this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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They could've been massively rich running the exchange the legit way, but no... it's always more, more, more... now, now, now.
It was a crypto exchange, I don't think there is a "legit way" to run one of those.
there absolutely is. just do your job facilitating trades between consenting parties, thats it.
My understanding is the exchange itself wasn't really their downfall. Their downfall was was using the money deposited with them or invested into their company to gamble on risky trading with an affiliated investment firm. They kind of ran this firm, it was supposed to be separate but really wasn't. It sounds like at least $10 billion was moved from the exchange to this investment firm, who lost most of it. Didn't help that the main thing that firm was involved in was.... buying crypto of course. In an incestuous ouroboros of fraud.
But yeah I think you're right, even if they hadn't engaged in all that fraud, how does an exchange determine how much money in usd and different cryptocurrencies to keep on hand to safely cover all depositors with them when there is such dramatic volatility in all the different cryptocurrency values? Every crypto exchange is probably doomed to a massive dramatic collapse at some point or another just from a volatility standpoint alone. Not to mention the massive underlying issues with many cryptocurrencies like wasting energy, wasting resources, co2 generation. Hard to argue there's such a thing as a "legit" exchange.
If you move 1 BTC to an exchange, and you keep it in your account on the exchange, the exchange is meant to keep the 1 BTC on behalf of you.
They are not meant to do anything other than keep it.
An exchange is not a bank.
If the exchange takes your tokens (or fiat) and does anything other than what you ask them to do, they're not legit.
They also had practically no accounting of money going in or out, other than Quickbooks. Their entire platform was coded as a ponzi scheme with explicit cases to skip checking if balances would go negative when withdrawing money for Alameda Research.
It's still a bit hazy how Alameda lost so much money. Normally when hedge funds blow up, there are some identifiable bad trades that take down the rest of the fund. We still haven't been told that story in the Alameda/FTX case.
They offered financial products like perps that can get particularly rekt as a facilitator. pretty sure they lost billions on bad risk parameters. it was well known that you could make money on ftx unlike any other exchange. some people thought it was because thats where the activity was but it's come to light that its much ddeper than that.
Properly run, an exchange does not speculate on the underlying asset, it only facilitates trades, and there is zero volatility.
Yeah we're not talking about fractional reserve banking here