Harrison has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the $10 billion fraud that brought down Bankman-Fried's empire.
Listen to the CoinMarketRecap podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts
The former head of FTX US has at least one high-profile backer of his new crypto venture.
SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci revealed this weekend that he has invested in Brett Harrison's new crypto venture, a crypto software company that will help investors create personal strategic algorithms for their strategies. It will also provide them access to both centralized and decentralized exchanges.
Scaramucci told Bloomberg he was investing his own money to show support for Harrison.
In a reply to a long Twitter post by Harrison on Saturday about the terrible experience working for FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried that caused him to depart the now-bankrupt exchange two months before its collapse, Scaramucci said he is "proud to be an investor in your new company," and told Harrison:
"Go forward. Don't look back."
Harrison has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the $10 billion fraud that brought down Bankman-Fried's empire.
Nonetheless, he said, he quickly found out who his friends were, with some people treating him "like an entirely different person overnight."
Others, he said, "immediately offered sympathy and support" even as he was deluged with what he described as the "frenzied and baseless accusations" directed at him on social media in the aftermath of FTX's collapse.
While FTX US doesn't seem to have been looted like its much larger sibling FTX international allegedly was, the revelation that a small group of top executives at FTX and Alameda Research stole $10 billion in customer funds to prop up the trading firm after steep losses made any association with the firm toxic.
SBF's Long Shadow
In his 49-part Twitter thread, Harrison revealed that having worked for Bankman-Fried cast a long shadow over his fundraising for the new company even before FTX came crashing down. He said:
"After I left FTX US and up until November, nearly every conversation I had with a venture capitalist about my new company eventually came around to the same kind of question: 'Is FTX investing? Is Sam okay with you doing this? Do you mind if we confirm with him?' After that, many conversations eventually came around to the same kind of apology: 'We know you weren't involved in what Sam and others did, but we can't take on the PR risk of associating ourselves with FTX, no matter how capable you are or compelling your idea is.'"
Scaramucci has also broken his silence about his close relationship with SBF, which even extended to the fallen entrepreneur's family. He told an event in Davos:
"I have to tell you that the betrayal and fraud — it's bad on a lot of different levels. It certainly hurt me reputationally."
