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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29330 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I think there were politics at work. Bankman-Fried seems to have represented FTX as the better alternative to what was out there - let me quote that invaluable Sequoia article once more:

The biggest headache for Alameda wasn’t finding the opportunities, but executing the trades. At that time, when it came to crypto exchanges, the choice basically boiled down to Coinbase or Binance. Coinbase makes a point of being regulated by authorities in the U.S., but as a consequence, didn’t offer the kinds of options contracts and derivatives professional traders need to hedge their bets. Binance, on the other hand, offered the kinds of derivatives SBF was familiar with when he traded for Jane Street—but as a company, it was continually moving from country to country in an attempt to evade all jurisdictional authority. Neither exchange was particularly good to trade on.

...At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others.

He was also cosying up to politicians and regulators, even writing his own set of suggested regulations (which seem to have been widely panned) and part of that was badmouthing rivals like Binance. So there was bad blood there and no love lost and it seems to have hit a peak when FTX bought out Binance's investment in it in 2021.

I think, but this is only my own personal view, that Binance 'riding to the rescue' when Bankman-Fried was begging for investors to keep FTX afloat was nothing more than a way of making sure the entire thing collapsed. Revenge and profit in one!

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