- An "effective altruism" charity backed by Sam Bankman-Fried is set to close.
- The jailed former crypto billionaire was a major proponent of effective altruism.
- The philosophy seeks to understand how to use resources best in order to help people.
A UK-based "effective altruism" charity funded by the disgraced former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is set to close.
Effective Ventures Foundation UK, originally incorporated in 2012, reported income of more than £140 million in 2022, which is around $177 million as of April 2024.
But a report filed by the charity in March said that its board did not intend to sponsor new projects and was expected to "wind down (in 2025 or beyond)" after spinning out its projects into independent entities.
It was also confirmed last week that the charity would be selling Wytham Abbey, a 15th Century manor house that it owned near the city of Oxford in the UK, where it ran some of its effective altruism projects.
Effective altruism is a philosophical movement that was developed in 2011 by philosophers from the University of Oxford.
In essence, it seeks to understand how to use resources best in order to help people.
Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, previously told Business Insider that Bankman-Fried, 32, was "the poster child" as well as "the financial backbone of the movement."
Harvard Law School describes it as "partly a research field, which aims to identify the world's most pressing problems and the best solutions to them" and "partly a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good."
The idea quickly became popular among the mega-rich and tech leaders in Silicon Valley — and it is also what brought together the leaders of Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange FTX and his trading company, Alameda Research, Michael Lewis, an author who wrote about SBF's rise and fall, said, per the Financial Times.
But Effective Ventures was hit hard by the bankruptcy of FTX in November 2022, and the charity announced that together with its US arm, it would have to repay the FTX bankruptcy estate nearly $27 million that it received from the exchange in 2022.
The UK Charity Commission also opened an inquiry into Effective Ventures UK in December 2022 in order to assess any potential risks to the charity's assets.
In a statement to BI, the Commission said the inquiry was still ongoing.
News of the charity's intention to close comes a week after Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. He was also ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture.
The charity has said that it strongly condemns fraud and Bankman-Fried's actions.