Crypto firm Bitpanda lays off around 20% of its people
blog.bitpanda.com
blog.bitpanda.com
Looks like FTX and Binance are about to leave their competition in the dust in this crypto winter.
Coinbase seems to have thrown in the towel for now. I would have thought they would see this as an opportunity but their fiscal situation must be alot worse than they are letting on. Which is strange because I would have thought they were better capitalized that they are letting on.
We're watching as closely as we can to see if they have alot of bad loans outstanding to failing firms.
With Voyager about to go under, Celsius just hiring a firm to guide them through bankruptcy and several other minor firms already going under there will be no shortage of tech talent available to well run firms.
When we come out of this downturn in a year or two FTX and Binance are going to be even larger giants than they are now. With no real government oversite over those firms to limit their growth, the next crypto crash could be because one of those two gets into trouble.
Another dark horse candidate is Goldman Sachs, they are well capitalized. Look for them to start to buy up distressed crypto assets and go into the next bull market in(probably 2024) as a big crypto player for institutional clients, and possibly for retail under their Marcus brand.
Those two stagnated (at best) in the aughts. Google was taking Yahoo's lunch, and Microsoft had no web vision and was tied up in antitrust headaches.
For nearly half the aughts they weren’t even really competitors in the same market. It wasn’t until the latter half of the decade that Yahoo! even tried to be a search company competing with Google and Yahoo! had a definitive lead ahead of Google in mail, finance, etc for virtually all of the decade.
Design and code a Content Management System (CMS) for Binance. The CMS would used to post articles for the public. The current Binance site supports up to 17 different languages. Each article would have some translations but not all articles have all of the 17 translations. Design and code a RESTful API for the CMS.
The user of the CMS would need to input the different translations for the same article. Design a user interface to facilitate this. We would only be looking at the functionalities of the user interface, so do not spend too much time on the design aspects.
Derive your own data model as deem fit. The preferred language for backend is Java and frontend is JavaScript though you are free to choose any other languages as well as frameworks.
Submit the code as a GitHub repository and make sure that the GitHub repository is public. Remember to add a README file for instructions on how to run the application and explanations (if any).
Thing is, let it be known, every homework you do for a company lowers your salary by 3%. Unless you charge, then it doesn't, it's weird like picking up money off the street. Just bad signaling, it's against your interest.
thank you come again
interviewer: if you can explain what deadlocks are, I’ll hire you
me: hire me, and I’ll explain deadlocks
I think I could knock out a few 1999 style PHP scripts with inline HTML with an SQLite DB for fun and giggles in an afternoon.
It would do everything they ask for with minimum effort. I don't see how they could argue that you didn't 100% complete the task.
Things used to be so easy 20 years ago...
Will be actually see end of growing head counts for sake of growing them soon?
[1] https://s28.q4cdn.com/948876185/files/doc_downloads/2022/06/...
Source: know several of the largest market makers on the big retail exchanges.
I would be terrified too, if my business lost over 50% of it’s cash reserves. Or rather they still have the BTC, but it’s worth one third of peak
This is a classic mistake of banks. When allowed to do so, they think they can improve their returns by running trading desks. That's why we in the US used to have Glass-Stegall, which kept banks and brokerages separate. Because, before and after Glass-Stegall, banks got into trouble that way.
Nobody runs a pure crypto exchange that doesn't trade for their own account. Crypto exchanges are depository institutions, asset custodians, brokers, lenders, market makers, and exchanges. All those customer assets, just waiting to be exploited.
As I point out occasionally, most retail financial scams appeared in the 17th through 19th centuries, as newspapers made it possible to reach large numbers of suckers. There's not much innovation. Most of crypto is the same old scams, repackaged. Look up "bucket shop", "blind pool", "tulip mania", "Mississippi bubble", "Florida real estate scam", and "high yield investment program". Those alone cover most of crypto.
There have been overhyped tech booms many times in history, but most actually did something, such as build canals or railroads or electric utilities or networks. The crypto community has accomplished very little in the real world.
Plus, with how many regular people have lost a lot of money, and are still losing more, a major regulatory crackdown is just a matter of time now. And that will cripple most of the crypto ecosystem.
Might you or someone else explain what staking is? Is this an overloaded term in crypto? I know that there is proof of stake that is used for consensus but I'm guessing this is not the same thing? Is staking a Defi offering?
That's what they tell the suckers.
[1] https://hitbtc.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-crypto-st...
Like most financial schemes, it really has nothing to do with the crypto, other than that it would be illegal to operate platforms like this with real money, since we created regulations decades ago to protect people from this.
Would the following be a correct summary then?
By holding more tokens you become a preferable verifier node because you hold more tokens. And the way you hold more tokens and burnish your reputation as a verifier is by borrowing those assets from the actual owners and then paying the asset owners double digit interest? Is this correct? The idea is that you will make enough in transaction fees on the network to payout something like 18% interest to asset owner and still make a profit?
If so this seems wildly circular.
"Staking" originally meant participating in a proof-of-stake consensus and you get rewarded by the network with the new blocks that are mined.
All the Terra / Luna / NFT / exchange "staking" was people latching onto DPoS to make their schemes sound more technologically sound. Its an overloaded term at this point thats nearing meaningless unless you are clear you mean actual proof-of-stake.
overloading technical jargon for marketing, just on its own, seems like a strong scam signal. or at least a signal to stay away
PoS is like running your own whitelabel SaaS offering.
And yes, I know, it's fighting an uphill battle to discourage the use of "staking" for lending out on a centralized platform. "Words drift in meaning, deal with it". But it's also important for people to be able to know what you mean, and there are pretty substantive differences between that kind of staking and "anything that earns a return on your coin" and it's helpful to have a separate word for it.
Staking should mean partcipating in a proof-of-stake network by using your stake to participate in block validation or delegating to someone else. In most cases you don't need to lock anything and at no point do you hand control of your funds to someone else.
The problem is that many grifters then came to use "staking" to mean all sorts of different things with the only thing being in common is, get some rewards. But I've seen things like BlockFi get described as "staking" when really its just giving your money to control of someone else and earning interest on it.
It sounds pretty much like a CD aka "Certificate of Deposit" which is a product sold by banks.
Is there an entire generation that doesn't know anyone who ever bought a CD from a bank?
These days they are a joke, but still shown on bank web pages.
Here is the list of rates from a regional bank near me:
5 Year CD 0.10%
4 Year CD 0.10%
3 Year CD 0.10%
2 Year CD 0.10%
18 Month CD 0.10%
12 Month CD 0.10%I'd also recommend anyone shop around for CD rates. Those are hardly representative of what you can get at, say, Ally. (2.75% APY on a 5 year)
It's a crappy bet, because the upside is limited while the downside can take you to 0.
See treasurydirect.gov.
(I don't think they actually rate them? Not from the US. But in some hand-wavy approximate way, they're as good as US gov bonds since they're similarly backed. (Actually why do you have both CDs & 'treasuries'? Monetary/fiscal separation sort of thing?))
Yes, 0.10% is dramatically lower than 20% or whatever. That's my point.
And yes, FDIC insurance is a thing. That's also my point.
And yes, younger people almost certainly haven't ever owned a CD themselves, but that wasn't my (somewhat rhetorical) question.
You responded that you were surprised that something high risk / high reward was compared to a junk bond, and then compared it to a CD. It's obviously more like a junk bond than a CD, for exactly the two reasons you now mention.
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/crypto-staking-101-what-is-st...
> Similarly, when you stake your digital assets, you lock up the coins in order to participate in running the blockchain and maintaining its security. In exchange for that, you earn rewards calculated in percentage yields. These returns are typically much higher than any interest rate offered by banks.
https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/f...
> The unstaking process may not be immediate; with some cryptocurrencies, you're required to stake coins for a minimum amount of time.
https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-staking
> Enter Proof of Stake. The main idea is that participants can lock coins (their “stake”), and at particular intervals, the protocol randomly assigns the right to one of them to validate the next block.
However running a validator is hard, requires custom servers and hardware, so people simply delegate them to another validator, who does the validation on their behalf and distributes the reward to its delegators. In essense, you earn 10% ETH simply by voting a validator. Note that this IS safe and in most cases, people do get their coins and profits back and it's very secure. You can't lose money in the sense that you won't lose ETH. There are ill-minded people to steal people's funds, but that's not the general case.
Since most people only cared about the profit part, the term "staking" has since changed meaning to become anything that requires you to put coins in and get coins back. Staking UST is one case: you lend UST to the protocol and withdraw UST at any time, and the protocol prints you UST at 20% APR. There are lending protocols, airdrops requiring you to stake something, providing liquidity to collect fees, etc. And for simplicity they all become "staking".
Note that while staking is secure, it doesn't change the argument about how ETH is just junk bonds. If they offer 3% return per year, it's essentially printed money and the currency's value would decline 3% per year as well. If they lock you in for a longer period (ETH staking locks you in indefinitely until The Merge goes live for half a year), you are kept from selling your ETH and these coins are already worthless once they are unlocked. Buying ETH for staking is essentially providing liquidity for people selling ETH so they can make a quick profit.
>"So if you own 1% coin you can only run 1% validator and won't be able to flood the network."
Is this the reason that companies are pay interest is because the more coins they hold means their validator percentage in the network and so their profits go up?
Also you mention:
>"However running a validator is hard, requires custom servers and hardware, ..."
I was under the impression that PoS meant there was no need for special/custom ASICs in the same way that PoW mining has. Is that not true? What types of custom servers and hardware is necessary for participating in PoS validation?
That's about it. But the profits are usually a fixed percentage of your earnings which is the same for everyone holding the coin, so it's more like the central bank paying out interest for deposits, which does not actually increase currency value (you lose value by not depositing).
> I was under the impression that PoS meant there was no need for special/custom ASICs in the same way that PoW mining has. Is that not true? What types of custom servers and hardware is necessary for participating in PoS validation?
Usually no ASIC is necessary and in rare cases GPU can speed it up a bit. However, you often need decent amounts of RAM, CPU and disk to validate transaction validity and run smart contracts, since smart contracts handle a lot of state like balances of accounts and that has to be computed. So it takes the same amount of resources like a regular database would do.
https://archive.ph/41hMi#selection-3923.0-3923.13
Staking is roughly what he calls putting something in the box in that story
A bucket shop doesn't appear to be a scam. You go to a bucket shop and purchase a share of stock, and the bucket shop assumes the obligation to deliver you that stock on demand, but it doesn't purchase the stock right away. (It's hoping that, because you're stupid, the price of the stock will drop.)
The reason it's hard to call this a scam is that a bucket shop selling you a share of stock is economically identical to an upstanding market participant and pillar of his community selling you a call option. Or, viewed another way, it's economically identical to the bucket shop selling you a short share of stock.
That is not a difference from either the call option model or the short sale model. It's true in all "three" cases.
Furthermore, if your intention as a rope vendor is specifically to sell someone enough to hang themselves with, you're not operating a scam as you sell them the rope.
You mean it was an artifact of excessively high liquidity and high liquidity can only be explained by the fact that the interest rate is trapped at the zero lower bound as there is no market signal that tells people to reduce their degree of liquidity.
What makes you think they're interested at all?
perhaps they'd be interested in leveraging the funds of others to flip assets, for example?
That's a pretty big assumption right there.
The target customers for crypto are other investors, degens, and gamblers. Most of the money in crypto is house money, i.e. money that was made from existing crypto investments. Just see the transaction volume on OpenSea (decentralized ETH house money) vs CoinBase's NFT marketplace. Retail neither cares nor has the money for shitty jpegs.
FTX understands the target market. Which is why it has focused so aggressively on futures. You can short/long practically everything on FTX with leverage. That's the investor/degen/gambler class - the bulk of money in crypto.
Binance doesn't do anything extremely well, but whatever it does, it simply works. Withdrawals work, support is clumsy but works, perps work, spot trading works, even their awful chain, as full of scams as it might be, works.
Think about the landscape of exchanges globally. TSE, SiMex,Globex, ICE, NYSE, LIFFE LME, Eurex, etc etc etc.
If FTX is an exchange, then they make more money when volume is up and less money when it is down. Just like all exchanges.
If the holding company Alameda that owns FTX is a market maker, they make more money when volume is up, spreads are wide. They may or may not do well during herding events like crashes, but market makers don't like directional vol.
If any of these players are arbitrageurs, where do their arbs come from? Why do they persist? I think most of the edge comes from retail flow.
This is a trading business. What makes you think that any exchange has an edge that is unique in a downturn that makes it like Amazon or Microsoft? Neither of those companies run a trading exchange.
Why the romantic anthropomorpgic narrative surrounding trading exchanges? Historically it's a good but not amazing business. There is secular growth, but it tends to be highly constrained and it's a very competitive environment.
Does FTX have better infrastructure or risk management than ICE or CME? Or just better press at the moment.
The parent comment was about FTX and Binance compared to the other crypto exchanges not to the exchanges in general.
FTX claims to be way more efficient than Coinbase - having only 25 engineers compared to thousands for coinbase. This could be secret of the surviving exchanges - efficiency.
I have heard Coingecko’s ranking eliminates some of the volume pumping tricks but have little to back up that claim: https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges
I have doubts about real use cases being found and regulators are clamping down on it too. People should now also have realized that it's not a hedge against the market or inflation at all.
I tried to sign up for their service 2 times. Both time it did not work. One time even after the success message after the video verification.
Still getting Newsletters which seems to get more and more irregular.
Well, we will see. Maybe cutting down will solve it for them in the long term.
You can't have retail demand for something that's only meant to go up and do nothing else. There are no "normal" users buying NFTs because they love the art, or buying ETH because they want to use it to get overcollateralized loans on AAVE (when they can get undercollateralized loans for cheaper).
I can't understand how VCs wouldn't get something every crypto degen instinctively knows after a single bullrun.
if you need to layoff 20%, then do it, in a dignified way.
"We want to assure you these are one-time measures that we took to make sure Bitpanda keeps what it is and has been: a rock solid company and a great employer. "
I don't think the "great employer" definition in the normal world involves rescinding job offers etc, but it's fun to read the crypto speak.
Keep on being a "rock solid" company compared to those loser companies like AWS etc. I'd personally put crypto folks as far away from "rock solid" as possible!
Even if those companies end up producing nothing of value (which is still not known), they will have given lots of people actual Rust experience which they can apply later on other projects.
So the anti-crypto and pro-crypto maximalists are going to be both disappointed.
“This is good for bitcoin”
> “This is good for bitcoin”
And who said that?
These exchanges and crypto companies need to stop encouraging customers to buy and gamble their savings and college funds into the crypto pyramid scheme.
This needs to end.
I would not call it casino. Casinos go through regulated scrutiny to test the games probabilities are accurate so you play against math, crypto is a an unregulated market so you (probably) play against or benefit of market inefficiencies.
That's only for physical games/machines, right?
There is very little liquidity in crypto. And when one of the whales breaks rank and heads for the exit every other holder will be sitting on chips with some nominal value but absolutely no buyers.
Incredibly apathetic and selfish to be happy about people losing their jobs and wish for even more. Doesn’t sound you really care about “gamblers”, you just want to be right. This is just sad.
Peer-to-peer finance is what the crypto industry is enabling, and you really think people are worse off from being empowered in this way.
What's the difference to FAANG employees?
No one says "Wall Street cashed out", they say "the market crashed".
The market gets inflated with borrowed money and the bills gets paid by retirement funds having record loses when the big ones run away with the money.
It's the biggest ponzi of them all.