Manifund co-founder Austin Chen announced the hire on Friday, revealing that Ellison had been working at the organization since July 2025 under the pseudonym "Carol." She transitioned to a full-time staff role in August 2025 and spent roughly two months contributing publicly to the platform before her identity was disclosed. Her work at Manifund focuses on developing its funding platform and expanding its philanthropic programs, particularly its AI safety regranting initiative.

Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges in December 2022, just weeks after FTX collapsed that November. She cooperated extensively with federal prosecutors and served as the star witness against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was also her former romantic partner and who was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced Ellison to two years in custody and ordered her to forfeit $11 billion. Kaplan acknowledged her cooperation but said the sentence was necessary to deter "other potential bad actors from committing fraud."

Ellison entered FCI Danbury in Connecticut in November 2024, transferred to community confinement in October 2025, and was fully released in January 2026, ahead of her original release date. The early release is consistent with standard federal good conduct credits, though the specific basis was not publicly confirmed.

Manifund acknowledged and apologized for what it called a "minor deception" in having used a pseudonym, and framed the disclosure as consistent with the organization's stated commitment to transparency.

Under the name "Carol," Ellison authored the "AI Safety Funder Bulletin," a comprehensive living document cataloguing major AI safety funders, published on Manifund's Substack newsletter, "The Fox Says."

In that document, she noted that "donations in 2026 are going to be a lot higher than 2025," pointing to pledges from major funders and observing that some have stated intentions to more than triple last year's AI safety donations. Coefficient Giving has indicated plans to deploy roughly $1 billion toward catastrophic risk research in 2026. Macroscopic has stated intentions to contribute up to $100 million. Longview Philanthropy has distributed $266 million in total since 2018, and the OpenAI Foundation has committed or announced $130 million in grants.

Manifund was founded in 2022 by Austin Chen and Rachel Weinberg. Chen also founded the prediction market platform Manifold Markets. The organization operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and functions both as a regranting platform and a fiscal sponsor, giving donors a way to fund early-stage projects without those projects needing their own nonprofit status, while retaining tax benefits for contributions.

Its 2025 AI safety regranting program distributed $2 million across 13 regrantors. The 2026 program is targeting $2 to $5 million across 10 to 35 regrantors, with individual allocations ranging from $50,000 to $200,000. Past Manifund-backed projects have gone on to raise substantial follow-on capital: Timaeus received $143,000 from Manifund in 2023 and, following a merger with Resolution, later secured $160 million from Coefficient Giving; Apollo Research received $335,000 before raising a roughly $20 million seed round.

Impact Beyond the United States

For crypto users and builders outside the United States, Ellison's return to a public role carries a specific weight that goes beyond legal rehabilitation.

The FTX collapse caused direct, measurable damage to communities across Africa. Nigeria's Nestcoin lost $4 million in operating capital frozen on the FTX platform and was forced to lay off approximately 30 employees. Panic-driven withdrawals from FTX spread across Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, and Senegal. Rwanda's central bank responded to the collapse by banning financial institutions from engaging in crypto activities. A Nigerian blockchain consultant, speaking anonymously to Rest of World, summarized the broader damage bluntly: "It has reduced the trust level of users in the sector."

That trust deficit persists even as regional blockchain activity rebounds strongly. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded more than $205 billion in on-chain transaction value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent increase year over year. In a separate measure of recovery, Southeast Asian blockchain companies raised $680 million in equity so far in 2026, more than double the $319 million raised in all of 2025.

Manifund's core funding priorities, centered on AI safety and biosecurity research, are not strongly aligned with the most pressing blockchain use cases in regions like these: stablecoin remittances, inflation hedging, DeFi access, and digital identity. That assessment reflects the organization's published program focus rather than a formally sourced conclusion.

But the AI safety funding landscape that Ellison is helping to document does carry indirect relevance. The research bodies and policy frameworks funded by organizations like Coefficient Giving and Longview Philanthropy will increasingly shape global AI governance, including the rules governing AI tools deployed across Africa and Southeast Asia, even as those regions remain largely outside the grantmaking conversation.

Ellison's hire signals that the EA ecosystem is willing to move forward with figures closely associated with the sector's most damaging scandal. Whether that reads as pragmatic rehabilitation or premature normalization is a question the broader crypto and philanthropy communities are still working through.