9 ms·
Why Solana was decimated by FTX's downfall? Because in a silly, Scooby-Doo villain fashion, they were literally the same people more often than not. Personal a
by polygamous_bat 4y ago
Why Solana was decimated by FTX's downfall? Because in a silly, Scooby-Doo villain fashion, they were literally the same people more often than not.
Personal anecdote: I was supposed to get in a call with a few people on the Solana team -- received a calendar invite with a name@ftx.com address, which was then amended to a name@solana.com address. Make of that what you may.
- optimalsolver 4y agoSame way that Tether and Bitfinex are exactly the same people.
- nileshtrivedi 4y agoI looked at the Solana ecosystem when people started claiming its strong performance and scalability aspects. It was remarkable how difficult it was to find the identities of actual people behind Solana, Phantom, Serum etc, even though Solana is a VC-funded chain. Personally, I would never put money in any project where the team does not even put their identity & reputation at risk. But in those times, lots of people did exactly that. https://twitter.com/nileshtrivedi/status/1459438723305725952 https://twitter.com/nileshtrivedi/status/1459438723305725952
- pavlov 4y ago> “I would never put money in any project where the team does not even put their identity & reputation at risk.” In the heady days of web3 of <checks watch> six months ago, we were being told that it’s actually better if you don’t know who is behind a project because that’s the true spirit of decentralization. Just another crypto gaslighting exercise. Remember when people were very upset that the creators of the Boring Ape NFTs were revealed from public records?
- dragonwriter 4y ago”zero trust” is when there are plenty of key people in critical, load-bearing roles, but you have no basis to trust any of them, right?
- biztos 4y agoI met a youngish European guy who was working as a project manager for a DAO, I forget what they did but they made money and the staff got paid (crypto). It turned out many of the people working for the DAO were anonymous and nobody in the DAO knew or cared who they were in real life. They did good work, got paid crypto, everyone was happy. When I asked “what about sanctions” he gave me the blankest look I’ve ever seen.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoBecause sanctions and crypto are inherently incompatible. The former is a flex of institutional, state power. The latter is an exercise in screw-the-state libertarianism.
- Galanwe 4y agoI don't necessarily agree... I want widespread crypto, because I want to have the autonomy to initiate transfers myself, transparency of my accounts, easier back office, less payment middlemen, etc. Yet I would like a state managed crypto (e-euro?) so that a fraudulous transfer, stolen wallet, etc can be canceled. - We're in 2022 and I still can't have an API with my bank to analyze my purchases, I have to parse PDF monthly reports. - I still can't automate my savings without a third party robo advisor than requires me giving my account credentials. - I can't easily make FX swaps without a third party broker with 2 days wire transfers in/out. - I can't swap without a brokerage margin account. etc. Centralized crypto? yes please, it's still better than the current state of affairs. Not everyone lives in Europe or the US with fancy worldwide smart banking. Here in HK, banks are from the 90s. Crypto centralized would level the banking experience to the current century.
- alex7o 4y agoSadly the US is not that far ahead anyway, you also need to provided your bank credentials too. But yes the UK is light years ahead of everybody. But I am not sure centralized crypto would solve this, technically speaking crypto is a ledger. Banks also have ledgers but centralized, but you still don't have api control over that.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoI'd buy that line if the project were such a threat to the status quo that the people working on it would not be safe if their identities were known. Still waiting for that one to come along though.
- 3np 4y agoTornado Cash, Alexander Pertsev.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoThat's close to what I'm going for, but maybe not a big enough threat. I'd argue that the status quo is that if you have enough money you can do whatever you want. It's sometimes inconvenient. Sometimes you have to have a clever accountant on staff. But you can get it done. Anonymous money is more of the same, except you can fire that accountant. So tornado cash was an optimization of the current status quo. I'm talking about a threat to that status quo. The kind of coordination technology that would let us turn our backs on money so that everybody on wallstreet had to go find real ways to contribute because the people who make the things they want just laugh at their silly dollars.
- kragen 4y agosatoshi
- defrost 4y agobourbaki
- kart23 4y agocome on, it's on wikipedia and they put it on their linkedin. It's really not that difficult, it's not like they tried to keep their identities secret.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoWhere are you finding it? Wikipedia only lists the "founders", which links to the "History" page in Solana's homepage [0], which only has story until 2018. Notably, this is before FTX was a thing, so my claim becomes "Solana was taken over by FTX at some point." [0] https://docs.solana.com/history https://docs.solana.com/history
- kart23 4y agook, i assume you just wanted to know about who was behind solana, which is pretty simple. i don’t know about any of those other crypto projects or who is running them now.
- nailer 4y ago> It was remarkable how difficult it was to find the identities of actual people behind Solana, Phantom, Serum etc. https://www.linkedin.com/company/solanalabs/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/solanalabs/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/phantomwallet/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/phantomwallet/
- darth_avocado 4y agoYou mean BitFinesse
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI have zero confidence that the 30B or so Tethers floating around on Tron are actually real.
- wmf 4y agoWould you have felt better if all the developers worked for Solana Labs? Honestly I would consider it not bad if development was split between Solana Labs, Jump, and FTX.
- nailer 4y agoIt was decimated because FTX held between 5-11% of all Sol and sold it immediately when they were going down, dropping the price from 36 to 10 dollars. Eth is down 70%. Sol being down 90% given the above isn’t surprising.
- largepeepee 4y agoIt's far from just tokens. They funded several sol projects that are now underwater without their money even DeFi ones with how FTX was controlling serum. Serum itself was the backbone of numerous sol projects and when it got exposed for being heavily manipulated by FTX, it was obvious sol was gonna get fucked.
- nailer 4y agoTo be fair the Solana community replaced serum with opendex in one week.
- wc- 4y agoThis point is getting missed by a lot of people I think. FTX / Alameda had a part in funding almost all solana-based projects, and almost all of these fundings involved some kind of "use FTX as your bank" fundraising stipulation. So not only were they propping up the ecosystem with projects getting funding that might not have really deserved it, but now those projects have no treasuries. The entire solana ecosystem is just nuked now and it isn't hard to see this in on-chain activity and project/dao comm's. edit: as a dev solana had some nice implementation details and was a step forward over some other chains in some ways. IMO it's totally DOA now, but I hope the dev community (whoever is real and not an alameda-funded "anon" dev etc) continues on in some capacity on a fork or other chain.
- abacadaba 4y agofor better or worse, at least it is/was something other than another evm fork. will buy some at $3.50 for lulz.
- lend000 4y ago
- ignoramous 4y ago> ...they were literally the same people more often than not. Curiously, a16z is the lead investor in Solana and Coinbase, while Sequoia...
- polygamous_bat 4y agoTo be completely fair, they were investing in FTX and FTX but with a comically large mustache on; two different entities entirely.