Posting through, crypto clay-edition

Sam Bankman-Fried repeatedly speaks to journalists about his adventures in unpaid assets. This time it was at least intentional. We are not sure whether this was more successful in clarifying things.

SBF said in a live broadcast discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin from Nyt that he had "never tried to cheat anyone". But he claimed that he only pursued Alameda's share in the trading volume on the platform, not the actual size of his positions or its risk, which seems to be a rather important detail.

"These are positions in which FTX could carry out margin calls for these positions and close them in time so that they would cover them all.

to translate it: A sales argument for crypto exchanges was the way they carry out "Margin Calls" by not really calling. Platforms should simply automatically liquidate traders if their positions become too long.

In his first day declaration, the new FTX CEO John Ray said that FTX had exposed its requirements for the automatic liquidation of Alameda. This could be a form of the "back door", which made Alameda possible to intervene even if SBF "doesn't even know how to cod", as he said interviewer Tiffany Fong in a video published this week.

And then there is the question of how he incorrectly marked accounts. It sounds like the stock exchange decided years ago to accept deposits from customers by Alameda . From the interview:

So I'm still looking at the details of some parts. But I think that in addition to what I have seen, many of the standard loans here that FTX, if they look back to 2019, had no bank accounts. It had no bank accounts worldwide. We tried to get [bank accounts], it took a while, it took us a few years. And you know there were customers who wanted to transfer money to FTX.

In the meantime, some of them transferred money to Alameda Research to receive a credit on FTX. That was a considerable sum. . . Correctly, the internal accounting of the FTX has effectively tried to burden Alameda with these funds, but it didn't happen in the main account. And so there was a discrepancy between the display of the account and what was really going on there. And I still see how it worked mechanically.

angry!

If we only had clarity from other global crypto exchanges about how they secure the money of their customers.

It certainly looks as if Binance does not do so despite his long blog post last week. The article claims that customer funds are on "separate accounts" before explaining why the money is actually not kept separately:

".

While Binance does not tell the customer that they should deposit money through a hedge fund, it does not keep your money tied. However, after SBF had deregistered from the dealbook interview, he continued tweeting. And he convinced at least one viewer:

I really appreciate that.

I screwed up. I will do anything to do it right - even if I knew it might never be enough.

-Sbf (@Sbf_ftx) 1. December 2022