Nickel Digital has around $12 million stuck on hobbled crypto exchange FTX

Quick Take

  • Nickel Digital Asset Management has around 6% of its assets under management stuck on FTX.
  • That percentage translates to around $12 million.

Crypto investment firm Nickel Digital Asset Management has around $12 million of its funds' capital stuck on FTX after the exchange halted client withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy protection. 

That figure amounts to about 6% of its $200 million in assets under management, founder partner and chief investment officer Michael Hall said at the City & Financial Global conference in London. Around a third of Nickel Digital's funds on FTX were insured, he added.

Founded in 2019, Nickel Digital serves institutional investors. The London-based firm is authorised and regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to its website.

Hall said Nickel Digital only trades on large, profitable exchanges and initially avoided using FTX. "We looked at them and saw that the bid-offer spreads were quite tight. That was probably Alameda taking advantage... so we didn't see any advantage to trading on FTX," he said.

But Nickel started to use FTX in 2021 after the crypto exchange operator raised money from big-name institutional investors. "We relied on the due diligence of equity investors. We thought they were the smart money. It turned out not to be," Hall said.

FTX's high-profile investors

FTX raised $1.8 billion in total funding and was valued at $32 billion before it filed for bankruptcy protection last week. The company had high-profile investors, including Temasek, Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, and all three of them recently wrote down their investments to zero.

Nickel Digital is one of several companies feeling severe repercussions of FTX's fallout. Crypto.com, Genesis, Galaxy Digital and Vauld all have exposure to FTX.


Disclaimer: The former CEO and majority shareholder of The Block has disclosed a series of loans from former FTX and Alameda founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

AUTHOR

Benjamin Robertson is senior newsletter writer at The Block, based in Oxford. He covers global crypto policy and regulation news. Before joining, he worked at Bloomberg News where he wrote about crypto, regulation and finance in Hong Kong, and later reported on private equity and asset management in London. Get in touch via email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @BMMRobertson

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AUTHOR

Yogita Khatri is a senior reporter at The Block and the author of The Funding newsletter. As our longest-serving editorial member, Yogita has been instrumental in breaking numerous stories, exclusives and scoops. With over 3,000 articles to her name, Yogita is The Block's most-published and most-read author of all time. Before joining The Block, Yogita wrote for CoinDesk and The Economic Times. You can reach her at [email protected] or follow her latest updates on X at @Yogita_Khatri5.

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To contact the editor of this story: Andrew Rummer at [email protected]

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