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Comment by djaouen | Hacker News Reader

This would (probably) be a mistake on CZ's part. Taking on FTX's customers would undoubtedly bring him more goodwill than letting its customers go down with the ship.

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We (the public) don't yet know how bad it is. CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong said he was also not interested in an acquisition after a small amount of DD. He said we will likely find out how bad it is eventually.

> not interested in an acquisition after a small amount of DD

Sounds like liabilities exceeded assets

Judging by the Alameda leaked balance sheet, a huge part of assets and probably more than 100% of equity was in FTT which is now essentially worthless

If we had one for binance, it would show a ridiculous amount of tether and other coins which they probably own a majority of, meaning their balance sheet is similarly comprised of assets they can't actually price or expect to be able to sell at market value

How do you know this? was googling around but didn't find much of anything

There's a balance sheet floating around: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dSG6ER9N_YABnmUKzKae...

Source: https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1590384255091499008

Could be fake.

Edit: Looks like the parent commenter was referring to Binance's balance sheet, which might be what you were asking about. The balance sheet I linked is FTX+Alameda.

Tether can be liquidated via the Tether Foundation.

And surely the buck stops with the Tether Foundation, who stand ready to cash Binance out, and they won't need to dump a bunch of risky assets and possibly not net enough to meet Binance's needs

Binance has already taken on FTX's customers/

I mean there’s goodwill but there’s also the terrible-and-getting-worse crypto industry trend. He might need to keep that cash on hand.

I mean, unless the whole thing is FUBARed, in which case, he should probably get out of crypto entirely before the whole thing crashes. But I tend to lean on the optimist side of things. :)

Wtf, why? Binance is not liable for FTX's customers.

6bn$ is a steep price for goodwill.

FTX customers have likely fled (those that can / could withdraw) to Binance already.

Is there information what FTX was doing with their customers crypto assets that would cause a liquidity crunch? Did they lend it out? Staked?

Transfers of cryptocurrency from FTX have been frozen since yesterday.

Do you have a source for this?

yes. anybody who has ftx funds.

*had

Ouch

https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1590035367373086720

I'm not sure they have a choice. Binance is leveraged to the max with tether already; they likely can't afford to pay FTX real-world currency for the purchase. They'd have to offer tether or other vaporcoins as payment, at which point FTX might as well just keep its vaporcoins instead

Not if the liabilities taken on would cause financial stress on FTX with FTX itself is not doing as hot due to the collapse in crypto assets.

Why? Maybe it's a different subset of crypto users who did not want to go with binance in the first place, and are not likely to stay in binance for whatever reasons. And it's not like binance is running out of customers

maybe they'd rather keep $6b on the balance sheet rather than burn it to goodwill that won't keep them solvent?

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