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Not sure if folks here keep up with crypto much, but over the weekend FTX had a liquidity crisis and agreed to sell to Binance. This is pretty huge news - FTX was one of the bigger crypto exchanges known for buying out other flailing firms that had crises. This may lead to a larger spiral within the crypto economy. @aqouta curious for your take here.
Also as some folks here may know Sam Bankman-fried of FTX wealth is one of the three major funders of the Effective Altruism movement. Given the circumstances of this bailout, it's likely that FTX was sold for an incredibly small amount - if Binance didn't help them with the liquidity crisis they almost certainly would've fallen to $0 value. Unfortunately this means that the money EA has been pledged/receiving from SBF is going to dry up. I'm curious to see if the EA movement can weather this storm, as they have been rather aggressively growing and it looks like they've been betting on this funding being in place for a long time.
Time to add some wild speculation - Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, is Chinese. Now that Binance owns FTX, they are clearly the dominate player in the crypto space, or at least positioned well to become the dominant exchange. I wonder if this shift will cause China to reconsider their decision to make crypto illegal? Or is it too much of a risk to state power?
Update: This definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
Wild, I wonder if the fortune cookies from shops around me will stop having FTX quotes/ads in them. Sounds like it was them fucking up more their corporate sister which was involved in the trading for profit end of crypto rather than infrastructure that failed so I'm not sure this really says much about crypto. It's a relatively young exchange which started in 2019 and seems like it's less resilient than the other players in the space. Volume wise Binance does seem dominant but they have been dominant for a while. I'm not much of a fan of their centralized BNB chain as it seems like it's all just pretending to be a decentralized to avoid solving the hard problems projects like ethereum have struggled hard for. Exchanges are mostly a means to an end for crypto and I doubt this will be what makes China change their minds, although I'm never really sure how serious they are about stomping out crypto, it feels like they've banned it a dozen times now.
That is... strange? Never heard of FTX ads in fortune cookies but good for them I guess.
Yeah, what's worse to me is just the reputational hit to crypto. FTX was one of the exchanges that, at least to me, seemed much more credible than things like Terra. They directly claimed they didn't invest their clients assets... then when a bank run comes in they very quickly succumb to the death spiral. Personally makes me update away from crypto firms being stable, even big ones like Binance.
I haven't looked into this - could you explain what the centralized BNB chain is and how it's different from ETH?
In day to day use it's pretty similar to ETH as it's basically just copied the EVM. However Binance's chain has only 21 validators, they've been trivially able to shut it down before after a hack, which at that point it's basically a really inefficient public database with some functions dressed up like a blockchain. This has allowed them to beat the classic blockchain trilemma of scalability, decentralization and security by sacrificing decentralization. So you can do cheap and fast DEX transactions on BNB but ultimately it's a sham.
Ahh that is a shame. Yeah @daseindustriesltd mentioned above that a lot of crypto is being taken over by centralized actors and I have to agree.
I definitely believe in the classic decentralized use case for crypto, but it seems maybe there just isn’t enough dissatisfaction with the status quo for people to go all in yet. At least we will hopefully have the option of moving off fiat currency if or when things really hit the fan.
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