THE FTX FIRST DAY DECLARATION New CEO John Ray is scathing about Sam Bankman-Fried's management. "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information." pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/33/188450/0420… pic.twitter.com/Bd3Pjg4s7L
ME NOTICING THAT THE GUY WHO WROTE 'THE BIG SHORT' HAS BEEN HANGING AROUND ME FOR SIX MONTHS: is this good twitter.com/unusual_whales…
The Definitive Thread on FTX I met SBF before FTX started, and witnessed their rise and fall. I can't stand @nytimes's puff piece. If anyone wants to know what happened, send them this.
- Kicked off early 2019 - crazy how recent that feels
- “FTX started as a way of raising capital for Alameda”
- “Alameda likely a massive chunk of FTX volume. Early numbers never made sense otherwise”
- Alameda tried to “manipulate futures” on Binance mid 2019. CZ called them out, likely start of bad blood.
- Serum was an FTX project. Plus a bunch of spin offs which all launched coins - “Sam coins” - OXY, MAPS & others.
- Dec ‘20. Alameda losing edge as space gets crowded. Starts making riskier bets using serum assets as collateral
- Uses FTX to artificially inflate value of new tokens they’ve created (list low % of coins and have alameda buy them to give impression of huge market cap.)
- Additionally owned Billions of FTT. -FTX was only platform that allowed using FTT and other “Sam coins” as collateral.
- Alameda uses these illiquid coins to finance big directional bets. When market drops, they get margin called and don’t have money. Need to dip in to user funds.
- At this point FTX likely doesn’t have reserve to meet deposits, but should be ok as their other token holdings vest and become liquid over time. But needs FTT to remain valuable. Hence pushes for legitimacy, mainstream marketing etc.
- When 3AC/Voyager happens, FTX takes on debt, likely to protect FTT price because these firms owned a lot of it.
- 30 Oct - Sam takes a jab at CZ on Twitter again.
- A few days later, Coindesk releases piece showing how much of their assets are self-issued.
- CZ sees this, decides to sell. Caroline's public offer to buy at $22 causes panic, because it's as close to an admission that they are using FTT as collateral as you can get. People start selling - $.5b of stables leave exchange in a week. Run continues
- The thread has more details on the aftermath.
🚨 -ONE MONTH BEFORE THE SHIT HIT THE FAN (10/11/22) @AlderLaneEggs warns about $FTX & @SBF_FTX etc to @KeithMcCullough "Nothing here fits. Everything reads like it's a complete scam. This thing is dirty and rotten to the core." Watch full conversation: bit.ly/3WWxd0X pic.twitter.com/J4kik8DKu8
1/n. I read ~3 years of @carolinecapital blog posts. This is a general review... mostly bc her beliefs, interests, and thoughts change drastically over time. Ex: her poly post was taken out of context, since it was written in 2020, before Bahamas. TLDR: Caroline is very based.