The ex-Goldman Sachs quant behind the big decisions at FTX
There's no shortage of quants in crypto. And many of them have spent some time at Goldman Sachs. But when the FTX dust settles, one former Goldman quant may turn out more important than the rest: Ramnik Arora, the head of product at FTX.
While Sam Bankman-Fried licks his wounds while allegedly under observation in the Bahamas, Arora's whereabouts are less clear. He's still on some (possibly not contemporary) org charts, reporting directly to new CEO John Ray III.
If Arora is still at FTX, it may be because he knows where the bodies are buried.
Writing at the weekend, the Wall Street Journal said SBF wasn't much bothered about raising money for FTX: he frequently "deferred" to Arora instead. The Information says Arora was the guy Silicon Valley investors liaised with when ironing out the details of deals.
At the same time, though, it seems that Arora - who was head of product at FTX, played a key role in spending money too. His investments at FTX included everything from $5m for an NFT fraud detection service to an investment in an African cross border payments system.
Arora was the cash guy. He raised the cash. And then he helped spend it. This might be why unconfirmed Twitter lore now has it that he's one of only a few people at FTX (along with SBF, Caroline Ellison, Gary and Constance Wang) who allegedly knew what was going on.
Like most people at FTX, Arora wasn't in tradfi for long - although he was there for longer than Constance.
He spent just over three years at Goldman until June 2015 when he quit for Meta and became briefly a research scientist on the Libra Blockchain. Another of Meta's blockchain guys told Wired that he was brought in to work on the blockchain project, but that when it was canned he was left to "float." Arora seemingly floated into Meta's core ads team, before floating off again to work for FTX. He may soon be free to float again.
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