The American state of Oregon’s Democratic Party had received a massive donation of $500,000 and it turns out that a senior executive of the FTX crypto exchange was the mystery donor.

True source

Local reports revealed that state officials were initially informed by the Oregon Democrats that the donation of $500,000 had come from Prime Trust.

This is a fintech based in Nevada, which focuses on crypto. But, the party director revealed on November 1st that this was not the true source of the donation.

The contribution had actually come from Nishad Singh, the Engineering Director at FTX, who has been the fourth-largest donor of the state’s Democratic Party since November 2020.

Apparently, there had been some confusion surrounding the identity of the donor behind the half-a-million-dollar contribution.

Brad Martin, the executive director of the state party, said that the documentation provided by the bank in October had led them to believe that the donation had come from Prime Trust LLC.

The donation had been made on October 4th and the media had deliberated as to why such a sizable contribution had come from a startup in Las Vegas.

The clarification

On October 28th, Singh had gotten in touch with Martin to reveal that he was the one to have made the donation to the Democratic Party of Oregon and it had not come from Prime Trust LLC.

On November 1st, a Prime Trust spokesperson also clarified that they were not the ones to have made the contribution.

It said that they had only made the transfer on behalf of their client. Since then, the party has made amendments to its state campaign finance disclosure to highlight the true donor.

Some people may not be surprised about the nature of the contribution. Singh has used Prime Trust for making political donations in the past as well.

Likewise, the FTX exchange has also been focused on politics in Oregon.

Previous donations

A report in April discovered that the chief executive of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried had made a donation of $14 million to the Protect Our Future PAC via Prime Trust.

This had comprised $1 million donated by Singh and the rest had come from the CEO of the FTX exchange, which had been confirmed.

However, FTX had not disclosed why it had chosen to use Prime Trust for donating the funds and a spokesperson for Prime Trust had said that such transactions were quite common.

Bankman-Fried’s PAC had also made a donation between $8 million and $10 million to the political campaign of Carrick Flynn.

He was a family friend and a political novice who was running in an election in a newly created district of the US House of Representatives outside of Portland.

According to NGO Open Secrets, these donations also involved Prime Trust as well as Nishad Singh.