22 ms·
FTX Appears to Have Stopped Processing Withdrawals, On-Chain Data Show
- kranke155 4y agoSeriously? This is kind of incredible. SBF has always seemed like an interesting operator in the space, and his proposals for regulation now appear to have gained him a lot of enemies. I wonder how much of this market pressure is organic vs organized. Certainly CZ from Binance seems to have planned a squeeze on them.
- snapcaster 4y agoYeah talk about a brutal move. Made my estimation of CZ increase, what a shark
- 55555 4y agoYeah, but why wouldn't he want to sell his hundreds of millions of dollars worth of FTT before crashing the price? Isn't that a bit strange?
- cryptoanon 4y agoEgo wars. Sam made a joke about CZ getting arrested on US soil.
- bhouston 4y agoYour comments cryptoanon have been so incredibly wrong about FTX/Alameda... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33520624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33520624
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cryptoanon 4y agoI never made any comments about FTX.
- jjulius 4y agoAlameda, on the other hand... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465861
- shapefrog 4y agoSell $100 mil at 22, buy em back at 17 ... Profit $22 million.
- snapcaster 4y agoI'm guessing they sold as much as they could before the announcement, but regardless of the theoretical money value i don't think there was actual hundreds of millions of liquidity so using this stack to wipe out a competitor is probably the most effective way of using it
- cryptoanon 4y agoThe wide range of Binance’s criminal behavior didn’t clue you in on his sharkiness prior to this?
- shapefrog 4y ago> how much of this market pressure is organic vs organized vs ponzi scheme unravelling
- somuchfordonor 4y agoNo dude, Sam Bankman-Fried is going to totally autist-genius his way out of this one.
- shapefrog 4y agoBernie Madoff was also able to totally autist-genius his way out of trouble too.
- pluc 4y agoIt's certainly not incredible. A crypto company going belly up and fucking over their entire customer base is very very credible.
- 323 4y agoYou cannot squeeze that which is not in a squeezable position.
- janmo 4y ago4 days ago there was an interesting discussion here about a possible Alameda/FTX bankruptcy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464494
- ta988 4y agoAnd I love how you have self-professed specialists that tell you "no this will never happen". Finance is full of over-confident people that don't know enough or have too much at stake.
- xadhominemx 4y agoI wouldn’t consider the crypto universe to be “finance” The vast majority of finance people have been in the Matt Levine school of thought the entire time - the entire industry is a ponzi and every crypto person who thinks the way traditional finance does things is stupid will end up slowly replicating all the traditional finance structures and norms because it turns out they exist for a reason
- paulgb 4y agoI used to work in (trad) finance and while I want to agree with you, there's also a lot of trend following and going to where money is moving, with a belief that if it does go to shit you'll see the writing on the wall first before your winnings turn into losses.
- xadhominemx 4y agoYes, that is true about every industry
- skippyboxedhero 4y agoThe vast majority of finance people don't give a shit about the value of the product. Their business isn't to take risk or speculate, that is what your money is for. Their job is to give the people what they want, and earn hard-money commission. That is it. I will say though: I think crypto is here to say, I think normal finance is here to say, they aren't incompatible. What I think was illogical was to suggest that blockchain was a substitute for very efficiently run operations (like custody)...but it could be used elsewhere (for example, having investment funds do transfers on a blockchain is interesting) because it is also true that other parts of the industry are pre-historic (anything retail-facing is usually expensive and poorly-run, the whole retail fund value chain is a joke).
- somuchfordonor 4y agoWell the user's money is going to good use, it's financing the AI that will defeat the AI that tries to take over the world.
- pavlov 4y agoAfter the 2008 financial crisis shook my faith in banks, I really hoped it would be replaced by a system of wildcat banks located in offshore tax havens speculating on their own virtual scrip and waging cyber-warfare against each other. Good job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- inasio 4y agoFTT-USD live: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=FTX%3AFTTUSD https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=FTX%3AFTTUSD
- throwup 4y agoSome fun insider trading there. FTT started climbing at 16:00 UTC, but the Binance-FTX deal wasn't announced until 16:09 UTC
- oldstrangers 4y agoFTX has to be one of the most ubiquitous names in crypto at this point, most recently seen by everyone on the jerseys of umpires in the World Series. I can't even imagine the kind of fallout from this if it keeps heading in this direction.
- jefftk 4y agoThe way to see this is (and check if it's still the case) is to click back on https://etherscan.io/tokentxns?a=0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2 https://etherscan.io/tokentxns?a=0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf... until you see ones labeled "out". That will take you to 6:37am ET. Possible interpretations range from (optimistic) a delay in pulling funds from cold storage due to unusually high levels of withdrawals to (pessimistic) FTX collapsing.
- juujian 4y agoThe fun part is that a bank run would still lead to a collapse of their system, so both would lead to the same outcome.
- Tesl 4y agoFTX collapsing is the optimistic case. I hope they take the rest of the crypto "space" with them.
- jefftk 4y agoI'm not pro-crypto in general, but ftxfoundation.org funds work I think is really important and would be sad to see collapse.
- em1sar 4y ago
- reducesuffering 4y agoSBF retweeted https://twitter.com/MoonOverlord/status/1589606333468512256 https://twitter.com/MoonOverlord/status/1589606333468512256 : "cant wait for my FTX airdrop for not moving any of my funds"
- shapefrog 4y ago
- xnorswap 4y agosimps?
- shapefrog 4y agoA banned word apparently, my comment is flagged. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Simp https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Simp People who respond to celebrities online are in the desparte hope they notice them, imo are some of the worst.
- rafaelero 4y agoWow, that's crazy. FTX was the company that saved a lot of crypto companies that were about to default on their liabilities in the first stages of crypto winter. And now they are the one that are going under. Ironic.
- jerf 4y agoWith respect, this isn't "ironic" at all, and I don't mean this as some stupid quibbling about the definition because I mean this for all definitions. Those two facts are quite connected; maybe not completely directly, but they are far from independent events that just happen to be occurring in some unexpected manner. At the very least, it means I interpret the rescue as another level of razzle-dazzle rather than a rescue based on solid fundamentals. This doesn't surprise me too much, your mileage may vary.
- shapefrog 4y agoI took all my money, put it into a metal bin, poured petrol on it and set it alight. Now all I have is a metal bin, how Ironic
- tootie 4y agoWhat's ironic is that they did this at all. It's like they positioned themselves as the central bank of the crypto world. Only they skipped the "full faith and credit" part and made their contract be "hey, don't worry about it".
- marshmallowmad 4y agoI’m not convinced they’re going under. Is Alameda in trouble? Maybe, but FTX is basically having a bank run. Just because things are slow processing doesn’t mean they’re going under. SBF came out and claimed to have all customer deposits.
- miohtama 4y agoEven if FTX has stopped withdrawals, it does not necessarily mean they are insolvent. But remember, no smoke without fire. Like all other financial institutions, they can process only certain amount of withdrawals in a time frame, limited by their banking partners and so on. Currently their are under enormous pressure, as their competitor Binance has decided to dump very large amount of $2B FTT token they received as part of the exit from FTX equity round where they were a seed investor. This will put FTT price under pressure and people correlate this price with the integrity of FTX. Also, FTX associated entities have loans collateralised by FTT tokens, so if the collateral value falls too much the loans are liquidated. Based on the FTX user agreement, this should not have effect on user deposits, but might have negative effects on other FTX associated entities like Alameda the quant trading desk. The fear is causing everyone to withdraw from FTX and this has then clogged their withdrawal capacity. Generally, if Binance would not have been hostile, they could have dumped their FTT tokens with less effect on the markets. They chose not to do so and telegraphed their dump very openly. This does not reflect well on the crypto industry as general. We will find out very soon. Note that this kind of issues do not happen on decentralised exchanges (DEXes) where any reserves are transparent and smart contract controlled.
- janmo 4y agoWell it has been 4 hours now, and the media has been reporting it for an hour, everyone on Twitter and Reddit is talking about it. Yet, no communication from FTX or SBF.
- kobalsky 4y ago> Yet, no communication from FTX or SBF. this is the biggest issue. if they are having any kind of technical issues they should be on top of it. even if everything is fine by tomorrow and withdrawals are working again, this radio silence is unprofessional and at this point it feels like they are trying to avoid saying anything that will be held up in court against them.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
- SilverBirch 4y agoYeah, to be honest, looking at this from the outside I would say this is highly, highly likely to all come permanently crashing down. First there was the questionable behaviour - SBFs odd deals with various collapsing entities back earlier in the year, then there was the leak of Alameda's balance sheet looking incredibly shakey, and now Binance has seemingly decided they're going to stress test FTX. Most real banks would struggle under this kind of pressure, hard to see how FTX will manage to cope.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoIn retrospect, this makes those deals seem shady, and potentially part of a way to hide a larger contagion.
- twawaaay 4y agoIt will and there is a very simple reason it is going to happen. These products are built purely on trust. These things do not have any innate value. More than that, there is nobody that can be trusted that guarantees the value of it. Now think about long term stability of something that has value built purely on sentiment and the sentiment changes over time in waves thanks to globalisation. It is just a matter of time until people, for one reason or another, will get themselves into a spiral where the thing losing value will cause people to loose more trust, causing the value to drop. And there is nothing to stop it except large institutions that have power to manipulate market (if you remember Game Stop saga you know what I mean). A normal, tangible thing like a company that is profitable and has some future will see ups and downs as the sentiment changes, but the shares will always have some value because not all investors are completely irrational and some investors can calculate the value and at some point will say "Fuck all those people selling it, I think they are all mistaken because I can actually calculate the value of it and the shares are now cheaper than they should be so I am buying". This should be enough for the instrument to weather even very negative but temporary sentiment. But this is not true for crypto. Crypto does not have innate value and when it goes crashing down it can easily crash to zero. Over long time, without giant institutional investors propping it up constantly, it is guaranteed that it will happen at some point.
- 4y ago
- 323 4y agoAll of HN knows that Tether is a scam that will implode AnyMomentNow (TM). However, notice how for the second time in a year an unexpected crypto entity (FTX/Alameda) is the actual one which is in difficulty. The first time being 3AC/Celsius. In finance, when everybody knows something, it's 95% likely to be false.
- mschuster91 4y agoThe problem with scams and pyramid schemes is that they can survive for a very, very long time limping around - all they have to do is pay off enough angry people that doubts don't explode too much and cause legal trouble, or have enough gullible fools which don't want to sell because of sunk cost fallacy. Crypto scams/schemes and also legitimate crypto service providers also have another vulnerability: getting hacked or external influences (e.g. economic crises, legislation, sanctions or asset seizures) making their business model impossible to continue. The problem is: it's sometimes very hard to determine if a crypto service is a scam, a pyramid scheme, a money-laundering operation or a legitimate service. And almost nothing of it (except certain NFTs which have legally bound real world entities tied to them such as [1]) is backed by actual real-world liquid-ish assets. [1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/the-first-nft-home-just-sold-for-175000/437522 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/the-first-nft-hom...
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI think it's a really hot take to point at a scammy crypto entity falling to pieces and conclude that this is evidence crypto skeptics are wrong.
- 323 4y agoNo, it's evidence of group think and lack of critical thinking. If HN can spot scams so easily, how come there was no talk here about 3AC/Celsius and now FTX/Alameda being obvious scams.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoBecause it's really hard to identify a specific needle in a haystack comprised entirely of needles.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swader999 4y agoCrap, I have $20 USD on there!
- shapefrog 4y agoCorrection you have $19, no $18, no $17, no make that $16 on there
- testfoobar 4y agoFor other crypto-naive, I found this article useful in explaining what exactly FTX and FTT are: "But what’s so special about the FTX crypto derivatives exchange? What's the use case of the native FTT coin, and why is the project tipped as one to watch for the future?" https://www.exodus.com/news/what-is-ftx/ https://www.exodus.com/news/what-is-ftx/
- shapefrog 4y agoWell there is 30 second of my life I wont get back having been exploited for my attention. It is straight up paid advertising pretending to be "news". Infowars and Goop are closer to journalism than that link.
- bigdaddyrabbit2 4y agoUnlike traditional finance, all this is on-chain, so you can trivially look it up. https://etherscan.io/address/0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089caef3819b13448 https://etherscan.io/address/0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089cae... FTX seems to be processing withdrawals normally. For the life of me, I can't understand why journalists love to speculate instead of doing a 5-second search on EtherScan.
- nerf0 4y agoI admit I did panic and tried to withdraw my funds yesterday. They just processed it today. A bit delayed but still processing.
- joyfylbanana 4y agoNothing wrong with taking a caution first approach. However to me most articles about FTX seem like "panic first, research after". Yes SBF's investment company might be fucked, but customers funds should be totally separate from that.
- Nursie 4y agoI think that “should” is working really hard there. We only have to look at the other crypto firms that have gone bust to know this space is rife with problems in that area - lies about FDIC protection, cryptocurrency and tokens considered part of company assets and subject to creditor claims, rather than customer deposits etc. I wouldn’t like to rely on that “should”.
- joyfylbanana 4y ago> I wouldn’t like to rely on that “should”. And you don't have to. Best always to hold your own coins yourself if you have that possibility, or use a custodian you trust.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
- rmac 4y agoHere's a dune query for the last 3 hours of erc20 transfers from the main FTX withdrawal hot wallet (0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2): <<Spoiler: there are none>> https://dune.com/queries/1142206/1950606 https://dune.com/queries/1142206/1950606
- edf13 4y agoSpoiler alert: There are plenty: https://etherscan.io/address/0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2 https://etherscan.io/address/0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2...
- rmac 4y agoClick on "Erc20 Token Txns" to get a clearer view into the transfers. There are none labeled as "out" for a few hours. The "Transactions" list on etherscan can be confusing as to the source and dest (check the individual Txns)
- ajhai 4y agoWe put together a quick dashboard showing the drop in outgoing transactions https://makerdojo.io/public/dashboards/JO6U9whjdL8DRvefKMAoK8WnKTRZETyc5bPymWog https://makerdojo.io/public/dashboards/JO6U9whjdL8DRvefKMAoK... [Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of MakerDojo]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paganel 4y agoThere was a post in here warning about just that three or four days ago, there were still people accusing the writer behind the post in question of hunting for a new scoop and such. Looks like he was 100% correct in his assessment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Dreako 4y agoHow will this affect the future of FTX Arena?
- rmac 4y agoSo binance is buying ftx.com? https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160?t=-dcFRXH_lz-EJnkQuqJVtw&s=19 https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160?t=-dc...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nova22033 4y agohttps://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520?s=46&t=GFpk_7xs7Cy8mrSsS8FgQA https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520?s=... From CZ This afternoon, FTX asked for our help. There is a significant liquidity crunch. To protect users, we signed a non-binding LOI, intending to fully acquire FTX.com and help cover the liquidity crunch. We will be conducting a full DD in the coming days.
- raverbashing 4y agoRelevant? https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160 https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160
- SilverBirch 4y agoAnd it's done: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520 https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520 CZ Buys FTX