Indian-Origin Nishad Singh Among Top 3 Executives Fired By Crypto Exchange FTX. Who is He?

Bankman-Fried said that Singh put a bigger focus on behaving ethically than he did. He said that the company’s collapse “hit all of us hard, but it hit him HARD.”

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX Layoff: Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which recently filed for U.S. bankruptcy court protection, has fired some top executives, including co-founder Gary Wang, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing an FTX spokeswoman. The other fired executives were engineering director Nishad Singh and Caroline Ellison, who ran FTX’s trading arm Alameda Research, the newspaper said.

The crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy protection last week and former Wall Street trader Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive after the rival exchange Binance walked away from a proposed acquisition.

Sam Bankman-Fried told Vox’s Kelsey Piper that the company could be saved if “EITHER Gary or Nishad comes back” or it wins a jurisdictional battle against the state of Delaware.

When asked to clarify whether they were both gone, Bankman-Fried said that Wang was “scared” and Singh was “ashamed and guilty” because FTX customers’ deposits had been lost. Bankman-Fried said that Singh put a bigger focus on behaving ethically than he did. He said that the company’s collapse “hit all of us hard, but it hit him HARD.”

Who is Nishad Singh

1. Nishad Singh studied at Crystal Springs Uplands School, a top private school in Hillsborough, California.
2. He then graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science.
3. Nishad Singh joined FTX as its Director of Engineering in 2019.
4. Prior to joining the cryptocurrency exchange, he was part of its sister organization Alameda Research, which is at the center of the current controversy.
5. He joined Alameda in 2017. According to his now-defunct LinkedIn profile, Singh earlier served as a software engineer at Facebook, where he worked on machine learning.
6. The job at Facebook was a “dream,” Singh once said in an FTX podcast in 2020. However, he decided to join Alameda after visiting Bankman-Fried at an apartment.

As of March, Wang, who had previously worked at Google, was the world’s 431st-richest person with a fortune of $5.9 billion, though he has since fallen to 647th-richest with $4.2 billion, according to estimates by Forbes.

Crypto Exchange FTX Bankruptcy

The U.S. bankruptcy proceedings involve multiple FTX group companies with more than 100,000, and possibly over 1 million, creditors.

According to interviews with several people close to Bankman-Fried and company communications not previously reported, the company had been secretly taking risks with customer funds to prop up a trading firm owned by Bankman-Fried, which led to the company’s collapse.

The company had come under some regulatory oversight through the dozens of licenses it picked up via its many acquisitions. But that did not protect its customers and investors, who now face losses totaling billions of dollars.

Several crypto firms have since been bracing for the fallout from the FTX collapse, with many counting their exposure in millions to the beleaguered exchange.