This is what Matt Levine said re: why FTX lost money. (archive).
“One question that might be too early to answer is: Why was there a liquidity crunch in the first place? A crypto exchange is a weird sort of business, in many ways more like a brokerage than a traditional exchange. The simplest way to run the business is to take deposits from customers, buy crypto for the customers, keep everything segregated, and make money on commissions. Coinbase Global Inc.’s balance sheets are public, and pretty simple: It has about $101 billion of customer cash and crypto assets, and about $101 billion of offsetting customer liabilities. If the customers asked for their $101 billion back, presumably Coinbase would just give it to them. 1
A more complicated way to do it is to provide leverage to customers: Instead of taking $100 of customer cash to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin, you take $100 of customer cash to buy $200 worth of Bitcoin. A lot of FTX’s business is in perpetual futures, a leveraged product, sometimes levered 20 to 1. If you are an exchange and you are in this sort of business, you will need to come up with the extra $100 to lend to your customer. Presumably that doesn’t come from your equity: You are doing some sort of borrowing, perhaps from other customers, 2 perhaps from outside financing sources, perhaps from your affiliated hedge fund, etc. You will have some customers who owe you money, and others whom you owe money. You will be like a bank. If everyone to whom you owe money demands their money back at once, you will need to get the money back from the ones who owe you money, which might be hard. (You might not have a contractual right to demand the money back right away, or it might be rude and bad for business, or you might have to liquidate them to get the money back and that would blow up the value of your collateral.) In broad strokes this is a reasonable description of what happened to Bear Stearns, a brokerage that financed its customers’ positions. If you are a crypto exchange that provides leverage, then you are probably bank-like enough for a run on the bank.
Another complicated way to do it is that you take your customers’ assets and go invest them in whatever sounds good to you. You’re holding Solana tokens for a customer, you invest them in some yield-farming thing to make some extra cash, if the customer asks for the tokens back you don’t have them, etc. This is more or less what brought down the Celsiuses and Voyagers and BlockFis of the world, but I would not have expected it from FTX. “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings,” Bankman-Fried tweeted yesterday. “We don’t invest client assets (even in treasuries).”
(I should note that this answer aligns with my ideological biases more than a lot of the other comments in this post, so moderately high uncertainty, can easily be very wrong).
This is what Matt Levine said re: why FTX lost money. (archive).
(I should note that this answer aligns with my ideological biases more than a lot of the other comments in this post, so moderately high uncertainty, can easily be very wrong).
(My current guess is that significantly more blatant fraud is going on than the Levine article was suggesting)