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Doesn't touch some of the most interesting points-- for example, Genesis was accepting GBTC shares as collateral to loan parties like 3AC more money to conduct
by nullc 4y ago
Doesn't touch some of the most interesting points-- for example, Genesis was accepting GBTC shares as collateral to loan parties like 3AC more money to conduct more of the GBTC arb trade and for their collateral calculations they used (after switching to it mid-stream) the underlying value of GBTC's bitcoin rather than GBTC's market price guaranteeing that they would become massively under collateralized as the GBTC discount increased.
Also doesn't mention that Gemini was marketing the 'earn' program using deceptive marketing that compared it to a savings account. It also seems to imply that most of the earn money was going into the GBTC arb, but really earn's promotion had scaled up after the arb was mostly dead. GBTC went into discount Feb 25th 2021 and has been since, It looks like I became aware of and started sending complaints about Earn sometime around November 2021. The first message in my email mentioning it, spam from Gemini, was on October 16th 2021: "Did you know you could be earning up to 7.4% APY on your crypto with Gemini Earn?". By that point GBTC was trading at a substantial (>15%) discount, so the arb was dead.
Edit: initial announcement of Earn was https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gemini-launches-gemini-earn-a-new-way-to-earn-interest-on-crypto-assets-301219887.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gemini-launches-gem... Feb 2nd 2021, so I think it's unlikely that more than a trivial amount of the earn funds went into the GBTC arb.
AFAICT earn money was going into (companies that gambled on) "defi" ponzi schemes, it's just that genesis really got screwed at a massive scale because of the GBTC loans and connected defaults.
- jcpham2 4y agoIt is insane to me to see what are supposed to be legitimate, reliable, regulated businesses doing the same ponzi crypto interest shit that we learned on IRC this stuff doesn’t work a long time ago. The yield curves just don’t math Greg sir