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Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

babel.finance

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Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#111

Post by capableweb »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #102
icu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I get that, but I'm old enough to remember the .com crash carnage and people saying that the web was a total waste of time etc and look how wrong they were. I think that the future is a probability distribution, and there is a non-zero probability that crypto doesn't die but keeps growing. Therefore, I'm not all in, but I'm not all out.

The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone. Blockchain tech has at best a series of edge case applications for record keeping. I don't think they are comparable at all.

> The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone

In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#112

Post by DannyBee »

O__________O wrote: post #64
lifty wrote: post #45

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, DAO, etc — are here to stay. Even with the market as is, today it’s still a trillion dollar industry.

This argument is always very funny to me.

History is rife with hundred-billion dollar industries destroyed in very short periods of time, across multitudes of field types.

For example, i've watched fields created by single legal opinions, grow to many billions, and then get destroyed overnight by a different legal opinion. All in the course of 10-15 years.

The amount of money in it is just not a sufficient condition for it to stick around. It certainly helps, mind you, but there will always be somewhere else to put the trillion dollars.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#113

Post by GTP »

icu wrote: post #92
rvz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moving forward I'm staying away from projects with a "stable coin" component as I don't think the fundamentals work. Not all stable-coins are the same. Out of all of them USDC seems to be the strongest out of the rest of them and is more likely to survive in the long term out of the others. That does not mean you should put your whole savings into it. It is still very early for stable-coins. I would rather wait for…

I kind of agree, but at the risk of being completely wrong, I think in the future central banks, or global financial institutions backed by central banks, are probably going to be the issuers of stable coins.

...And then we're back to fiat currency again.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#114

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

lifty wrote: post #45

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

Unfortunately scammers will always find new suckers for their ventures. People lose money to pyramid selling/MLM scams in real life all the time. Cryptocurrencies just made it possible to recruit suckers on a global scale.

Unless governments step in and ban them, there will always be new crypto scams.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#115

Post by cdiddy2 »

O__________O wrote: post #50

Besides Terra (LUNA), Celsius Network (CEL), 3AC, and Babel Finance —- are there other examples? * As is, while clearly some of these failures have had a massive impact, there clearly a lot of DeFi projects of significance still standing: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/defi/

Most things collapsing aren't defi, with the exception of Terra which, as an algo stable was expected to fail like all algo stables before it.

Celsius/3AC/Babel are all not defi and we would know about their health and risk factors much sooner if they were defi.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#116

Post by giaour »

yessirwhatever wrote: post #25
fakedang wrote: post #18

Remember when crypto was supposed to be the "holy grail" against the current economic situation? Edit:- the cycle of upvotes and down votes on this comment hahaha....

The concept is sound, implementation is what matters. Blockchain and crypto got hijacked is all.

So it was the world that failed crypto, not the other way around? The purity of your faith is impressive.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#117

Post by jcranmer »

ceejayoz wrote: post #40

Two years ago: https://decrypt.co/43168/whistleblowers-level-accusations-ag... > Anonymous sources who claim to have inside knowledge allege that Babel Finance has been misusing client funds via highly leveraged transactions and without permission. (Oh, look, Tether's involved again. How much of the $160M in their claimed "shareholder capital" at https://tether.to/en/transparency has evaporated in the last month? The…

> (Oh, look, Tether's involved again. How much of the $160M in their claimed "shareholder capital" at https://tether.to/en/transparency has evaporated in the last month? They're currently claiming it hasn't changed by more than $50 since a month ago; https://twitter.com/jjjbtc/status/1524819806892982272)

If you need any strong suggestions that Tether's asset statements are a pack of lies, this is it. They claimed to have--before the cryptocurrency collapses started--an equity buffer of around 0.2% of total assets. Now they claim to have unwound ~10% of those positions in a market environment where selling any of those assets (even something like US treasuries!) would realize enough loss to wipe out that buffer. Instead, their equity buffer increased by something like 0.00001%.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#118

Post by jtode »

Barrera wrote: post #98

This article gives some context, including this: > At the end of 2021, Babel Finance had an outstanding loan balance of over $3 billion, up from $2 billion the previous February. It averaged $800 million in monthly derivatives trading volume and had structured and traded over $20 billion in options products. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/17/babel-finance-s... The ripple effects here are going to be substa…

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Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#119

Post by yessirwhatever »

randomsearch wrote: post #32
yessirwhatever wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept is sound, implementation is what matters. Blockchain and crypto got hijacked is all.

Same as communism.

Not true. Communism is inherently inhumane.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#120

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

capableweb wrote: post #111
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone. Blockchain tech has at best a series of edge case applications for record keeping. I don't think they are comparable at all.

> The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.

I think we're probably disagreeing on "immediate", I was thinking by the time of the late 90's. You're right, it would have been less obvious when it was a pile of universities communicating together. But regardless, by the time of the dotcom crash my family in rural Northern Alberta had the internet.
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