While news of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange’s crumbling castle has come and gone, there is a new wrinkle in the tale involving one of the world’s largest singer-songwriters. After reports that Taylor Swift knew all too well that the exchange would fail and declined to sign a deal with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, news has broken that she actually did jot her name in the contract’s blank space.
In a new report from The New York Times on Tom Brady’s contested relationship with FTX, new information emerged that contradicted previous reporting on Swift’s involvement in the exchange’s sponsorship deals. Adam Moskowitz, one of the lawyers behind a class action lawsuit waged against FTX celebrity spokespeople like Brady, revealed in April on The Block’s podcast The Scoop that Swift had denied the deal over uncertainties involving unregistered securities. Now, Moskowitz claims to Times that he had no inside information on internal talks regarding Swift while sources told the publication that after six months of discussions, Swift eventually did sign the deal with FTX.
Swift did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Swift was in talks with FTX beginning last spring for a whopping $US100 million, as reported by Financial Times. The pop superstar’s deal would have included a tour sponsorship for her massively attended The Eras Tour which kicked off this spring and is sponsored by Capital One. After half a year of discussion, Swift signed the deal, only for Bankman-Fried to renege on the agreement. It’s very possible that Swift did ask FTX and her lawyers about whether the exchange was peddling unregistered securities, but that answer seemingly wasn’t enough to dissuade her from signing on the dotted line.
FTX collapsed in November as the cryptocurrency exchange could not meet the withdrawal demand of its users. A bombshell report from Coindesk pointed to the eventual revelation that FTX had used customer funds to fuel investments into its co-owned trading firm Alameda Research, leading FTX to eventually file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Court-appointed FTX CEO John Ray III said he’d never seen “such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organisation,” referring to FTX.
While FTX’s downfall was kicked off by what appears to be good old-fashioned fraud, charging crypto companies with offering unregistered securities has become common in the last year. Last September, SEC chair Gary Gensler said that he believes “the vast majority” of crypto tokens meet the definition of an unregistered security.