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FTX balance sheet, revealed

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Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#31

Post by pavlov »

rippercushions wrote: post #9

What the fresh hell? This isn't even an actual accounting balance sheet. He was trying to convince investors to put billions of dollars of actual money into FTX, and the best he could do is the sketchiest one-page Excel ever, complete with comments like "Hidden, poorly internally labled fiat@ account" (sic) worth 8 billion and warnings about typos ! No wonder CZ got cold feet.

Somehow this same level of sloppiness, disorganization and disrespect was a mark of a great disruptive innovator just two months ago.

In the Sequoia profile they greatly admire how Bankman-Fried plays League of Legends while pitching to investors, and takes naps in his office when he’s supposed to be in meetings. How surprised can they realistically act that their genius lost 8 billion dollars in a “hidden, poorly internally labeled account”.

The investment industry needs to face their role in this debacle. The Ontario teachers’ pension fund sent tens of millions to FTX with apparently no due diligence. That money ended up in the pockets of crypto insiders and also funded promotion like Super Bowl ads that sucked more retail dollars into FTX. Some of those poor FTX customers who are facing a 100% loss on their crypto “investment” may have been teachers from Ontario.

Pension funds and VCs don’t generally invest in gambling and drugs. Why do they invest in crypto?

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#32

Post by laichzeit0 »

rippercushions wrote: post #9

What the fresh hell? This isn't even an actual accounting balance sheet. He was trying to convince investors to put billions of dollars of actual money into FTX, and the best he could do is the sketchiest one-page Excel ever, complete with comments like "Hidden, poorly internally labled fiat@ account" (sic) worth 8 billion and warnings about typos ! No wonder CZ got cold feet.

Hey man, move fast and break things. Professional accounting practices are nothing but “gatekeeping”. Hack the fucking plaaaanet.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#33

Post by pigtailgirl »

"What are President tokens? President tokens are ERC-20 tokens that will be redeemable for either $1 or $0 based on if Trump wins or loses the Presidential election. These markets act as tradeable prediction markets where the market price of TRUMPWIN should be roughly equal to the probability that Trump will win the election and the market price of TRUMPLOSE should be roughly equal to 1 minus that probability. TRUMPWIN and TRUMPLOSE are based on the President 2020 Futures Contracts on FTX."

jfc...

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#34

Post by mudrockbestgirl »

Okay, but... how? How did they manage to lose so much money by running a popular exchange that should bring in tons of fees? Even if they were gambling with part of the deposits, how can they lose 90% of all assets? You'd have to be actively trying to lose money to be this bad...

Also, where does Alameda fit into the picture?

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#35

Post by pigtailgirl »

AmericanOP wrote: post #21
TotoHorner wrote: post #3

So... is this guy just a complete sociopath or something? Telling everyone what regulations should be (and buying politicans) to ensure consumer protection while simultaneously sifting away 90% of consumer funds ? How does a person lie that much?

He ran the inverse Theranos playbook. Instead of a supremely polished persona, he hard-committed to the sweaty geek. Confidence, man.

-- apparently he was jacked to the hilt on adderall 24/7 --

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#36

Post by blue_light_man »

The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices.

Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations.

They are all here for their financial upsides.

Only trust the tech. The maths. If you can't do the work you would be fucked by them.

That's all.

I am not saying PG did something shady. I am saying even a well regarded figure like him in this community should not be taken for granted unless they back their claims by sold evidence.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#37

Post by wumpus »

Shank wrote: post #17

The "before this week" column seems to be attempting to draw sympathy by saying "but everything was fine before, seriously!" when in reality it just proved that, even in the best of worlds, they had an extremely optimistic view of the entire crypto ecosystem, including its liquidity. I can't believe they seriously held that much of their total value in their own issued token. That's just preposterous. Imagine if JP M…

Remember the Wirecard collapse, where there was a fake bank account in the Phillipines that allegedly had $2.1 billion USD in it?

This is the crypto equivalent.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#38

Post by kypro »

Shank wrote: post #17

The "before this week" column seems to be attempting to draw sympathy by saying "but everything was fine before, seriously!" when in reality it just proved that, even in the best of worlds, they had an extremely optimistic view of the entire crypto ecosystem, including its liquidity. I can't believe they seriously held that much of their total value in their own issued token. That's just preposterous. Imagine if JP M…

> Imagine if JP Morgan Chase's entire value was in JP Morgan Chase stock

The value of JP Morgan Case is the total value of their stock, almost by definition.

Buy backs are also basically a transfer of a company's cash to company stock and are regularly done by US corporates.

The difference here is that they secured debt against their own company assets so that when the value of the company went down, they went into more debt relative to their asset value.

They were also leveraging an asset which was highly volatile and which could be easily targeted by bad actors. Anyone with any experience in risk management understands that your leverage should be proportional to the volatility of the asset you're leveraging. This is why you get large loans backed assets like real estate, but not stocks. Stocks drop 20-30% every few years where as real estate is far more stable.

If they were leveraging dogecoin instead of their own token the result would have been the same.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#39

Post by [deleted] »

blue_light_man wrote: post #36

The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices. Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations. They are all here for their fina…

[deleted]

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#40

Post by jjallen »

The thing that I always wondered about with FTX (and Binance frankly) is how did they get so big so quickly. What did they have that caused so many people to use _their_ exchange. This is still unexplained and was a major red flag. Usually to grow that big takes many years. Just look at Coinbase.
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