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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

From the Sequoia article on SBF / FTX, it's very likely to be able to trade internationally because each country requires you to have a bank account in that country to be able to access their markets.

In the Sequoia article, SBF gained his initial funding for FTX from executing trades from the US to Japan, where BTC was overpriced because no one bothered to arbitrage it because of the setup difficulty. The way he did this was by contacting a friend to open a bank account in Japan and manage the funding over there while he managed the account US side.

I am sure some of it is normal corporate shell game but I'd imagine at least 50% of this setup was for regulatory purposes. Even small fintechs will have "shell game like" company structure to please regulatory forces that require having certain things be independent from the consumer platform even if the two companies are working towards the same goal.

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That sounds to me a lot like a cover story to try and convince people there was actually a value-add. I'm skeptical that the barriers were so high they discouraged anyone from seizing essentially free money, but he solved this with a Japanese friend's bank account.

No one did it for Japan first probably because they have pretty strong criminal liability stuff for securities violations and other financial crimes and don't play the "no fault settlement" game.

It's not illegal to arbitrage but yeah I think what you are pointing at is you have to be regulatory-ily buttoned up for Japan markets vs a more loose market where you don't have to be super careful & can learn as you go.

So SBF having been in finance before (Jane Street), he knew where the footsteps were and how to do it vs a fly-by night crypto investor with no finance background.

Supposedly the Japan “subsidiary” (if you can call it that) was set up by a Japanese person and a resident of Japan, who was a contact of SBF through the Effective Altruism thing. I think they knew something was shady, because the account they had opened in Japan was with a small rural Japanese bank.

When that “arbitrage” turned out to be really lucrative one of the founders of Skype (Talinn something) gave SBF a $50 million loan. SBF and that Talinn guy knew each other also from that Effective Altruism sect-like thing.

All this info was part of a Sequoia congratulatory piece on SBF, they of course had also given him money. The article has since been taken down, it’s still reachable through Web Archive.

> The article has since been taken down, it’s still reachable through Web Archive.

I've skimmed through it, and by god, I was surprised Sequoia wasn't crediting the sun rising each morning to SBF.

This guy has major Epstein vibes (minus the girls). comes out of nowhere super politically connected, investing in research, with a pretty dubious origin story of how he got rich.

That's a major reach.

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