First up it was a deep dive into dot coms that cost Telstra hundreds of millions back in the 1990’s, now Telstra Ventures is trying to work out how much they have lost on another speculative investment with the collapse of global crypto exchange FTX.

Back in the Dot Com era it was Telstra executive Ted Pretty who campaigned Telstra’s investments in Companies that kept falling over.

Telstra Ventures general partner Yash Patel

Now Telstra Ventures general partner Yash Patel has a lot of explaining to do after he spruiked Telstra Crypto investment alongside FTX Founder and Chief Executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is using social media to deny claims that he has had fled to Argentina after the Lehmann Brothers-style collapse of his business.

The good news is that the potential losses are isolated to Telstra Ventures an operation that management spun out into a separate entity some years ago with insiders claiming that the losses are at “the low end”.

The spectacular collapse of US crypto exchange FTX is set to set back crypto currency with several retailers approached recently to accept crypto currency as payment for goods.

This morning investors in Australia including Telstra Ventures are still trying to work out the wide-reaching impact the unfolding scandal will have on the cryptocurrency industry with several Woke linked online retail businesses having second thoughts about crypto currency.

The Australian offshoot of FTX was closed down last week as the Sam Bankman-Fried’s $US32bn ($48bn) empire was crashing and organisations in Australia were suddenly facing millions in losses.

Authorities in the USA are investigating whether Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $US10 billions of customer funds from FTX to prop up his ostensibly separate trading company Alameda Research.

This was reportedly done via a “backdoor” in FTX’s accounting system, which was built using bespoke software, and which allowed Mr Bankman-Fried to alter FTX’s financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors.

In his videos Telstra Ventures Patel and Bankman Fried discusses, the potential for crypto mergers and acquisitions at a time when values in the sector were low.