FTXwatcher

• FTXwatcher 18 Apr 2024 19:28 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  I could have been clearer about what is being counted as what, but such FTX-related assets are all counted as illiquid in this categorisation /​ hypothetical. I agree that assets appearing to exceed liabilities in itself doesn’t necessarily mean much, was covered in OP in the first section.

  All I’m counting as liquid here is:

  • Roughly $1bn of the final SBF balance sheet

    • Mostly looking at $200m ‘USD in ledger prime’, $500m ‘locked USDT’, and $500m of HOOD shares.

  • The $5bn returned to customers during the bank run

    • Since this was successfully returned, it’s almost liquid-by-definition.

    • I would assume this was overwhelmingly USD /​ stablecoins /​ BTC /​ ETH, since those collectively made up almost all of the final liabilities (SBF balance sheet over on top left)

  • The $???bn returned to the lenders in June 2022

    • I speculated $10bn in prior comment, but again this is very much just a guess.

  Anyway, it’s hard to put much weight on any of this because so much is uncertain, including the accuracy of that balance sheet.

• FTXwatcher 17 Apr 2024 11:10 UTC

  22 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  Caroline claims she was able to track their finances well enough to (a) establish that they couldn’t afford to buy out Binance and (b) calculate a -$2.7bn NAV-excluding SamCoins for Alameda and recommend against $3bn of venture investments, both in 2021. I gave some links for that in OP. Then they calculated out how to repay lenders in June 2022, creating the spreadsheet that was central to the eventual guilty findings. So I don’t think they were completely clueless when it came to 10 figure numbers or the big picture more generally.

  I suppose I consider it almost a given that they did not have good financial controls on ‘mere’ 7-8 figure sums, because at this scale and complexity that would be a full time job for a professional, probably multiple professionals. Per Going Infinite, VCs knew this and tried to push Sam to hire a CFO; he mocked them as quoted in OP and refused. So in the end all four people permitted to know the true state of things had substantial other responsibilities and no accounting background.

• FTXwatcher 16 Apr 2024 17:53 UTC

  10 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  The framing sounds too generous, since I do not think there was any plan to transfer it at any point. But I can see a grain of truth here. As covered in OP, SBF seemed to think Alameda’s balance sheet by October 2022 was very roughly:

  • $18bn of illiquid assets

  • $6bn of liquid assets

  • -$15bn of customer liabilities

  Then the customers started to withdraw, $5bn in liquid assets was returned, then they more or less ran out and declared bankruptcy.

  So what might this have looked like before returning money to crypto lenders in June 2022? I did not find any concrete figure for what the size of those transfers was, but I’ve generally assumed around $10bn. If so then the pre-return state was:

  • $18bn of illiquid assets

  • $16bn of liquid assets

  • -$15bn of customer liabilities

  • -$10bn of crypto lender liabilities

  So on this hypothetical, at this point Alameda/​FTX have liquid assets exceeding customer liabilities; in a crisis of confidence they can meet a full bank run from customers, though of course at cost of still going bankrupt and blowing up the lenders.

  To be clear, this is all very rough and speculative. But I can readily imagine that Alameda had sufficient liquid assets to cover customer liabilities before they repaid their other major funding source. Of course the problems of the commingled assets, investing of customer assets, lying to everyone, and various other crimes would remain.

Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes