$190B Ontario Pension Says No To Crypto after Lost FTX Investment
Teacher Retirement Plan Onatario has decided to stay away from cryptocurrencies.
The decision came after the OTPP, which manages over $190 billion in assets, lost its entire $95 million investment in cryptocurrency exchange FTX after it went bankrupt in November 2022.
OTPP is one of many investors in the now-defunct crypto exchange, having invested twice: once during a bull market in 2021 and again during the exchange’s Series C funding round in early 2022.
In an interview with the Financial Times, OTPP chief executive Jo Taylor stated that pension funds should not rush into other cryptocurrency investments. Taylor stated that they were still processing what happened with the exchange and that they would be more careful about investing in new assets such as digital currencies in the future. The pension fund is in charge of providing pensions to more than 330,000 teachers and school employees.
“We put our time in and did extensive due diligence on this business.” It didn’t turn out the way we expected. We are not always given all the information we need to make the right decisions.”
The pension fund now aims to direct its investments into more traditional markets, such as real estate, and to gain exposure to the private credit sector. The investment plan provider intends to invest 10 billion Canadian dollars ($7.4 billion) in the domains mentioned above over the next three years.
Besides the OTPP, another leading pension fund, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), lost its entire $154.7 million investment in troubled cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network. Celsius was one of many crypto lenders that failed during the cryptocurrency crash in the second quarter of 2022.
The dramatic collapse of FTX, the third largest crypto exchange at the time, had a significant impact on the entire ecosystem. Investor and venture capitalist confidence in the crypto ecosystem has plummeted, and crypto funding has dried up. It also changed the narrative of mass adoption of the crypto ecosystem and attracted regulatory scrutiny from around the world.
