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Comment by kuratkull | Hacker News Reader

Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined - this was yesterday/today. Of course the price of FTT crashed today. And now Binance buys FTX to help them out... smells like Binance played 4D chess all along.

https://decrypt.co/113674/binance-moves-to-liquidate-its-ent...

https://decrypt.co/113788/binance-ceo-declines-alamedas-bid-...

https://decrypt.co/113866/battle-crypto-titans-ends-binance-...

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FTX should never been in this position. They are an exchange. Nobody should be able to obliterate them by playing around with their crypto.

Hard agree. While Binance prompted the downfall, FTX created all the conditions for it by playing fast and loose with its clients' money.

They are an exchange that allows future trading and margin trading which require borrowing money/assets/coins. The FTT tokens were probably put up as collateral for loans. The drop of the FTT value probably triggers calls on those loans. Thus the liquidity crisis.

that makes FTX a "shadow bank", not merely an exchange.

It makes them a brokerage, doesn’t it? Not a shadow bank.

It's worse than "shadow bank". It's bank who is allowed to print money at its whims and create any arbitrary leverage it wants.

Well, that's what the 'shadow' in 'shadow bank' means: less/different regulation than a normal bank.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, btw.

Where's the "bank" in this "shadow bank"? You're describing a casino with a money printer.

"Shadow banks" aren't necessarily "banks". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banking_system

> The shadow banking system is a term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations.[1] Examples of NBFIs include insurance firms, pawn shops, cashier's check issuers, check cashing locations, payday lending, currency exchanges, and microloan organizations.[2][3] The phrase "shadow banking" is regarded by some as pejorative, and the term "market-based finance" has been proposed as an alternative.[4]

You're moving the goalposts a bit there

The phrase already existed. If there was no more to it than you could immediately guess from the words, then it would be a useless term.

What would you say a non shadow bank is? "Money printing" is "just" a reserve ratio near or less than 0.

It shouldn't work this way. Customer funds should be segregated from whatever prop trading the rest of the business is doing.

The only way this happens is if the prop trading business is over-leveraged somehow and the exchange bailed it out with FTT.

Customer deposits should meet liabilities 1:1. If they don't, somebody is lying.

> Customer deposits should meet liabilities 1:1. If they don't, somebody is lying.

That’s not how banking works. You hold illiquid assets. Sometimes they move in price. If they move enough in price you’re insolvent. Limiting bank runs is a genuinely hard problem.

Exchanges aren't banks, and crypto exchanges especially shouldn't be banks. Crypto is liquid and can be redeemed in its own denomination instantly if you hold it in a simple wallet. That's what exchanges should be doing. They shouldn't be doing fractional reserve banking, and a run shouldn't be possible. Preventing runs on a crypto exchange is exceedingly easy if the operators aren't taking risks with client funds.

Well, it seems the word 'exchange' in this case is used with a different meaning when applied to FTX than the meaning you have in mind.

Which is exactly the problem.

This should be illegal, and people who do this should go to jail.

Customer funds should be 1 to 1 backed with assets.

As long as noone is being lied to, I don't see any problems.

Case A, tell your customers that their funds have asset backing, and have asset backing: fine.

Case B: tell your customers that their funds have no asset backing, and have no asset backing: fine. (Those customers deserve what they get.)

Case C: tell your customers nothing, and do whatever you feel like: fine. (Those customers deserve what they get.)

Case D: tell your customers that their funds have asset back, and have no asset backing: bad.

Except none of these 4 cases happened with FTX.

SBF claimed that assets WERE backed, while it appears that they were not.

That would be case D, wouldn't it be?

Assets backed with lies and cryptobullshit. At least someone has had a learning opportunity.

> As long as noone is being lied to

That is exactly what is happening. There is lots of lies being told, with no transparency, and then people's money disappears.

Instead of that, if people money disappears, we should arrest the people who made it disappear.

No argument from me there. I was just narrowly addressing the point in stale2002's comment.

Though to be honest, it is well known that the long term fate of any crypto exchange is to go bust. So no one could really claim that they didn't know it was coming.

Crypto is glorified gambling. (At least so far. In principle, crypto can mature over time into something more serious.)

I don't think it can, because all those serious things already exist and require the kinds of governance that the crypto promise rails against.

In theory the eventual steady state of crypto is a fully debugged and tested perfect software system that is not exploitable.

B and C are perfectly fair game for a government to attempt to prevent, regulate, and prosecute in my book.

I don't think anyone has an inherent right to take advantage of people's ignorance solely for their own profit even if those people "deserve what they get." We make plenty of other ways of abusing people illegal, why allow that one?

I agree that if voters want to outlaw B and C, that's their prerogative. I don't see any moral imperative for that action, though.

My formulation of 'deserve what they get' was perhaps a bit snarky.

There are good reasons for people to invest in risky ventures. Eg when you invest in a startup, you might be able to get your money back, if you ask nicely, but there's no guarantee, and there's not necessarily any liquid assets backing your funds.

I think investing in risky assets should be legal.

I also think that it should be legal for people to invest in assets that have no official classification into whether they are risky or not. Ie when the company taking your funds makes no claims (as in C), in practice the customers should assume the worst.

If you want to forbid C, alas, that leads to a lot of bureaucracy. Because you have to define what an adequate level of disclosure looks like. And then there will be lots of paperwork.

As a taxpayer I don't want to see any government resources wasted on protecting greedy, stupid cryptocurrency "investors" from their own bad decisions. They deserve what they get and their losses will serve as a useful example to others.

Case D is what we are seeing over and over again, including this circumstance

No argument from me there. I was just narrowly addressing the point in stale2002's comment.

Are you saying that fractional reserve banking should be illegal, or that insolvent banks should be illegal? I think the second one already basically is. Or at least with a real bank, they get shut down and the FDIC bails the depositors out.

Educated rumor is suggesting FTX may be insolvent, not only the victim of a bank run type scenario.

That's called picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.

Your margin account should be immediately liquidated and your positions closed if the value of your collateral drops below your outstanding obligations.

You are referring to liquidity providers and market maker; they provide the liquidity (in the form of loans for margin trading, among other things), take risk in exchange for market making fee.

An exchange on the other hand is facilitating trades by matching buyers with sellers. At least that's how it works in stock markets. Even if NASDAQ were to become a market maker they would have to spin a separate entity, bring their own funds to provide liquidity. Even then I don't know if it's allowed by regulation.

> Even then I don’t know if it’s allowed by regulation

It isn’t, precisely for this reason. The US Equity and Equity Derivative markets have tried a few times to get approval for initiatives using their already existing BDs (to facilitate inter-market order routing), and in every case it’s been blocked by the regulators as too risky to the underlying business.

The issue here has more to do with the lack of a centralized C&S clearing house in crypto, and is one of the reasons counterparty risk remains such a massive issue there. Having to maintain an account at each exchange, much like you would a BD, and praying things don’t suddenly go pear shaped, strikes me as insane (and is one of the primary reasons I’ve avoided getting involved in the crypto space)

Ok. To settle once for all whether FTX is an exchange or not. Below are the services they offer.

Futures: ... with margins of up to 101x.

Leveraged Tokens: ... up to three times the leverage. ... the leveraged coins offered by FTX don’t require any margin.

Options: (standardish).

MOVE: ... wager on the price movement ... a play on volatility.

Spot Markets: ... more than 100 different spot trading pairs.

It's fine for a trading venue to list all these derivatives, the problem in this case is that the venue and issuer are the same entity. In the trad finance world this is strictly separated.

But the free market dictated that they do because that's exactly the downside of their use of a crypto coin.

How many exchanges will need to go under for the market to decide that isn't a great way to operate one? How much educating of users/customers will it take?

I was having this exact conversation with my friends y'day. An exchange marketplace shouldn't be in this position unless they are also participating in the market directly or indirectly through funds, their own and the customers' funds.

Customers' assets (either crypto or fiat/USD) should be backed 1:1. The only reason for FTX to pause withdrawals and then assure investors that their money is safe is a sign that they are using customers' assets/funds to participate in the market.

How long before SEC/regulators wake up and regulate these shadow-banks disguised as exchanges as other exchanges?

> having this exact conversation with my friends y'day

There is a strong, vested interest in portraying FTX's collapse as a one off. Binance doing them dirty doesn't cast a pall across the industry. Fundamental problems, likely replicated systemically, does.

> An exchange marketplace shouldn't be in this position unless they are also participating in the market directly or indirectly through funds, their own and the customers' funds.

Yes, although the limitation with this line of thinking is that in most market-related activities (including running an exchange) it's hard not to be structurally long the market in various important ways. For example as an exchange your commissions are going to be highly correlated with market activity and may also be per unit in some cases and so would be directly correlated with market prices in that case.

As a second-order effect, customers' trading limits are going to be affected as prices fluctuate even if you don't directly offer margin yourself, because not only does the value of the thing they've deposited with you change and therefore affect how much other stuff they can sell this for but also they may have made that deposit by pledging collateral elsewhere and borrowing against that to create margin so that margin loan will be affected.

You can definitely try harder to avoid the problem than FTX though which seems to have been pretty much all-in on it's own illiquid token (FTT) and Alameda using leverage on FTT as their main source of funding. One of the things I learned at Goldman during the crisis is that you can't rely on a mark for anything illiquid - you have to have a real liquid market price.

Sounds like a crypto ponzi scheme

> How long before SEC/regulators wake up and regulate these shadow-banks disguised as exchanges as other exchanges?

Very long in this case, as SBF was the biggest donor to the Biden campaign.

Last few weeks he was even trying to involve himself in writing the regulations he wanted, trying to kill DeFi and make it comfy for himself against other CEXes, no doubt.

Some people say that's what triggered CZ to act.

And now the whole of FTX and $8 buys you a mosquito net, what a world.

Do you have a source for the Biden funding remark? Open secrets suggests about 11M in donations came from SBF controlled entities but that’s pretty far down the list. The top contributions were from Bloomberg at 93M.

Those are for company controlled pacs as well, so not just SBF.

For individuals the best info I could find doesn’t list SBF as a major donor.

https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/joe-biden...

They're more a brokerage than an exchange - you can buy Bitcoin and Eth leaveraged at 20-1 through their perpetual futures. Whilst these are presumably hedged - FTX are still taking on risk.

https://ftx.com/markets/futures

https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024780511-Futures-...

> Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined

This makes absolutely no sense and is not how markets work. If FTX was actually willing to buy unlimited FTT at a given price, Binance could not have "crashed the price" by selling below that price — somebody would simply have bought at the Binance price and sold to FTT at their price.

What seems more likely is that FTX extended that offer only to a small portion of the tokens that Binance wanted to sell (to maintain the fiction of their price).

My assumption when reading the quote was that it would be an off-market transaction.

Similar to how stocks can be traded in Dark Pools outside of the regular stock market.

Their point is that if you have the money to buy $1.1B of something off market, you should also have the money to buy $1.1B of something on market. Any time someone posts an ask at or below $22, you simply fill the order.

beyond the fact that the dynamics of saying "we'll take everything at a certain price up to $1.1B" will likely lead to much more than that showing up on the market and leading to a price crash anyways... I imagine that an off market transaction can involve things like not sending $1.1B in cash to the other person the same day.

If you have enough assets, everything can show up, and you just buy them out.

It's describing an arbitrage opportunity. If person A wants to buy something for $5.00, and person B will only sell for $1.00, I stand to make $4.00 per unit by simply being a middleman for the transaction. Private or public markets, the arbitrage opportunity remains the same.

FTX was not actually willing to buy, they are suffering from reduced capital position so they were bluffing

> reduced capital position

Sounds like a euphemism to me.

Alternatively FTX was confident they could make the purchase given time, but did not have the funds on hand.

Moreover, you are assuming no one else decides to sell based… one could argue publicizing their plans was meant to encourage just that…

I think what happened is that the probably wanted to buy it with their balance sheet rather than $$ which explains why this is a liquidity crisis. Say they have a $2bn in value (crypto, company assets, etc...); they can't place market orders to buy the FTT on the open-market; but they can make an off-market deal with Binance to swap these assets.

I think maybe FTX just doesn't have the money and their bluff was called

Another problem is the bank run that this narrative created.

Isn't FTT like FTX's own issuing tokens? It's like printing one's own money. But when the backing firm fails, the printed money is worthless, just like what LUNA issued by Terra had become.

Yeah. I can't be bothered to verify, but i remember that Binance has a huge double-digit percentage of all FTT tokens in circulation. Dumping all of them would crash the tokens value. And since this is FTX's own token, they would hurt a lot, maybe even terminally.

It only matters if FTX was using FTT as a collateral for accounting purposes for a valuation that is not realistic considering the liquidity of a position size.

And of course they were, what else would they keep it pumped up for.

Just went over the issues on the balance sheet of Alameda Research, which is SBF's trading company.

Of the $14.6 billion assets Alameda manages, almost $6 billion is FTT based. Alameda has heavy investment in Solana, Serum, and other alt-coins. It looks like the drop in their value has lowered Alameda's asset balance. Alameda borrowed FTT tokens from FTX to put them as assets in the balance sheet to shore it up. The size of the asset balance is probably used to obtain loans and liquidity.

FTX issues FTT tokens (print money) => lends to Alameda to put under the asset balance => Alameda borrows money from outside against its assets or uses the asset/coins to invest in others => win with thin air!

The crashing of the FTT token not only tanked FTX, it's going to tank Alameda Research as well since its asset balance suddenly shrunk and might have liquidity problem.

The tanking of Alameda is going to another Three Arrow Capital event since Alameda invests in lots of other cryptos. It might be forced to liquidated those investments. Expect another bloodbath in the crypto space.

> The size of the asset balance is probably used to obtain loans and liquidity.

1) Lenders don’t care about the liability side?

2) How does “liquidity” differ from “loans” here? That is, when would they do this to achieve one but not the other?

1. We don't know what the lending basis for FTT from FTX vs the claimed value of FTT on Alameda's book. FTX lent FTT at $10 to Alameda and then FTT inflated to $50 would mean Alameda has $50 asset vs $10 liability.

It's reported that Alameda Research has $14.6 billion in assets and $8 billion in liabilities. Some claim that Alameda's assets are "entirely illiquid." Nobody knows how bad things are. The only thing is that FTX has stopped the withdraws.

2. Loans for long term and liquidity for short term? Like overnight lending.

Edit: add more info.

1) What is that replying to? I was asking why the borrowed FTT would make them more capable of getting loans if it came with a corresponding liability. That would only make sense if lenders didn't care about the liability balance sheet, which is ... non standard.

Edit: That is, you said the "size of the asset balance" is used to obtain loans. That makes it sound like merely increasing assets -- even if they come with liabilities, makes them more capable of getting loans.

There are DeFi protocols where you can lock-up crypto assets (eg FTT) and use those locked assets as collateral to borrow another crypto asset (eg ETH). That all happens "on chain" and there is no way for the protocol to know if there are corresponding balance sheet liabilities.

I don't know what the OP was referring to, and I don't know if this is what they were doing, but something like this could happen.

Right, but those are generally going to be on worse terms than you can get in a negotiated loan from someone who knows your entire business. So it doesn’t make much sense to negotiate an FTT loan and then use that as collateral for a less-informed loan from a smart contract.

It would be like getting a personal loan from a bank, buying jewelry with it, and then using the jewelry to get a pawn loan — a dubious strategy, since the terms on the first loan are going to be much better.

> FTX issues FTT tokens (print money) => lends to Alameda to put under the asset balance => Alameda borrows money from outside against its assets or uses the asset/coins to invest in others => win with thin air!

The Federal Reserve issues US dollars (print money) => US Treasury borrows money from The Federal Reserve, Japan, China and the UK against its assets or uses the asset/coins to invest in others => win with thin air!

Yeah but the US can destroy you diplomatically, militarily, and economically if you try anything funny.

Of course! That's why it's so important for the US to encourage the use of the USD on a global basis, and also spend billions on the US Navy.

> The Federal Reserve issues US dollars (print money) => US Treasury borrows money from The Federal Reserve, Japan, China and the UK against its assets or uses the asset/coins to invest in others => win with thin air!

Win with the largest military in the world and all tangible assets and influence the US has.

This is actually... extremely apt. It is commonly referred to technically as the dollars exhorbitant privilege. It would seem FTX managed to exploit this phenomenon on a micro scale. Until it didn't of course lol

Ultimately the fiscal operations of the U.S. government are backed by the total assets of the U.S. (public and private), which are far larger.

> Of the $14.6 billion assets Alameda manages, almost $6 billion is FTT based.

When that info was seemingly accidentally revealed, the spicy little nugget in there that made people sit up & notice was that the entire market cap of FTT tokens was well below the reported asset value of the tokens on the balance sheet.

Do keep in mind that there's a difference between liquidity and insolvency.

This doesn’t sound like very complicated chess. Sounds like those Hong Kong TV shows I watched when I was 13

Having lived in Hong Kong and watched some of these old shows, I concur.

Please share!

Please share these TV shows so we can all watch them and learn.

The seminal HK show about the stock market would be The Greed of Man (大時代) [1]. It's 30 years old, but classic scenes in it are still used in memes even today.

Edit: I totally forgot to mention the "Ting Hai Effect"! [2] Wikipedia has a great summary which I'll just quote here:

> The Ting Hai effect, also known as the Adam Cheng effect, is a stock market phenomenon in which there is a sudden and unexplained drop in the stock market whenever a film or a television series starring Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng is released. It still remains as a popular topic among stock brokers, years after the television drama The Greed of Man was broadcast in Hong Kong in late 1992. The effect is named after Ting Hai, the primary antagonist in the drama, who was portrayed by Cheng.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0843185/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ting_Hai_effect

I don't even know where to begin looking for this. I have zero ability to read chinese, although I can understand it verbally :P

Binance continues to amaze.

Does anyone even know where it operates out of these days?

The fabric of the internet.

They said they’d announce it shortly in July (https://decrypt.co/105376/where-is-binance-hq-ceo-cz-says-co...). Since then, nothing

They got regulatory approval to operate in Dubai and have offices there, so maybe there (https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/09/20/binance-secures-l...)

There is a pool of capital that pays people working for them onchain. They can also do fiat via local subsidiaries, and local contracts for compliance and litigation.

It's almost like it doesn't matter.

For accountability, it barely matters. For financial products they offer, it also barely matters. Most jurisdictions are too small to say anything and all their customers can circumvent any geo-restriction. They have distinct subsidiaries in major markets like USA.

They have a lot of positions open at their Singapore and Hong Kong... offices?

That sounds like 1D chess.

Conspiracy theory was expected but Alameda was spotted to have smoke up a week earlier.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/divisions-in-sa...

CZ sounds smart to withdraw quickly not to be the one in a sinking boat and it did sink quickly.

Seems more like a classic run on the bank. Made worse because:

+ the bank (FTX) was likely massively over leveraged

+ the bank's primary assets were likely not very liquid

Both of above are speculation. However, why else be forced to sell (1) to Binance?

(1) Matt Levine makes his usual solid argument as to why the price was likely zero, other than cashing out FTX debt: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

> smells like Binance played 4D chess all along

It's not really "4D chess" to screw over your competitor to corner the market.

That's like, business 101.

Business 101 is buy low, sell high.

Winning an evenly matched game of prisoner's dilemma with billions at stake is about as close to 4D chess there is.

Buy low esteem, sell high esteem - the concept comes from Hetty Green (long ago billionaire.)

I'm not too familiar but can you elaborate on how the screwing happened.

CZ tweeted "Oh shit, FTX is basically insolvent, we're gonna have to dump all our FTT magic beans!" or words to that effect.

Then, when FTX predictably tanked, he stepped in and generously offered to buy out FTX.

Same thing Soros did to the Bank of England's fake pound.

Typically you don't expect Bank of America and Chase to do this to each other.

...anymore.

Porsche and Volkswagen did.

Market manipulation is not exactly business 101.

I'm not sure this is market manipulation?

Depends on the intention I guess. They might have been genuinely worried that the token was going to crash and also didn't trust the counterparty to be able to pay for it. In this case it would have been a genuinely legitimate transaction.

But if dumping the whole stock was done with the intention, even partial, to crash the price, then it seems to me that it would be manipulation. Of course crypto is unregulated, so it wouldn't be illegal.

> FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price.

Why would Binance decline this opportunity? If FTX, Binance, and the market knew FTT would just crash, it sounds like a given that Binance should take advantage of the fixed price instead of losing hundreds of millions of dollars "letting the market decide".

Because they wanted to create a liquidity crisis in FTX that would force FTX to sell itself for a discount?

Presumably, it is more appealing to Binance to kill their largest competitor than it is to realize a return on a minority investment.

It depends on the fixed price offered by FTX.

If FTX could pay the current market price, then they could have absorbed whatever Binance sold on the open market.

They probably offered a deep discount.

Or maybe they offered to buy it later (when?) at a price fixed today - discounted or not. If they don’t have liquidity (why?) they cannot buy it on the market.

Illiquid means you can't sell your position without lowering the price significantly.

It could be that you need time to sell, or it could be that no one is stupid enough to buy it.

The former can be fixed with a temporary loan, the latter in bankruptcy court.

As discussed extensively elsewhere an “exchange” shouldn’t be in the business of having illiquid positions in the first place.

But here we are, and I’m not sure if FTX was offering to buy with some favorable terms regarding the time of settlement in addition to a discount. They could have bought on the open market at the discounted price but they apparently didn’t…

This is my view as to what possibly happened in last 24 hours. Mind you I have no idea if its real but i am making an educated guess based on my 10+ yrs seeing such events play out several times.

1) Alameda used FTX money and balance sheet along with using $FTT to take out billions of loans and "investments" including possibly customer funds to "invest" "efficiently" into risky investments

2) He then also used a lot of it to prop the entire market up in the 1250-1350 range over months to decouple the market possibly and keep $FTT above the $22 mark which was possibly a margin level for his collateral.

3) Market rallied and everything was fine. He is up a lot but lost few between making potentially risky investments (maybe shorting?), maybe options market making as that was his original expertise... who knows. But he clearly lost some money in there.

4) Rumors spread of balance sheet shortfall. Now mind you .. Alameda is a separate entity than FTX. So using FTX resources for trading on Alameda is a big no no.

5) CZ finds out about this. Decides to market sell his billions of $FTT position. Caroline gives up her hands and says they will buy at $22 which on the chart you can see has been the support line time and time again so clearly that line has been supported constantly..

6) The market selling pushes price below $22. Entire market and large players smell blood.. the moment the price goes below $22 the lenders market sell coins ($FTT and $SOL) for margin. This results in a loop after it breaks below $22 and goes into freefall with no support anymore

7) With no options to get more money from lenders and having no other assets to get more loans from lenders as they are already selling his assets, SBF goes to CZ and asks to bail out FTX as there is a big hole that cannot be filled anymore. CZ probably decided to take over FTX and said to SBF you have to either stop gap some of the fills from selling your assets since you did things wit the balance sheet and customer money you weren't supposed to. He probably said he will bail out FTX but NOT Alameda. Sam then either market sold everything he had...OR the lenders... Sam went to the lenders and said I am defaulting on my loans...So the lenders just market sold all the collateral. I think its most likely Sam said he is going to default on the loans and they market sold.

IF the lenders recouped 70-80% then i think its fine.

IF the lenders WERE NOT able to recoup and will have to take a write off on the loans.. we have issues. That part I am unsure about. IF a large lender goes under... then there is further contagion. The market selling off coins so quickly triggered probably more liquidations.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? We have seen bigger black swan events like in crypto past. All new concepts have days weeks like this. Stocks had it, banks had it and crypto has had it few times. There will always be new smart people to push growth and take over.

When 3AC went bust, we got to $800 on $ETH. We rebounded to 2k in time. That was close to 17-18bn. This is smaller. in time... we will be back. Not sure when.. but eventually it all comes back. Market is cyclical end of the day.

One missing piece: $1B BTC being auctioned by the IRS soon. This is such a big number that it will almost certainly be bought at a discount by an arbitrageur and liquidated on the market, so this was the impetus for the broad-market crash that killed their leveraged positions.

The 24hr BTC volume on Coinbase alone was $126B. The feds selling $1B won’t make much of a dent.

Not on coinbase alone. Coin market cap shows same volume globally

Ah yes. You are correct.

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