No, it became a Ponzi scheme in May/June 2022 when Alameda Research lost all their money and instead of letting Alameda die SBF (mis)used FTX's client's money t

No, it became a Ponzi scheme in May/June 2022 when Alameda Research lost all their money and instead of letting Alameda die SBF (mis)used FTX's client's money to bail our Alameda. Who then lost even more money leaving nothing. There is no evidence of fraud etc before then. There is no evidence of significant, unexplained transfers out of FTX before then either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Research We've known this for a while. Try to keep up! Also: >One of the most popular ways to run a Ponzi scheme is to run a cryptocurrency exchange. This is simply untrue. Even if all crypto exchanges were always Ponzi schemes, that would be a few dozen making it one of the LEAST popular covers for Ponzi schemes... And: >It is not far-fetched to assume that many of the deposits on FTX were transferred directly to Alameda, and used to pay off Alameda's debt. With $50M in customer deposits, and $8M in seed money, it would have been possible for Alameda to pay back the remainder of its high interest loan - and settle all of the outstanding interest. It IS far fetched actually. Per the Authors own numbers, they borrowed 117m at 43% interest. Even if 50M a day in trading volume means 50mil in deposits (Hugely questionable), how can you pay off 117m, plus interest plus buying back shares, with only 50mil?! And the simple act of paying back anything sort of indicates it was NOT a ponzi scheme at that point right? A Ponzi scheme never pays anyone back, it just borrows more. Let alone buying back shares. IMHO, FTX (and most other crypto exchanges) are created for a simple reason: the fees are huge right now. Stock trading fees are usually less than 1bps (1 bps = 0.01% of the value of the trade). Coinbase charges 40bps for retail users. SBF ran the Kimchi arbitrage when it was profitable, he ran FTX for the same reason. The crazy thing here is how much money he LOST by not stopping things that were loss making or where risk>>reward... He killed a golden goose to save a mangy terminally ill budgerigar.