coinbase, Binance being in a “tricky situation” and Huobi and OKX being more Asia-focused as reasons they aren’t able to take big swings like FTX.
“So [Bankman-Fried] is one of the few people left standing, and I guess he’s gonna have all the benefit of being there,” McCann said.
As McCann’s name appeared in our reports dated December 30, 2022 and January 4, 2023, Chris McCann in an email dated January 18, 2023 wrote:
I’m writing to ask to correct information on two of the articles you published:
https://weeklyblitz.net/economy/several-ftx-top-officials-busy-in-cleaning-mess-from-hiding/
https://weeklyblitz.net/international/crypto-ventures-need-to-be-outlawed-forthwith/
I was never an employee at FTX and I never worked there in any capacity before. Let me know if you need any information from my side and thanks for understanding.
Chris McCann
Partner at Race Capital
On the same day in another email in response to our message he wrote:
I was an investor of FTX via Race Capital but not employed by FTX in any capacity.
From the same article you linked:
It’s hard to know what a company looked like in its early days. Thanks to Chris McCann at Race Capital, readers can get an inside look of what FTX looked like to the early investor.
Minority investors aren’t employees of the company so what you wrote in your article is not true. No need to do anything else but would be great to have your article correct and my name taken out of it referencing me as part of the company.
