Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alameda is helmed by quants from Jane Street etc., they are supposed to do better with regard to risk management, forecasting, bet sizing. Their whole M.O. is that they are smarter and actually do math and that is the source of their success. https://www.alameda-research.com/our-team Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. But from their tweets and podcasts it does seem they approach things very differently and in…
> Alameda is helmed by quants from Jane Street etc., The CEO worked at Jane Street for less than 18 months and appears to have had a fairly junior role there. I'm sure they are smart folks but there's a limit to how much you can learn in 18 months, in your first job after college.
Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
101–110 of 216 posts
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#102What the argument misses / why FTT is different than Terra 1) Alameda Research owns FTX, one of the largest and arguably most important crypto exchanges. 2) FTX offers fee discounts to FTT-stakers and additional discounts if you pay in FTT. [0] 3) Trading volume on FTX thus creates an organic demand cycle for FTT. The large firms will buy, stake, and then continuously refresh their supply. 4) The vast majority of the…
The problem with Terra was that the stakers got a guaranteed* 20% anual interest in dollars*. You can take a look at all the fine print and implementation details, or be a naysayer like me and read the 20% and claim it will collapse. I can't find the details about FTT/FTX. How high is the guaranteed* anual interest in dollars*? * With some mild assumptions, like the coins doesn't crash miserably. Past performance doe…
FTT does not offer any sort of interest like Terra did. The benefits of holding are strictly discounted use of the FTX platform [0]
[0] https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052410392-FTT-Stak...
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but just in case it's sincere: Alameda are considered a lynch-pin of the crypto industry, they're holding up pretty much everything... and by extension, FTX is far more important than Kraken. If Alameda implode, it'll be far worse than 3AC's implosion. I don't think it's possible to kill the crypto industry, but Alameda's implosion would be the most likely event to cause it.
The whole point of crypto was to be decentralized. For one company to go down and cause the industry to implode means the industry is on the wrong path and needs to be reset.
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The definition of insolvency is not being able to pay your debts. Alameda claims $14.6B in assets vs $8B debts, which means they're solvent. If they actually only have 12% of $14.6 = $1.8B, they're way mucho insolvent.
Only the 5.8bn in FTT is being claimed to be worthless. Not the full 14.6bn in assets. If that's true (and the article itself lists reasons it isn't true!?), that still leaves 8.8bn in other assets, vs 8.0bn in debts. The article itself says the same when it says 88% of equity. Equity is assets less debts. So as long as they have any equity left at all, they're not insolvent.
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#105This might explain why Sam Trabucco the former co-CEO abruptly left out of the blue a few months ago… https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/08/25/sam-trabucco-quits-co-... For those not in the know, Alameda is THE trading firm in crypto that everyone always assumes is causing liquidations. For them to be insolvent would be a huge deal. It’s crazy to watch greed pollute the minds of crypto trading firms like Three Arrows Ca…
Am I correct in understanding your argument that "so long as numbers keep going up, all will be fine"? Because there is a possibility that crypto never gains back the hype as late 2020, and Bitcoin never reaches the high of $69K ever again, in which case people who "bought and hold" at that time (including those who were encouraged to be "brave" by Matt Damon in a crypto.com ad) will never see (a portion of) their mo…
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
3AC was a prop trading firm flush with cash… until the curtain was lifted and it turns out it was just a big fraud. Alameda is a prop firm flush with cash… Why do you assume that Alameda isn’t “packed to the gills” with financial gremlins? If you asked anybody in the space about 3AC or Alameda 12 months ago, you’d have heard the same thing about them: prop trading firms that have been hugely successful investing thei…
Alameda is helmed by quants from Jane Street etc., they are supposed to do better with regard to risk management, forecasting, bet sizing. Their whole M.O. is that they are smarter and actually do math and that is the source of their success. https://www.alameda-research.com/our-team Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. But from their tweets and podcasts it does seem they approach things very differently and in…
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean this guy as well as a bunch of people on Twitter who have been clout chasing ambulance chasers, running over the truth to chase a story. The formula is this: 1. Create an helpful explainer thread to explain some crisis (ex-post) 2. Start to make vague predictions about relatively easy to predict things (like that Celsius is going to go down, a couple days before it technically goes down). 3. Refer your readers…
Dude you sound like the saddest most desperate FTT bag holder of all time. Did you lose your house and did your wife leave you or what...
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#108First very simple point, to become insolvent you have to actually take a loss somewhere. They may have a lot of junk tokens on their balance sheet, and these tokens may be overmarked, but Alameda's cost basis (most of them were from seed rounds) is still way below their current value.
With Three Arrows it was very obvious where the loss was from, they were hyper-bullish and doubling down on BTC all the way from $69,000 to $18,000 using leverage. By contrast Alameda is notorious for being dollar maxis, constantly taking money off the table, and very rarely having any sort of long-term major beta exposure. (A big reason they have a reputation as mercenaries in the space.)
The second point is that the bulk of their liabilities are in the same tokens on their balance sheet. This is particularly true for the FTT token, almost certainly the FTT on their balance sheet is simply a loan from FTX (which is essentially the same org) to Alameda to make a market on FTT on FTX. Regardless if FTT collapses, it wouldn't matter cause insolvency both the asset and liability side of the balance sheet would go down.
Most likely this is true for much of the rest of their liabilities. Crypto trading firms like Alameda make a huge proportion of their revenue from being "paid market makers" for specific token projects. It's very hard for new tokens to bootstrap liquidity. So the typical arrangement is a token project will "lend" Alameda something like 5% of the supply, which Alameda will use to be a market maker in that token at all of the major venues. Most of the liabilities on their balance sheet are probably these token deals, rather than loans made in hard currency.
Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#109Re: Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude you sound like the saddest most desperate FTT bag holder of all time. Did you lose your house and did your wife leave you or what...
I have no interest in Sam, Sam coins, or the cult of Sam.