Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen Take Equity Stake in FTX

National Football League star quarterback Tom Brady and his wife, Gisele Bündchen, are investing in cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It is another sports-related partnership for FTX following the sponsorship deals with Major League Baseball and NBA team Miami Heat.

The seven-time Super Bowl champion and his wife are becoming shareholders of FTX Trading Ltd. as part of the partnership. Brady and Bündchen will become the exchange ambassador and FTX’s environmental and social initiatives adviser respectively. 

In the announcement, FTX said they are committing to a multi-million dollar annual charitable contribution during the multi-year partnership. Financial terms of the long-term partnership were not disclosed.

This comes as FTX discusses raising as much as $1 billion in a new funding round with a valuation of $20 billion.

“[Brady and Bündchen] have already opened their Blockfolio accounts to invest and trade the cryptocurrencies of their choice,” FTX also said in the statement. Previously, FTX’s crypto trading app Blockfolio had partnered with NFL’s 2021 top draft pick Trevor Lawrence in April. 

Star stock picker Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to create a Bitcoin ETF. This makes ARK Invest the latest fund house to enter the Bitcoin ETF race. 

Why Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Files to Offer Bitcoin ETF

Cathie Wood, whose ARK Innovation ETF was the top-performing U.S. equity fund last year, has been a longtime Bitcoin bull. The fund would trade under the ticker symbol “ARKB,” if approved by the SEC. However, the SEC has swatted down dozens of Bitcoin ETF proposals in recent years.

ARK Innovation ETF owns around $820 million worth of shares in crypto exchange Coinbase. Also, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is a top 10 holding in Ark Next Generation Internet ETF.

Amid the growing institutional interests in crypto, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has invested in crypto data analytics firm Nansen. Other participating investors include Skyfall Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, imToken Ventures, Mechanism Capital and QCP Capital.

Nansen has completed a $12 million funding round led by a16z. Investment by the Silicon Valley VC firm comes from its $510 million Crypto Fund II set up in 2020.  

Founded in 2020, Nansen uses a combination of machine learning, algorithms and research to analyze crypto movements on the Ethereum blockchain, offering insights about the “smart money” action. 

Nansen will use funds to expand its solutions to Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and other blockchains like Binance Smart Chain (BSC).