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Binance to acquire FTX

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141–150 of 790 posts

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#141

I’m a little ignorant to the whole crypto ecosystem, so can someone give me a quick rundown on the chain of events that led to this? Seems a little out of left field. BTX, from the outside looking in, looked to be one of the more well run, stable crypto exchanges. $1.02 billion in revenue with $388M in net income in 2021. They didn’t go on any crazy hiring spree when they didn’t have to. Liquidity crisis implies that…

FTX's ceo also runs a prop trading firm which is the real source of his wealth. FTX loaned the trading firm billions of its own token FTT. FTX also gave binance billions of dollars of FTT because binance invested in them. Over the weekend FTX's ceo and Binance's ceo got in a fight on twitter and binance sold all of their FTT which collapsed the price. FTX's assets are tied up in the loans to their trading firm which…

> so they can't convert the FTT to cash which means can't process withdrawals.

That implies they embezzled customer funds (customer deposits should never be invested or loaned or intermingled with company funds)

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#142
post #16

SBF said "We don't invest client assets (even in treasuries)". [0] He then says the purpose of the transaction with Binance is to "clear out the liquidity crunches". [1] How could there be a liquidity crunch if assets are not invested? You can't do a bank run on an entity that doesn't function as a bank and doesn't invest clients assets... Something is shifty. [0] https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/158959828579870720…

Are you seriously asking? He lied like every other exchange does. The man's middle name is Bankman for god's sake.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#143

Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined - this was yesterday/today. Of course the price of FTT crashed today. And now Binance buys FTX to help them out... smells like Binance played 4D chess all along. https://decrypt.co/1136…

Isn't FTT like FTX's own issuing tokens? It's like printing one's own money. But when the backing firm fails, the printed money is worthless, just like what LUNA issued by Terra had become.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the world of unregulated finance. There’s a reason the FDIC exists and all banks must be insured.

There's nothing decentralized about FTX or Binance. They operate in an opaque manner like any traditional business, transparency comes from forced audits & regulation. Decentralized finance is built on chain where all assets are publicly auditable at all times. EDIT: parent comment talked about decentralized finance, then edited to remove mentions of defi

Even without the edit, your response feels like a no-true-scotsman

i.e. an attempt to remove bad actors who deal in decentralized cryptocurrencies from the purity that is defi.

What are some large, successful defi organizations today?

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZIRP is a hell of a drug. There's not a lot of innovation to be had on lending that is actually going to be considered legal. Unless they obfuscate it with AI, they are going to run afoul of some sort of anti-discriminatory laws. Credit score&history, income, capital.. go. Most of what BNPL actually turned out to be was just dumb money.

Its also the fact that in a bear market / recessions usually most correlations go to 1(on the way down) and whatever risk metric you used previously justify having low default provisions suddenly doesn't work anymore. Wonder whether we will ever see the actual datasets that BNPL founders saw that made them decide it is a safe business. Probably like you said ZIRP,bullmarket delinquency percentages.

Yes, though they were already taking on serious credit losses before any normal creditors were.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build new exchanges faster than they fall. It's the only way to keep the ponzi going.

Easy to do in a world of 0% interest rates, not so much now. I think the entire crypto ecosystem is about to crash and burn hard as the Fed just keeps the rate hikes coming.

Yeah the music stops when the naive outsiders stop having the extra cash into the system.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#148
post #14

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012133307478016 >Note that http://FTX.us and http://Binance.us – two separate companies–are not currently impacted by this. http://FTX.us withdrawals are and have been live, is fully backed 1:1, and operating normally. I wonder if this means SBF will continue operating FTX.us as a competitor to other US-based exchanges.

Really seems like vindication for the US's regulatory scheme that in that it keeps US customers out of these shenanigans.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#149

You know what this makes me kind of wonder... back earlier in the year SBF made a big show of coming in and investing in a bunch of the companies that were collapsing due to the LUNA/3AC/Celsius problems. He stepped in and to some extent halted the unwinding of some of these issues. It turns out now that it's likely FTX is underwater, and Binance is basically doing the same thing - coming in, picking them up cheap an…

Binance has serious legal issues (governmental investigations) and isn't based out of any jurisdiction. A Binance failure would have consequences that are very hard to predict

If it's going to happen, better sooner than later.
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