We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Our areas of interest include the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biorisk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations, effective altruism, and more.
If you’d like to launch one of our proposed projects, or have another idea for a project in our areas of interest—please apply! Please submit your applications by March 21 to be considered in our first open funding round.
UPDATE: Our first open funding round closed on March 21, and we are no longer accepting applications. We do not currently have any plans to resume accepting applications, and we do not know if or when we will do so. If we decide to start accepting applications again, we will announce this decision on our Apply page and with another post on the EA Forum.
We can’t wait to see your applications!
Some further details:
- On the same apply page, you can also express interest in working with us, recommend a grant or investment to us, or recommend a prize for us to launch.
- We fund non-profits and for-profits alike, so long as they are aligned with our mission. We aim to respond quickly, ask for the information that is needed and no more, and keep you posted on when to expect a final decision. We are willing to make big bets, and if we fund you, we won’t micromanage your work. There is no limit on how much you can apply for.
- You can read about our principles and approach to funding on our website.
In addition to our request for projects, today we’re launching:
- Our Regranting Program. We’re offering discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. Our hope is that regrantors will fund great people and projects that weren’t on our radar! We’ve already invited the first cohort, and we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor.
- Our Project Ideas Competition. We’re announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to our website—submit your ideas by next Monday (March 7)!
Our team is Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
About the FTX Foundation
The Future Fund is part of the FTX Foundation, a philanthropic foundation funded primarily by Sam Bankman-Fried. When Sam was 20 years old, he set out to make as much money as he could, in order to give away everything he earned to charity. He initially worked as a trader, then founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. Now he wants to use the wealth he’s generated to empower people and projects that are doing the most to make positive, long-lasting change.
FTX Foundation is also funded by major contributions from Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh.
Other funds in the FTX Foundation Group, including FTX Climate and FTX Community, are focused on climate change, global poverty, animal welfare, and other issues important to the FTX community.
We’ve also written another post with more on our priorities for 2022, for people who want to follow our work closely.