Metropolitan Museum of Art will refund $550K in donations from FTX.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, based in New York, will be returning more than $550,000 in donations it received from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The museum will be refunding the amount to FTX debtors and had engaged in good faith negotiations with them. The donations were given in 2022 before the FTX exchange collapsed in November, with $300,000 received in March and $250,000 in May. The debtors argued that the proposed stipulation of returning the donations was reasonable and would provide them with a 100% recovery without any litigation costs. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, FTX’s new leadership has been trying to recover as much of the donated funds as possible. It was alleged that the donations were a result of criminal money laundering and violated campaign finance rules. The former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, reportedly made political donations amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. By March 2023, the funds returned to the bankrupt exchange made up just 2.2% of the money Bankman-Fried donated to political candidates from the Democratic Party.