Singapore’s Investment Giant Temasek Drops Crypto Efforts Amid Regulatory Uncertainty

Temasek, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore has announced that they have no plans of investing in crypto exchanges as of now, amid the regulatory uncertainty in the market, said Chief Investment Officer Rohit Sipahimalani.

During his interview with CNBC on Tuesday, July 11, Sipahimalani said: “There’s a lot of regulatory uncertainty in this environment. And I do think that be very difficult for us to make another investment and exchange in the middle of all this regulatory uncertainty”.

For a very long period of time, Temasek has refrained from investing directly in cryptocurrencies. However, it undertook an alternative approach of backing service providers in the crypto space. But Temasek’s $275 million bet on crypto exchange FTX has badly misfired after the exchange imploded last year in November 2022.

Soon after, FTX decided to write down the entire investment in the exchange. The Temasek chief said that they were largely misled by FTX’s disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried. “If there’s a management that is committed to doing fraud, no matter how much diligence you do, it’s very difficult to uncover that,” said Sipahimalani. Earlier this year, Temasek also cut compensation for those who recommended investment in FTX.

Temasek on Crypto Regulation

Temasek said that they have paused any further crypto investment efforts since the regulatory environment is not ripe. Last month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged two of the world’s largest crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase for operating as unregistered securities exchanges.

But Temasek is not giving up entirely and remains hopeful for future considerations. “If you have the right regulatory framework, and we are comfortable with it, and you have the right investment opportunity, there’s no reason for us to not to look at it,” Sipahimalani said.

“But as I said, at this point in time, we would not be comfortable investing in exchanges given the way things are right now,” he added.