In the Wake of Collapse, FTX Fortune Cookies Are Still on the Menu

It’s been nearly a month since crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy protection, but that hasn't stopped millions of fortune cookies sponsored by the disgraced company from being doled out at Chinese restaurants across the U.S.

The take-out-themed misfortune is being served up by OpenFortune, a New York-based advertising agency that sells wholesale cookies featuring client logos to more than 21,000 U.S. restaurants.

FTX was among OpenFortune’s clients and helped craft ill-timed musings stuffed inside the cookies such as, “You will soon feel a renewed sense of optimism for the future,” “There’s so much more to come,” and “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”

Although the phrases have aged poorly in the wake of the company’s collapse, OpenFortune hasn’t confirmed whether the partnership has been suspended, telling CoinDesk to direct all future questions to FTX, which did not respond for comment.

The partnership, which is likely the exchange’s smallest, is also one of its last remaining. While FTX was previously the powerhouse sponsor behind stadium namings and Super Bowl ads, brands have been eager to scrub any associations with the tattered exchange. The National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat, University of California Berkeley athletic department and esports franchise TSM all cut ties with the exchange in November, ending multi-year deals worth a combined $400 million.

Even if OpenFortune doesn’t honor the remainder of its contract with FTX, the company’s fortune cookies will be on the menu for at least a few more months. A representative of Hua Ting in Hillsdale, Illinois, a Chinese restaurant that works with OpenFortune, said that it still had over three months of FTX cookies left in stock as of late November. OpenFortune distributed more than 400,000 of its cookies to Bradenton, Florida, alone in March.

Morgan Polikoff, who dined at Hua Ting in November, can still remember his FTX fortune off the top of his head.

“My fortune was, ‘There’s a price to waiting,’” Polikoff told CoinDesk. “Pretty ironic given that in the case of FTX, the price to waiting was losing all your money in crypto.”

On OpenFortune’s website, it pitches to clients that nearly 6% of its cookie eaters share their fortunes on social media. In the case of FTX, it may have gotten its money's worth; hundreds of cookie eaters have shared their FTX fortunes to Twitter and Reddit in the last several months alone.

FTX isn’t OpenFortune’s only crypto tie-up – it has also partnered with VeeFriends, the non-fungible token (NFT) project founded by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck.