I think there’s two possible next steps:
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Be vigilant of what money is being donated to EA—if it comes from grey area fields (and I say this as someone who’s worked in crypto for a few years, albeit I quit the area earlier in the year). Of course this being EA there’s going to be people arguing the money has been moved to more positive uses, but public image is key to have sustainable donations moving on.
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Have a piece about the pros of EA and thank SBF/FTX for their donations but be clear that EA doesn’t knowingly accept money obtained in potentially immoral ways. Now there’s a chance this was all above board and FTX got beaten by a competitor in an unregulated sector, which is of course possible! However there’s a lot of contradictory points popping up about 1:1 backing and the trading firm was very close to an exchange… market information to front run I get, but hopefully they didn’t loan users funds via FTT to trade.
I think there’s a few serious questions here.
Morally, if it’s found that FTX funded EA through fraudulent activity, is there an imperative to do anything about this? Return funds, support those impacted, etc… Suicide due to a lack of funds is not unprecedented in the crypto space and a ~90% loss of a leading coin may sadly result in loss of life.
How does this impact current EA initiatives relying on FTX-based funding? Is there an urgent need to find other sources of funds to cover important work here?
Is there a need to disassociate EA with FTX because of SBF (he was a director of CEA, spoken about it, and there are other links recently made public such as Will MacAskill’s texts to Elon Musk introducing SBF to be involved in the Twitter deal).
There’s a huge negative sentiment towards SBF ‘playing a white knight’ that I’ve seen on FB/Reddit/HackerNews is leading people to assume EA itself may be fraudulent. Maybe it’s water under the bridge within a week? But maybe it impacts future philanthropy and impacted EA groups losing funding lose trust.