Exec who cleaned up Enron calls FTX mess 'unprecedented' | Hacker News Reader

Exec who cleaned up Enron calls FTX mess 'unprecedented'

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319 pointsgmays241 comments

It's an interesting read.

Step 1, finding the cash that's left and putting it into big banks with tight controls on authorizing withdrawals, seems to be going OK.

Step 2, finding the employees, not so much.

"At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment. Repeated attempts to locate certain presumed employees to confirm their status have been unsuccessful to date.

They thank some of the employees who stayed on trying to clean up the mess.

Step 3, "Digital Asset Custody", is not going well.

"Unacceptable management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, and the absence of independent governance as between Alameda (owned 90% by Mr. Bankman-Fried and 10% by Mr. Wang) and the Dotcom Silo (in which third parties had invested). The Debtors have located and secured only a fraction of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope to recover in these Chapter 11 Cases."

A few little prison-term sized problems:

(a) at least $372 million of unauthorized transfers initiated on the Petition Date, during which time the Debtors immediately began moving cryptocurrency into cold storage to mitigate the risk to the remaining cryptocurrency that was accessible at the time,

(b) the dilutive ‘minting’ of approximately $300 million in FTT tokens by an unauthorized source after the Petition Date and

(c) the failure of the co-founders and potentially others to identify additional wallets believed to contain Debtor assets.

They're working the problem. Chainalysis has been retained to find where those coins went.

"...investigators to begin the process of identifying what may be very substantial transfers of Debtor property in the days, weeks and months prior to the Petition"."

That's preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone. Anything in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy gets looked at hard, and the bankruptcy can go back further where fraud is involved. The Madoff Recovery operation used clawback heavily. Which is why the Madoff recovery took so long, but got a sizable fraction of the money back. Lots of lawsuits against people who thought they got out in time. Expect that here.

"Finally, and critically, the Debtors have made clear to employees and the public that Mr. Bankman-Fried is not employed by the Debtors and does not speak for them. Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public statements. Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F### regulators they make everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs. Delaware”.

Some news reports indicated that Bankman-Fried was still somehow involved, or "assisting", or something. He's not. He has zero authority at this point.

Almost everything here is an unmitigated disaster. However,

> the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol

— barring the part where this is secret — this seems like it would make some sense?

Alameda was, by my understanding, meant to be a market maker for the markets that FTX allowed its customers to trade in. You probably don’t want to apply the same auto-liquidation protocol to the market maker as you would regular traders.

Of course, I’m not a finance person, so I’d be happy to be enlightened here.

If market makers are getting liquidated with any consistency frequent enough to require exceptions, they are in deep trouble.

Market makers almost universally remain delta-neutral (that is, their goal is to be hedged against almost any market movement). Sure they sometimes get off balance and lose some money, but the margins for makers are typically so thin that liquidation is basically equivalent to total failure.

Hypothetically, if a market maker had the ability to create lots of little accounts, trade as those accounts, let some go negative, and continue to do this, some very positive expected value strategies should be available based on allowing some accounts to go negative, keeping the average profit only slightly negative over time, and walking away from the negative balances.

Making money on average requires actual competence. Creating a large profit variance with a small expected loss is much more straightforward and is normally a losing proposition.

This plan ends up being a more complicated version of just stealing customer funds though. And they just stole customer funds.

Exactly, this only works if the clearing venue is a third party. In this case, Alameda === FTX

My fund was also a market maker at FTX. We signed two contracts that modified the typical agreement with the venue. One of them stipulated that we had less access to leverage than normal (i.e. we could be liquidated earlier than we otherwise would be, but these terms were vague and apparently never had any effect) and enabled parallel risk checks on our account. The other was a line of credit from the venue which would allow us not to be liquidated when we otherwise would be in exchange for interest when the LOC was preventing liquidation. Our actual use of the LOC was entirely as collateral for open orders, so we never paid any interest on it.

It is not normal to allow market makers to take on arbitrarily large risk or arbitrarily large negative balances.

> preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone

Will be very interesting to see how the $5bn sent to users before FTX collapsed will be handled. If I had any recent withdrawals from them, I'd keep the money segregated for now.

> A few little prison-term sized problems

No one will ever see the inside of a prison off of this matter. FTX was deeply involved with powerful political contributors and those people can't be allowed to be subjected to depositions or other legal discovery. Key figures are on the lam and no one with the power to capture them will be tasked with doing so.

While the amounts involved are eye watering they are not large enough to destabilize to the US financial system, so the people involved need only resolve their various financial entanglements and wait for the story to expire out of the news cycle.

Who do you figure can’t be allowed to get deposed and by whom?

Madoff was politically well connected and it didn’t save him in the end. Donating money in one cycle will not save SBF. Your idea that Democratic electeds and regulators are consistently loyal (to anyone, including large one hit wonder donors) doesn’t square with my experience. If anything Dem politicos have an opportunity to show their independence by pursuing Senate hearings and similar public fora of investigation because they have nothing to lose going after this broke man.

> Madoff

First, the Madoff Ponzi was an order of magnitude larger than FTX; large enough to actually matter to important institutions. Second, Madoff could be trusted not to name names and understood that no one really wanted him to and he would, therefore, not be asked to do so. Thus, he could be safely prosecuted. The chuckleheads of FTX are not made of the same material; no one knows what species of insects are under those rocks and no one wants to know.

And I didn't say anything about "Dems". According to this money got beamed to (R)s as well: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/ftx-founder-sam-bankman...

> No one will ever see the inside of a prison

One of the enduring myths SBF crafted was that of his political connections. I have barely any D.C. connections. SBF has none. He was paid attention to. But walking into D.C. with tens of millions to spend is far from unprecedented, and it's not the sort of behavior that buys secrets. (Meetings? Sure.)

Do you think FTX working with the SEC team on drafting new crypto regulations was all a lie then? No one else was allowed that access, as far as we know, and Coinbase has been complaining about being stonewalled by Gensler for even basic questions.

Kevin O'leary was saying how he was trying to raise the bailout funds from sovereign wealth funds, but that evaporated once it looked like FTX lost the support (or at least the blind eye) of the SEC.

> Do you think FTX working with the SEC team on drafting new crypto regulations was all a lie then? No one else was allowed that access

I'm not familiar with their claims. That said, the SEC is generally quite receptive to input when it comes to rule making.

> Coinbase has been complaining about being stonewalled by Gensler for even basic questions

Enforcement versus rule making. Also, tweeting angry things at your regulator while publicly trying to yank their jurisdiction is a poor way to solicit discretionary feedback.

Madoff was at one time being considered for a job at SEC, and regularly worked with them on issues unrelated to his business.[1] That probably postponed investigations that should have happened earlier. After the crash, it didn't help. Madoff went to jail and the SEC was investigated by Congress and its own inspector general.

“While examiners and investigators discovered suspicious information and evidence and caught Madoff in contradictions and inconsistencies, they either disregarded these concerns or relied inappropriately upon Madoff’s representations and documentation in dismissing them.” - SEC inspector general

A few SEC employees were disciplined internally, but none were fired.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-madoff-sec-remarks-idUKTR...

> FTX was deeply involved with powerful political contributors and those people can't be allowed to be subjected to depositions or other legal discovery.

I disagree, he was undoubtedly buying connections and influence, and a lot of the SEC/CFTC/Gensler stuff reeks of corruption, but I don't think he's been around long enough or acquired enough influence to stop heads from rolling.

My money is on him and maybe a few others eventually serving a few years. He'll then try to restore his image and start a new business with a promise of extreme transparency and altruistic purpose, but this time "with adult supervision". I honestly wouldn't be shocked if Sequoia invests in him again.

> That's preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone. Anything in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy gets looked at hard, and the bankruptcy can go back further where fraud is involved. The Madoff Recovery operation used clawback heavily. Which is why the Madoff recovery took so long, but got a sizable fraction of the money back. Lots of lawsuits against people who thought they got out in time. Expect that here.

This clears up some questions I had before about employees potentially taking their own funds. Although, are customers in the clear here? As in, if you were a customer but were able to take your money out in time, is that money safe, or is some of it returned and then divided up?

If you withdrew funds in the 90 days before the bankruptcy, even if you're not at all involved with FTX's operations, you might be considered to be a creditor of the bankruptcy and face clawback. Nobody will bother for the little guys, but anybody who got out 7 figures or above will get some attention. In which case you'll need an attorney. This is complicated.

For a guide to how this goes, see the Madoff recovery.[1] That took a long time, with payouts along the way. The big question was whether the amount owed was what customers had deposited with Madoff, or what customer's listed balances were with Madoff after years of fake gains. With the Madoff scam lasting decades, the fake yields were substantial. That was settled with a court decision that the amount deposited was what mattered. This controversy stalled payouts for some time.

Then, over the years, there were some big clawbacks, followed by distributions to victims. Many of the clawbacks involved people who were insiders in some sense, and they were deemed to have profited from the scam. The Madoff recovery got back about 75% of what people had put in. That's unusually good. Most of that was from clawbacks.

Madoff, though, was a regulated broker. The Security Investor Protection Act applied. Small investor losses (up to $500,000) were fully covered by SIPC insurance and paid out early. The SIPC ran the recovery process. There was an accelerated process for hardship cases. In crypto, there's none of that.

[1] https://www.madofftrustee.com/

Thanks for all those details. It’s gonna be a rough road for all their customers, especially those who had a lot of money deposited.

> Step 2, finding the employees, not so much.

All FTX needs is one or more people on the "outside" (who used to be on the inside) that they trust in case something like this happens.

Those people would be the "hackers" that took 1-2 billion out after the bankruptcy declaration.

Then, anyone who gets a slap on the wrist or whatnot, even if they have their assets clawed back, knows exactly who to call when they're in the clear.

Same goes in reverse. The govt/debtors should connect with ex-employees/investors and get them to try and gossip, commiserate, provide black-hat advice, etc with existing employees in DMs and proxy any discoveries to the govt/debtors in exchange for a "consulting fee".

This is called the "race to the prosecutors office" in the US. The first whistleblower gets a free pass. Everyone else, not so much.

> Some news reports indicated that Bankman-Fried was still somehow involved, or "assisting", or something. He's not. He has zero authority at this point.

https://pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/33/188450/042120648... indicates that SBF continued to have de facto control over company assets even after resigning on November 11, which I would absolutely say fits the definition of "somehow involved."

Given that so few of FTX Group's digital assets have been secured, per the OP... it would seem to be unknown how much ability he continues to have to access the company's digital assets.

> In addition, in connection with investigating a hack on Sunday, November 13, Mr. Bankman-Fried and Mr. Wang stated in recorded and verified texts that “Bahamas regulators” instructed that certain post-petition transfers of Debtor assets be made by Mr. Wang and Mr. Bankman-Fried (who the Debtors understand were both effectively in the custody of Bahamas authorities) and that such assets were “custodied on FireBlocks under control of Bahamian gov’t”. The Debtors thus have credible evidence that the Bahamian government is responsible for directing unauthorized access to the Debtors’ systems for the purpose of obtaining digital assets of the Debtors—that took place after the commencement of these cases.

Oh, that's a new filing from yesterday. Hadn't seen that one yet.

Here's the view from the Bahamas.[1][2] Apparently the government of the Bahamas did attempt, per a court decision there, in getting custody of some digital assets of FTX. The Bahamas have appointed a liquidator.

The Bahamas are tougher on bankruptcy than the US is. They are going straight to liquidation, while the US bankruptcy in Delaware is chapter 11, "debtor-in-possession / protection from creditors". This whole thing is likely to go to liquidation soon, since there is no ongoing business worth preserving.

There are organized ways of handling international bankruptcies. The Bahamas does not seem to be a party to the main treaty on that. There is, though, an extradition treaty between the Bahamas and the US.

[1] http://www.tribune242.com/news/2022/nov/18/bahamas-rebuts-ft...

[2] https://www.scb.gov.bs/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Media-Rele...

How great is the Chainalysis business model? When there's a gold rush, sell shovels. When there's a fraud rush, sell investigative services.

Here's the administrator's filing with the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware: https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-fi...

Page 22 is exciting: "The Debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for a business enterprise. For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis."

.. and: "In the Bahamas, I understand that corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas."

It's a fun read, in a sort of True Crime sense. They had no financial controls whatsoever and just got people to wire them billions of dollars.

> It's a fun read, in a sort of True Crime sense.

It sounds like it was purposely written to be the cold open of the inevitable Netflix miniseries.

Matt Levine's piece yesterday also mentions a $1bn loan ("loan") from FTX to SBF

It's interesting that, under every silo's balance sheet shown in that document, there is a footnote saying that customer crypto deposits are not represented in the balance.

Is that his way of saying that they haven't been able to figure out where the customer crypto deposits were represented in the ledgers?

> employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis

This seems like a totally legit approach to me -- ChatOps for expenses, essentially. The usability of "an on-line 'chat' platform" (presumably Teams / Slack / Discord / equivalent) is much better for the employees than most finance tools, and most chat apps these days should have pretty great auditability capabilities.

(Of course, the rest of this FTX fiasco is a total disaster.)

AFAIK they were using Signal with auto-delete turned on. If true, this is a great way to avoid auditability.

Well, they are learning from the “best”: politicians [1].

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...

This is actually standard within financial institutions and big corps. It's not implemented as "signal with auto-delete turned on", but rather as retention policies on emails or whatever.

Except the retention on emails, for instance, is usually 7 years. Not exactly the same as auto delete after read... It's an apples to oranges comparison.

And the relevant transactions and approvals get recorded in other media for even longer periods in auditable forms.

A slack exchange saying, "Hey, would you approve this expense?" "Sure" isn't a problem. It's the lack of formal follow ups in an auditable medium that is.

Worked for a major US bank. 2 years max on email. You don't want discoverability back 7 years.

That's not really how auditing works though. If there is a legal requirement to keep records of communications between senior managers (and there is for financial institutions), then "we purposely used an app that deletes such communications to hide our actions from the auditors" is in itself a crime.

That's just modern double entry bookkeeping - 1 write, then 2 erase. If any transaction isn't erased, it leaves an audit trail for investigation.

It is not legit when you are a business of this magnitude in finance.

Chatops for TechOps? Totally, no one cares if you’re down, there’s little regulatory impact. Accounting and finance? Not even once. (Caveat around TechOps is IAM privs as it relates to SOX, GLBA, etc)

(a component of my work is providing guidance to fintechs on governance and controls with respect to various nation state regulatory frameworks)

ChatOps for expenses through Apple's iMessage Finance plumbing tool can tighten up on the formal regulatory oversight and grow new profit centers for Warren Buffet, TSMC, G20 business ambitions.

Yeah, I'm sure EY will be totally nonplussed and have no further questions. Oh, you used ephemeral messaging for requests and approvals with no audit trail? Totally compliant, ok, now, let's look at dual approvals...

It worked for Wirecard.

Wirecard seems to be a kindergarden party compared to FTX so.

Thinking of it, FTX and Wirecard are hard to compare.

Wow, no.

I suppose it would be fine if you had a Slack integration that was a front-end to a proper piece of accounting software.

But a completely ad-hoc system where accounting and auditors have to grep a giant chat log for an emoji is going to get you sent to some special level of finance hell. Nobody will have any transparency into why a request was approved, who approved it, and why. How do you possibly hand off the history of reimbursements to someone who is hired later, and how do you possibly create a structured report for auditors?

And I’ll even object to your supposition that finance software is hard to use. We use Brex for a corporate card, and it’s a totally smooth process, with a great app and website.

Not disagreeing here, just adding notes.

An example of a Slack integration front-end to proper software: Ramp[0] has a decent Slack integration for in-Slack reimbursement approvals. It's easier than navigating their web app.

Also, Brex is pretty polished today but even they started out as a junk show. Stripe started out as total chaos. Many of the neobanks... Most fintech startups out there started as three engineers in a trench coat 1) hustling for traction then 2) scrambling to get a scalable (and auditable, and reconciling...) system in place before user growth crushed them.

[0] https://ramp.com/

Oh, sure, to be fair, I only just started with Brex.

And I am comparing their website to consumer-facing Chase—was just superficially impressed how much nicer Brex’s UI looks, and also feels more performant.

Sounds like a dream for employees, I don't care what's under the hood. I have unclaimed business expenses because the reimbursement portal is so shit.

Unclaimed expense beats sitting in prison.

Never underestimate the force of procrastination.

Agreed. It's certainly possible to build way more robust controls using chatops than email or some internal "enterprise" app. FTX may not have implemented it this way, but one could envision the chatops automatically requiring approvals from the correct people based on dollar amount and expense type. And requiring those people to 2FA with their approval.

So, basically building auditable accounting systems in house instead of buying existing solutions? Yeah, but no.

There are a lot of fucked up things about FTX, but "omigod they didn't use SAP" isn't one of them.

Assuming I was talking about SAP when saying accounting systems, for what is basically banking, shows a certain lack in understanding either of those systems.

My finance colleagues (Fortune 100 company) who spend all day updating the general ledger in SAP will be interested to learn SAP doesn’t make accounting systems.

Ho Ho Ho.

Nope! That is never going to pass muster with the auditors. You have actual legal responsibilities in corporate accounting, you can’t just make it up as you go along doing whatever seems easiest without ending up in prison.

Noooope. Slack isn’t providing the kind of financial controls or guarantees necessary. There’s no reporting. Presumably any admin can manipulate or delete messages, etc.

Exactly, they would need a immutable, distributed ledger to accounts for their client immutable centralized and vaporized ledgers.

> and most chat apps these days should have pretty great auditability capabilities.

Most chat apps default configuration isn't going to do this well at all out of the box.

With some significant back end work, you can for sure do this. On the other hand you are probably right about it being a pretty good for end user.

If you don't do the back end stuff properly, you're going to be in a mess and will not pass any sort of real audit.

> For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.

So... the payment system was a discord bot?

Honestly having had to deal with the hell that is a purchasing request in large corporations I think I'd rather go with a discord bot than have to spend 6 months justifying why I need to purchase a $50 piece of software to do my job.

Yeah, but the next paragraph indicates disbursements included entire houses.

I mean, who wouldn't want that? Aside from that whole "embezzlement" issue.

Similar. The best reimbursement system I’ve worked with was for a company that just automatically approved everything under a few thousand dollars (never states a hard threshold) based on individual professional judgement to spend funds to advance company goals. And they audited every purchase ever made when you went for partner.

It was both liberating and terrifying to have that much freedom. The audits weren’t widely available so it’s hard to know how effective this was, but it was pretty rare to hear about people not making partner because of it and they were super thorough about every charge, frequently asking for detail.

Enron, and now FTX, are the reason why that is like that.

Sometimes corporate greed is why systems are so hard.

My previous company had a very rigid repayment system and i swear it was designed to deny expenses.

Once i submitted an expense for $3.25 for a train and they wanted receipts. I didn't have one and they wanted me to sign an affidavit that i would not find the receipt and resubmit my expense.

This is for $3.25 and the amount of time spent trying to get my money back exceeded the expense amount.

The obvious common sense question should have been : If my plane landed in X, and the office is located at Y, how did i get there?

Somehow. That's not their business. But they don't want you claiming a train ticket, a bus ticket, and mileage all for the same trip.

Every seemingly stupid rule has an equally stupid person behind it.

It would be nice if we could just trust people, but there are a class of people who then abuse that trust. Systems are in place to thwart them at the expense of everyone else.

If you claimed all three of those, you would have to claim all three of them, at which point you would have claimed all three of them, and someone could easily see that.

Someone could easily see that if you have an actual reimbursement system in place.

If it's based on the honor system, I could claim the train ticket, then claim a bus ticket and say that the ticket was for something else, you were mistaken. Then claim mileage and say the bus ticket wasn't that trip, you made a mistake. Again, just like the train ticket.

So, yes, the claim needs to be backed by proof of trip or by a deliberate action on your part saying that you are claiming this right here on this date for this trip.

In your example you describe "something else". If there's "something else", then that "something else" is an allowable expense.

Lies are not an allowable expense.

I liked one of my old bosses for this. He'd notice a meeting with 5 engineers about licensing some software and would swoop in.

"How much is the license for this software?" Upon hearing an answer, "The company bills your time out at $250/hr - this meeting has cost us the licensing fee of this software. Next time, just buy it. If I have a problem with that, I'll change the policy then."

Come on, these were professionals… they used slack.

One of the biggest mistakes in this whole fiasco is from the people who enabled this - how (why?) on Earth were they given such ridiculous sums of money… with 0 oversight!

Only true if the investors weren't sharing in the embezzlement.

As a security engineer and advisor that has had access to the internal practices of dozens of crypto-asset companies, I can assure everyone this level of negligence is -so- normal that if you actually behaved responsibly in this space it would be very hard to compete with those that are not.

Almost no one bothers with even the most basic of security controls, often connecting to production systems containing billions of dollars with compromised personal use laptops.

There are several more MtGox, QuadrigaCX, and FTX style events cooking right now.

Also, here is your daily reminder that decentralized assets stored in centralized third party systems are not yours, and will probably be abused or stolen.

Learn to use a hardware wallet or stick with low-tech asset classes like precious metals.

I'm surprised anyone is surprised. The selling point of crypto always seemed to be the ability to elude regulation, and so they did, and so the obvious temptations were tempting...

A vocal community has been calling out the blatant scams and corruption for years. The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence.

Does/will the lack of regulations infer milder criminal penalties?

I like this question. Do we then base the penalties purely on pain suffered by the scammed?

Even if they can’t establish securities fraud it seems like they have wire fraud based on the deleted tweets alone. Plus whatever internal accounting manipulations he had going on are likely some form of honest services fraud. Plus they were handling some international withdrawals through a front company in California that pretended to be an electronics wholesaler called North Dimension Inc which from what I can tell did not register with FINCEN so they have unlicensed money transmitter and potentially some other fraud because they likely misrepresented the business to banks too. For sentencing you basically get a score that increases with loss amount, increases with whether any victims faced financial hardship (in this case obviously yes), and decreases with things like cooperation and acceptance of responsibility. See https://www.sentencing.us/. But IANAL.

Probably not. Enron actually may have steered clear of violating any regulations. At the very least, the government lawyers were afraid to subject a jury to months of accounting regulations and debates over not black or white issues. So they just made the case that the sum of all the actions was an accounting fraud. And they got the CEO/CFO/CFO's wife (who helped/would have gotten the Chairman, but he died and several others in jail for it.

I would put money that SBF is going to prison for decades -or- evades US prosecution by managing to avoid extradition.

Thanks. So is it expected than he will jet off to somewhere before being arrested? Justice Dept or whatever relevant agency should act quick shouldn’t they? But I guess the answer there alludes back to a sibling comment’s point of testing the Justice system against someone with such a wide swale of influence/connections..

He has been in the Bahamas for a while. Theoretically, the Bahamanian officials are keeping him from leaving the country. The US does have an extradition treaty with the Bahamas, but they have their own crimes they want to try him for first. It's possible he could beat extradition. I don't think that's likely, but it's certainly legally possible.

Fraud, and other such white collar crime, has very harsh high-end penalties when the government chooses to enforce it with each offense potentially reaching 20+ years. If the government chooses to enforce the law, SBF could easily spend the rest of his life in prison. The question is will they?

That's what makes this case so interesting to observe. SBF is extremely well connected, donated to all the right people, and even actively advocated for their causes. It's a major, and very visible, test of the US Justice system.

The surprise isn't that how disorganized they were _internally_. Even if it's an open secret that the money hose isn't strictly above board, it was assumed that at least, the guys in charge were keeping track of the money, even if only for purely selfish cover-my-ass purposes.

Or even just to know how much money they had where, to loot it.

Once they looted the money, making the records disappear sounds smart.

Usually that means something like keeping two sets of books.

In this case, there's... half a book? Or at least seems like that's the extent of it. Also a half filled out spreadsheet that doesn't make any sense.

It would be surprisingly bad even for a fly by night scammer who skimmed $100k before the cops caught up with him, let alone a billion+ dollar operation.

But good point. Essentially, 'less evidence to shred if we never had it in the first place'?

The thing that shocks me is that anyone still trusts any of these exchanges except maybe Coinbase. I just heard the Kraken CEO in an interview touting his "partial balance sheet audit" for 2021. The interviewer asked if Kraken would have a full balance sheet audit (proving reserves) this year.

The CEO couldn't commit to a timeline for a full audit (ie not in 2022) but pointed out reserves were just "one component" of protecting customer's assets. That's like a captain saying that he wasn't going to check if there is a hole in the boat because hull integrity is just one component of a ship's voyage.

And on Reddit people seem to think Kraken is very dependable.

I don't expect the Coinbase CEO to secretly leave the country with gold bars. But I do expect Coinbase to either go bankrupt or to face major lawsuits for years and to have very poor stock performance.

And yet I imagine people will be surprised when they find out that Coinbase insiders have only been selling (and have sold almost $4B worth of) their stocks every since the direct listing (not even IPO). [0] Chances are, Coinbase was more of your garden variety pump and dump where you hype your useless startup up, and dump it on retail at a hugely inflated "market price".

[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades...

Your link shows $82M of buying by insiders compared to just $47M of selling over the past 12 months, so I'm not sure I understand your point.

Interesting. 100% of buys were from two directors, Tobias Lutke of Shopify and Fred Ehrsam, former cofounder. 100% of sells have been management.

Management selling is pretty typical. You'd have to dig into Coinbase specifically, but if a big part of your pay is stock/options, you will generally constantly sell a portion of that. Obviously, a big spike in management sales can be a red flag.

It makes sense, though iirc over the life of Coinbase management has been a large net seller, larger than average.

I'm interested the directors have been buying. Is that typical?

Q2 2021 is when it was listed, and when insiders bagged $3.9B. Compare that with the scale of $82M or $47M. After Q3 2021, crypto started crashing and so did COIN stock, so I imagine insiders who knew what's up and wanted to dump got out already.

They were sitting on large illiquid unrealized gains until the IPO. I can't imagine that's strange behavior in companies going public. Some funds will sell into the IPO as a rule in order to redeploy capital to other early stage investments. For early employees and founders who could have had up to 99% of their wealth tied up in Coinbase stock, some diversification is hardly odd.

"during a gold rush, sell shovels"

Crypto tokens have no fundamental value, but as long as people are interested in it, Coinbase has fundamental value offering a service to get money in and out without the apparent BS and scams. It crashed hard- I think coinbase is actually a good investment right now, a solid business with underpriced stock.

Edit: HOOD is probably a good buy too for the same reasons.

You should probably say whether or not you'd benefit from other people buying into those.

COIN and HOOD both have an opportunity to make major changes and become profitable businesses. But just looking at their cash/debt/stock comp/revenue growth/expenses, it doesn't look great.

How much sustained interesting is needed to payback the investment? Selling Beanie Babies also has fundamental value.

I see what you're saying, but I remember reading on here months ago that Coinbase's debt was unimaginably huge. Doesn't matter if they have a good business selling shovels if they can't dig themselves out of the impossibly deep hole they're in.

Just looking at the stock perf. They have high trading fees and still lose quite a bit every quarter. They need to figure out their business plan when trading activity is lower, or figure out some way to drive trading activity.

It is hard to compete with ponzi scams while they are running. Maybe they will have a better chance now?

Without ponzi schemes they'd have no customers.

I think they have an excellent chance of being the last one standing. Unless we learn that they have also been operating a scam. If all they do is run a reliable exchange and don't get hacked, as other exchanges fall they'll probably get more business.

But I think if public interest wanes, and crypto sort of becomes this amway for nerds thing, then they'll probably flounder unless they prune back their costs significantly.

I don't. Crypto traders will never learn. They'll continue to see that coinbase has high fees, low volume, and a limited set of coins and they'll continue to use scammy unregulated exchanges. When one dies they'll just switch to the next one. The majority of crypto volume will never be on a centralized US regulated exchange.

You're being unfair. The half of the hull above the water line under the passenger boarding ramp is totally fine.

Yeah, its not like a pilot saying he doesn't know if the wings are coming off but that's just one part of your flight experience. The engines and the drink tray are just fine. Who is the PR person who coached that CEO?

But if you lurk on these Crypto threads you get to hear people who throw around financial terms they only half understand. They say do your own research but these "white papers" (btw how did that become a thing?) are these vague cut & paste web pages. No one seems like they could read a 10k. You can laugh about how dumb these things are but I don't wonder who falls for it.

What would a good whitepaper look like, when the underlying product is a scam?

Don't worry, we purchased bilge pumps.

No tubing though. The pumps just circulate the swill.

Kraken is actually pretty far ahead — proof of reserves: https://www.kraken.com/proof-of-reserves

Jesse Powell also encourages people to self-custody.

Proof of reserves is worthless without proof of outstanding liabilities.

And the only way you're going to provide the latter is through something called an audit.

There's also a cryptographic way: https://syskall.com/proof-of-liabilities/#what

No on-chain solution is ever going to prove that your exchange doesn't owe a trillion dollars to a third party.

You need an audit for that. An audit. One of those things that has been done for centuries and millennia. It's not rocket science, it just consists of paying an accounting firm to look at your books.

(That, and having said books:)

This is just a web page describing a process that is not an audit of Kraken. If a company isn't audited by a third party who assumes liability for being wrong there are all kinds of things that could blow up.

This web page is also a great example of using financial speak to make it sound like they are doing the things that are considered important in their own special non traditional way-- or really-- without actually doing them. Who wants their account audited? Does your bank do that? I want the bank audited.

Isn't Kraken using the same metaverse auditing firm that is mentioned as being unknown in this exact document?

Many people's critical thinking skills go out the window whenever they think there is easy money on the table. That is how scams like these thrive, and how casinos get so big.

but they also did that with their customers' fiat deposits which went through the traditional regulated finance network. Does that mean the point of fiat is to elude regulation too?

Whatever regulations there are on fiat apparently didn't stop them from defrauding their customer's fiat.

AFAIK straight up stealing customer's deposits in a way the contract specifically says you will not, whether in USD or UnicornBucks, is some form of theft/fraud/embezzlement and already illegal.

A huge chunk of SBF's lobbying was to get on-chain DeFi banned. He was the biggest promoter of regulation, OFAC, KYC, etc in the space. His downfall, which began with the leak of the draft of the anti-DeFi and pro-KYC DCCPA bill he lobbied for, was catalyzed by people (including CZ) becoming enraged at him for trying to hurt FTX's strongest competitors using his DC connections.

Strangely enough, on-chain defi has no issues with insiders secretly siphoning off funds for their own trading.

No? I thought lots of that on-chain stuff was getting "hacked" all the time.

Yep, No. On chain you can't have "insiders secretly siphoning off funds for their own trading".

Hacking is a different issue (comparable to, lets say MtGox).

>A vocal community has been calling out the blatant scams and corruption for years. The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence.

Successful scams are like successful cults, nobody has ever joined a harmful cult thinking that they are joining a harmful cult. A good scam will never seem like a scam to the victim. The biggest risk factor in falling for a scam is believing that it can't happen to you.

The blatant scams and corruption are actually an incentive for many people who believed that they would be the beneficiaries of the scam, not the victim.

> A vocal community has been calling out the blatant scams and corruption for years

And not only that, even people who made fortunes in the financial markets.

> and so the obvious temptations were tempting...

But that is what happened. It's bad for people who've put in money they couldn't afford to lose

"The information was readily available to anyone doing even the most basic due diligence"

This is just provably not true. if you can find 3 credible people saying that FTX was lending out customer funds to the tune of $5+bn before 10/31/2022 I'll eat my shoe. the smartest critics in the room were taken as much by surprise at the extent of the crash and contagion as the most idiot-degen-ape. and it doesn't do anyone any favors to pretend it was obvious.

Yes, that's the selling point of crypto. This is not about crypto however, which continues to work perfectly fine, this is about an exchange.

Nobody would be opposed to have these companies audited. In fact people have been asked for tether and so on to be audited for ages.

The problem is anytime regulations are mentioned, they are about hurting the user, and not preventing things like FTX from happening.

I'm talking of things like the bill SBF himself proposed, which aimed to fuck defi (actual crypto, where you can't steal people's money like FTX did), to force people into these centralized exchanges where you don't actually own or hold any crypto.

> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

Are these filings typically full of quips? This seems pretty damning but I don't read enough court filings to know whether this sort of language is typical

It is not only not typical, it is definitely raising eyebrows from the clerks office to the judges.

Language in these filings is usually so dry that it makes the Sahara look like Tahiti.

The cleanup CEO is mad. And he’s seen some shit.

The financial equivalent of ‘somehow folks with PhDs mixed cleaning chemicals together for no apparent reason and gassed a bunch of kindergartners’.

> The cleanup CEO is mad.

I think he is also laying the groundwork for "This is going to never be fully accurate or clear what happened."

He's said as much in other parts of the filing. All sorts of accounts for subsidiaries that should exist apparently just can't be found.

I think this is it - he's looking for publicity as reputational CYA (which is a big part of his job).

If you take a look and go "I can do this" and can't, then you look sketchy. If you take a look and go "nobody will ever be able to do this completely, but I'll try" then you look like a hero.

Not even necessarily a CYA, but setting expectations about what is possible and what isn't is important.

It's like a doctor evaluating a patient.

On the other hand how could these guys have fucked up any more than they already did? I think it's clear that he's earnest and not trying to win points simply based on that fact... did they do anything right?

At least they weren’t building black market nuclear bombs?

What he's really saying is, these guys had no back office accounting operation.

Usually, in a bankruptcy of a financial enterprise, there's a general ledger of transactions to look at. Some may be fraudulent, hidden amongst the legit ones. FTX does not seem to have had that. Much of the history is missing.

So it will have to be reconstructed, often from the other side of the transaction. Banks will be asked (ordered) to provide their transaction history for all relevant accounts. There will be heavy analysis of the blockchain, which is less anonymous than many people in crypto think. Whatever records FTX has will be analyzed. People identified as having dealt with FTX will be subpoenaed for their records. Gradually, cells on spreadsheets saying "On DATE transferred AMOUNT denominated in COIN to UNKNOWN" will have UNKNOWN filled in. This is forensic accounting.

In bankruptcy, that happens in public. Over time, the PACER filings for the case will fill up with details of where the money went. Some will be trackable, some won't. A lot of effort will go into finding out where big amounts went. The numbers are big enough to justify the effort.

Then come clawbacks, arrest, trials, civil litigation... A huge pain for everyone involved, but if you screw up at the 10-digit level, it gets done.

Thanks, that is a good analysis. Considering the mix of (often bespoke) coins and tokens, seems like a sure bet that some legal minded forensic techies are going to be able to build careers off this too.

I don't' know, but I suspect its an attempt to put distance between the CEO running the bankuptcy and previous leadership. Essentially signalling to the court and debtors "serious people are in charge now. Things were messed up, but I'm not like that".

This guy has no reason to need to do that, his career is already rock solid - and if even 1% of the stuff coming out is true, this is an epic cluster of malfeasance and incompetence.

Usually small businesses are terrible at accounting and finance, but even they typically have some idea where their bank accounts are and what is in them

The new CEO (John Jay Ray III) was the one put in charge of Enron to clean up that whole mess. I don't think anyone doubts his legitimacy at this point, so there would be no need for him to be on the defensive. He was placed here specifically for that reason, I think.

This is a situation where lawsuits will be flying and a lot of very wealthy people who can afford lawyers and lost lots of money will be casting about for any deep pockets they can find and any scapegoats they can blame.

It is likely that nobody will sue this CEO, but a nontrivial part of that is precisely that this guy is correctly covering his bum. By being ready for this battle, he will probably never have to fight it. And that's only "probably". I wouldn't guarantee it. I would have some clauses about this written into my contract before I took the job.

Trustees appointed by a Bankruptcy Court already enjoy quasi-judicial immunity which shields them from any personal liability.

Was he appointed by the Bankruptcy Court or the Company itself?

> Essentially signalling to the court and debtors "serious people are in charge now. Things were messed up, but I'm not like that".

He's not trying to save or run the company. He's a liquidator with an unimpeachable reputation. From the instant he took over that distance became an ocean. I think he's just genuinely aghast, Enron was at least "clever" about their fraud, SBF and accomplices were brazen.

Look at the title again. This is the guy who cleaned up Enron and he is calling it "unprecedented" and says "never in my career have I seen such a complete failure..."

This is not typical language. John Ray III is a serious person.

The key are words like "unsophisticated". Enron was sophisticated, well documented, audited and done with Wall Street firms signing on. They could point to where every dollar had gone. It was an immense fraud, but no one was "unsophisticated".

It is not typical. I think in this case the extreme language is meant to signal to judges and stakeholders, "this is going to take a long time and be really messy, your usual expectations of the timeline of this process do not apply".

This filing strongly implies there is evidence of deliberate intent and fraud; after reading it I'm betting DOJ files charges fairly soon.

Are these filings typically full of quips?

Yes, according to the comment I read yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644846

They even provide a funny BuzzFeed example.

A company filing for a chapter 11 reorganization starts the process with a story about how they came to be in some temporary trouble, and how a renegotiation with the debtors will allow the firm to continue and thrive.

But in this case, FTX filed with a blank page where that story would be. Now the new CEO is explaining to the court that nobody knows how they came to be here, he has no idea if there is a viable company, and he has no idea if the money was spent, stolen, lost, or smoked. He doesn't even have a list of employees, or a reliable list of the bank accounts. He is aghast, and in no position to tell that kind of story.

I don't understand if there is any path for FTX that doesn't end in chapter 13. I certainly wouldn't bet on it.

What's clear is that FTX didn't have any real corporate structure in the usual sense. It was a handful of people sitting around on bean bags doing stimulants and trading crypto all day. It's amusing to read about the clash between the bankruptcy CEO's expectations of what a corporation looks like and what FTX actually was.

The thing is, it's incredibly unusual for a corporation to just ignore the massive legal risks like this. They commingled assets and used the corporation in a way that totally breaks the veil and means the directors are likely personally liable. That's honestly just moronic of them to do.

No idea why people invested in this, clearly nobody did their due diligence.

I wonder if that's how people will get out of lawsuits, by convincing the judge that no serious investor doing their due diligence would ever give these amateurs a single dollar.

> no serious investor

If they wanted to mitigate legal risks, it probably would have been better to take advantage of 'serious' investors, as opposed to less knowledgeable investors. I believe the latter group generally enjoys more legal protections.

There’s a scene in the Hulu show about Theranos where an investor was trying to do due diligence and they kept getting the runaround with crazy excuses. Like a comedy. They eventually walked.

I guess the FTX investors didn’t walk.

Makes you think how lucky we are that the financial system even exists.

If the veil gets broken, is it possible that any of the liability splashes back on the investors. Like Sequoia or a16z?

When the fishy balance sheets leaked I wondered who the CFO was who signed off on them. There was no CFO.

Beyond any regulation or regulatory failure it’s shocking the investors let this happen. You shouldn’t give someone billions of dollars without an adult in the room ensuring there are adequate processes in place to track and manage that money.

The GPs at the various VCs investing in this should honestly be fired.

But as story goes on the story just gets so much worse. This is theft of company and customer assets pure and simple. SBF and his cohorts are about to discover just how far reaching the long dick of the US government really is.

Like how can anyone think blindly spending customer assets wasn’t going to end in spending the rest of your life in prison or on the run? Because that’s where this is going.

This is effective altruism at its finest. They will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi. The industry as a whole will become safer due to their malfeasance. If that's not altruism, I don't know what is!

How is FTX related to DeFi in any way?

Well, clients believed their money was centralized at FTX. They now realize it has been decentralized to many other places.

The FTX business model was to initiate regulatory capture, spend a flood of money on the usual DC insiders to make all competitors DeFi illegal in the USA, then they just happen to soak up all the profits.

It would have worked out fine if they had just held it together until after they hired the US Gov to put all their competitors out of business. They would have been too big to fail and these smaller numbers could all be swept under the rug by larger numbers. Well, startups lose money until they make money of course.

One of the guys who's company was about to get shut down by the legislation FTX was purchasing, decided to out FTX's questionable balance sheet (if he's taking us out, then we're taking him out first...), and the rest is history.

If you pay the right people, the us government strongly supports anticompetitive policies. That side of the story was going to be very profitable.

Guilt by association. No, seriously. Do you expect Congress or the SEC or the DoJ to understand (and, perhaps more importantly, care) about the difference? I'm quite serious: all they're going to hear is "crypto".

The Adrian Veidt theory of FTX. I like it!

> will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi

Lumis and Gillibrand's proposals went from being considered for omnibus insertion to DOA. The people who write the coming rules are not going to be friendly towards industry.

>the rest of your life in prison or on the run

Suicide is also possible.

Most of the perpetrators are in early thirties; they will do 10 years and be out by their 40th birthday. Once they are out, they will dig out the millions of dollars worth of bitcoins they have probably hidden away in thumbdrives or CDs.

I know nothing of Crypto or law but I did watch Shawshank Redemption.

Over one million creditors say “Nope.”

_Parker Conrad has entered the chat._

Just kidding, he didn't spend a day in prison.

Just a bunch of settlements for shit like this:

> In the fall of 2015, Zenefits came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to comply with state health insurance regulations; the company was subject to an investigation by the website BuzzFeed. On 8 February 2016, Conrad resigned from Zenefits after it was discovered the company used unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance in multiple states. In the aftermath of the investigation, Conrad's replacement as CEO, former COO David O. Sacks—who was cleared of wrongdoing in the same investigation—announced that the valuation of the company would be halved and investors' positions "trued up" in an effort at rectification, while 10% of employees accepted an offer of a two-month separation package.

Now he's the head of Rippling and in full golden child mode.

I think the sons/daughter of the elite (like law school professors) get used to getting away with anything for their small crimes that they forget when they fuck up in a big and public way it becomes a lot more difficult to just sweep it under the rug. My guess is law professor daddy/mommy have bailed him out before and he never got the talk that when he does these things he needs to do it in a way where authorities can at least pretend they didn't see anything.

If you observe SBF behavior it's clear he has an almost kid-like understanding of the world, which speaks of a pretty sheltered existence that can nourish sociopaths.

No that’s insane. Professor’s children are all secretly elite criminals? What planet do you live on?

Sadly I live on earth. I've got my thumb out for the nearest habitable planet.

To be clear, you want to move off of earth to another planet because you think all children of law professors are sociopaths? Do you think there's any irony in accusing other people of having a child like view of the world?

I want to move off of earth for the alien orgies. Avoiding loaded questions is an incidental perk.

Judging from the transcript of SBF's conversation with the reporter from Vox, I wouldn't say he has a kid-like understanding of the world. Rather, his understanding of the world is a mixture of pure cynicism and total Machiavellianism. He explains that he thinks everyone, everywhere is constantly running a fake persona motivated by social gains. That's not a child's worldview.

It is interesting to think about whether certain aspects of his upbringing might have contributed to this type of person though.

I don't think he's been involved in a startup. Usually people like this get involved in big bankruptcies. Usually startups aren't big bankruptcies.

Most startups work like this(minus the fraud). It is what it is. Approving things via chat is completely valid, for example. Several bot products have flows for approving expenses etc. All kinds of things are approved via chat these days.

It's more than that.

But it's not less. Chaos + scam, chaos + future trillion dollar company, chaos + zero, and so on. Chaos is always there.

Malarky, and I say this as someone that works in a fintech startup. This excuse that somehow because you're a startup you don't have to follow the most basic rules of accounting is nonsense, especially when you're handling billions in assets.

What does "follow the basic rules of accounting" mean? Have rigorous systems in place such that you can close your books within a day? See a real time view of your financial position at any minute? Show a set of financials which meet GAAP requirements but are hand done in excel and complete 8 weeks after qtr end? Get audited?

Are you in the finance function at your startup? I'll guess no, and if you go ask someone there if it feels rigorous they'll laugh.

This Gish gallop of questions strongly suggests that you don’t have a lot of experience in the financial industry yourself, and are trying to cover for it with bluster.

It's one question. The others are some potential answers. Sometimes when one asks a question, it's unclear if they are looking for a nuanced response, or they literally have no idea what something means. You'll often see someone who wants the nuanced response offer a few potential answers as a way to signal they are looking for nuance.

"Gish gallop" on wikipedia suggests something quite different.

> Are you in the finance function at your startup?

Yes, I am. I'm in engineering but I have to work closely with our accounting team to make sure all the numbers add up and, importantly, that everything is auditable, and I built the systems to do this.

I'll let Matt Levine say it better than I can. What passed for financial tracking at FTX (which was a financial company) is beyond disgusting. FTX had a "hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account, with a balance of negative $8 billion. The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison."

Then you are almost certainly an outlier, and it's nice to see. If I may ask, how old is the company? While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company.

What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry? Matt says clever sounding things that don't add up sometimes..

No, we are not an outlier. Nearly all fintechs that work in traditional finance must have these controls in place, because otherwise nobody else will do business with them. E.g. you've got to have SOC 2 or ISO27001 compliance (or some other standard) for counterparties to even pick up the phone to do business with you.

I don't mean to be rude, but you seem very unaware what standards are in this space. (Or rather, I should say the financial space, as everything seems to be a shitshow in crypto). You seem to be conflating what, say, some social media platform or todo app startup needs to do for compliance vs. a financial company.

FTX was in the business of handling other people's money, and they can't even say where billions of dollars have gone. If you think this is just normal "startup chaos", please, please, please don't ever work in a financial startup.

Without naming names, there are specific well known fintechs who were not SOC or ISO compliant when they were 2 years old. And SOC compliance is self determined anyway I believe. Plenty of people did business with them because their customers were small businesses (mostly startups) who didn't think about such matters. These were/are good companies, doing the right thing, but not doing things they didn't need to do.

Plenty of businesses did business with FTX. The things large enterprise want in a vendor or counterparty are generally not a consideration outside large enterprise. I used to be involved with oil price hedging where our counterparties were small/mid sized oil and gas producers - it didn't even occur to them that they were taking credit risk on us or that they should know if we had a credit rating.

What startup deliberately builds back doors to siphon away customer funds with the knowledge of only the founders, and deliberately misleads internal finance folks.

Who "lends" customer funds without any documentation to let founders buy multi million dollar property in their own personal names

This isn't messy, move fast break things of a startup, it's fraud

It seems so, yes.

But the bankruptcy ceo claims the lack of controls is unprecedented. It isn't. Even good guys building good companies have a lack of controls in place in the early days.

> While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company

FTX is 3.5 years old, and Alameda is 5 years old.

> What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry?

"We're supposed to have $8 billion in this account but we don't."

Combining various sources of information and reading between the lines, the most likely explanation is that this is the Alameda account that FTX customers were depositing money into, which then got gambled away by Alameda instead of transferred to FTX.

I've never worked at a startup but I strongly question the idea that "Whoops we had customers send $8 billion to the wrong company and gambled it away instead of collecting it" is not out of the ordinary.

By the way, what the hell is a fiat@? Is that at-sign a typo or is it some kind of jargon I don't understand?

I'm guessing it's fiat@[Alameda], but I have no clue.

It's probably meant to account for cash at a bank somewhere or cash they are 'holding' for someone.

Basic rules as in ”when the funds move from corporate account to founder account, is it a dividend, a loan, a bonus, or something else”. Basic rules as in ”not printing our own tokens as collateral for our own loans”

The first is a legal determination and maybe a contract issue. The accounting for it is easy - accounting for thousands/millions/billions of transactions is difficult.

The second is not an accounting issue, it's a combination of legal and business judgement.

> What does "follow the basic rules of accounting" mean?

I mean, know how many employees and roughly how much cash you have, or at least be able to find out inside a week? Don't forget where you put eight billion dollars?

From the outside "accounting" might seem quite well defined and narrowly scoped. It's actually a big discipline and in many places quite ill defined.

See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting

Look at the "topics" for example. There is a lot to it. To anyone who knows the field, the statement "you should follow accounting rules" is so vague it's meaningless.

> the statement "you should follow accounting rules" is so vague it's meaningless

We aren’t quibbling over GAAP versus IFRS. Anyone looking at FTX’s lack of accounting and control and seeing even a shade of familiarity at their firm should speak to a lawyer. Start-ups will be start-ups, but if you’re taking outside money and literally can’t say where your bank accounts are, run the hell away.

Most accounting issues aren't legal issues. Most businesses can't give you an up to the current date balance sheet. Most VCs don't get audited financials for most of their early stage investments. Most financials given to VCs have errors in them, most of the errors will be harmless and wouldn't meet any definition of fraud (legal or pub talk). Virtually none would meet GAAP if audited. Most early stage businesses don't have good management/cost accounting in place and can't actually work out exactly what's going on.

FTX seems to have been doing actual bad stuff - moving assets between companies that would never be done at arms length. From a practical perspective, it's almost sending money to the founder. If someone sees their company doing that, yeah, talk to someone. But that is not an accounting issue.

The chaos and lack of accounting rigor is.. just not rare or surprising.

My friend, sounds like you need a good lawyer.

To fix other people's finance/accounting systems...?

I don't think "most startups" happen to lose billions of their customers money. You can be a super-stealth-ninja-startup, when you're handling dollar sums with nine zeroes you better do things in a more orderly way than "via chats".

I worked at two small companies in the financial sector and both had compliance and legal assistance, nobody would even wire a hundred bucks anywhere without knowing where it went.

Then they were wild outliers. Money gets wired and lost by practically all financial institutions with some frequency. It usually gets tracked down eventually... but it's way messier than it seems.

How do you know this and why should we believe you?

Anyone who worked in finance knows, but it's also reported reasonably frequently.

Great case:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...

The word "startup" should not serve as a general-purpose "get out of responsibility free" card.

The level of organization and internal controls a company needs is a function of what it’s doing and, to a lesser extent, how big it is. The age of the company is not a factor.

Financial exchanges, in particular, have particularly strict fiduciary obligations that come into effect the day they start operations.

Mostly agree with the "should". But the guy saying it's "unprecedented" is miles off. There is plenty of precedent at young companies, he's just not aware of them, and they (almost?) all had a smaller balance sheet.

SBF's admissions come off as kind of "lol yeah," like a dumb junior high prank or something, and they just keep finding new things. I am expecting an accusation like "Is it true that you smuggled a bunch of crypto wallets across the border, on thumb drives inside of the abdomen of a dead infant?"

  SBF: o haha
  SBF: yeah that
  SBF: so many border searches
  SBF: but good ventriloquists will do anything for money
  SBF: crying baby sure
  SBF: got a burial stateside at least right?

It really shouldn't be surprising that FTX is worse than Enron. Sure, Enron was run by crooks, but they were adults operating in a highly regulated industry. I've seen kids run a lemonade stand with better bookkeeping than FTX.

Adults operating in the US. They needed to have books. Now, the fact that those books were apparently a work of fiction is a different matter. But they did have to make the effort to have the numbers reconcile.

Which is why FTX wasn't headquartered in the US.

Who thought that giving a bunch of 20 year olds with no experience, and most importantly _no_ oversight hundreds of millions of dollars was going to end differently? Everyone involved with this deal at Sequoia capital should be fired. Did they do _any_ due diligence?

Maybe we should stop lionizing VCs as some sort of investment prodigies. All it is is some people already with money gambling on a large scale and occasionally winning - mostly because there is a bigger sucker somewhere downstream that buys into the promise of future mega-profits.

They are no different than some 20-year-old being all aflutter at the guy who just pulled up in a lambo and whispered "crypto & nfteee".

And, by the way, if you've already proven that you can break some hearts by doing borderline fraudulent stuff and conning people out of billions, that goes in your favor.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/08/why-is-anyone-still-...

VC fund general partners are usually not employees that can be "fired" in the traditional sense. However, they can be forced out in certain circumstances and the limited partners are probably asking some hard questions about fraud and cancelling future capital commitments.

Brian Cantrill recently did a talk on this exact motive: https://redmonk.com/videos/coming-of-age-bryan-cantrill-monk...

My favorite bit about the FTX fiasco is the spreadsheet with assets and liabilities has an entry for negative $8B:

> hidden, poorly internally labled ‘fiat@’ account

I see one can buy FTX risk management department mugs on Etsy already lol

It would be meta-funny if they never sent you the mug you paid for.

I read a thread from someone reviewing the books, showing all the issues. One conclusion was, “where did all the actual money they took in from people go? It’s missing as an asset.”

And I wonder if they’ve been hacked or otherwise extorted one or more times.

I don't really doubt that he's right about this, but doesn't he have a pretty big incentive to play up how bad the mess is? If he successfully unwinds it then he looks like a genius. If he can't do it, we can't blame him, because it was worse than anything anybody had ever seen.

This guys has been cleanup CEO a bunch of times, including the former biggest US bankruptcy ever. He doesn't need to worry about improving his reputation.

Plus, it's easy to compare his filings here with his filings in previous cases and reasonably conclude that FTX is just much, much worse.

Unstated subtext: "Who the heck gave these bozos this much investment $$? Your whole job is basically to check for this kind of basic corporate structure and organization before handing over hundreds of millions of $$."

I am wondering how Sequoia or SoftBank explain this to their investors.

“Are you smoking crack?.”

(This was the infamous “Enron Moment” when the question was asked of Ken Lay by a random employee at an all hands meeting where Lay was espousing optimism even as Enron’s collapse was imminent. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uv47l2/so_i_was... @1:12 —Downvoters here are always showing their ignorance ROFL)

I still cannot understand what investors were thinking and doing. I thought those people were extremely demanding? You always here these stories of people being nervous even to present an idea to investors, but here is an example of a company with not a single shred of professionalism or even attempt at doing things properly. Yet, investors were throwing money at them and writing coronation articles about them.

Is there a way where investors are held liable for some things? Their investments and marketing material for FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, etc. are a large part of what lended credence to FTX and this people putting money in. Will the investors be investigated as well? They are partly responsible, in my opinion. I am not crazy about this world where investors give all this money and see nothing but upsides (aside from losing money that really doesn’t matter to them), but then have no downsides, even when funding fraudulent or incompetent enterprises.

> I thought those people were extremely demanding?

Their demands are inversely proportional to the size of whatever profits they're anticipating.

> I still cannot understand what investors were thinking and doing.

Dumb money (like pension funds) was just following "smart money" like Sequoia. Smart money was investing based on his political, media, and regulatory connections and not the financials. They'll say different publicly, but I doubt anyone really cared if the books were cooked and it was all a house of cards, as long as they stood a good chance of getting out before it crumbled. VC's have been riding crypto pump and dump schemes for years now.

Is there a good start-to-finish summary of this? I don’t really pay attention to crypto at all, but this keeps coming up.

FTX was one of a biggest crypto exchanges (think - stock market), ran by bunch of smooth talking friends/lovers, who were more interested in playing games and Harry Potter than running a company.

They amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, from serious companies (who were impressed by their recklessness) and billions of dollars in deposits from customers. They donated millions to politicians and spent even more on ads (including Super Bowl). They stole those money, and partially pocketed it/moved it to their hedge fund (which they managed on a principle of “you don’t need to know math or finance” and “risk management is dumb”) that lost majority of it and triggered their fall.

They did all of that, while being run with less financial and corporate discipline than a neighborhood dog walking business by a teenager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTX_(company) does a pretty good job, I think.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/

FTX embezzled customer's deposits by giving it ("loan") to Alameda. Alameda then lost it.

Is there anyone on HN who lost money from FTX? Can you describe how it happened from your perspective?

What's there to explain? Customers put money into their accounts, and now all withdrawals are blocked (because the money isn't there and because assets are frozen in bankruptcy).

I'd just like to hear from one of the reportedly million people affected directly.

Is there a subreddit or something? One person tried to open one but was called out as a scammer [0], and commenters in that thread are also asking if there is any FTX victim even on the subreddit.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/yvqyji/i_have_cre...

I must've lost like 20$ on FTX. I used it to buy a lot more than that but never left anything there. I believe @cobie might've lost money.

Lost fiat deposits? What happens when you try to withdraw it?

So which one is it? Incompetence or Malice? These ultra-smart people from MIT and Jane Street, the "elite", couldn't possibly ignore basic accounting, or the fact that they were operating a Ponzi scheme and defrauding both their investors and their clients. It would be like calling Enron leaders "incompetent".

There are a wide range of other options here, including negligence and magical thinking.

Why not both? They did some things that were clearly illegal (malice). But they lost the money because they thought they were smarter than they were (incompetence).

Well, they'd like us to think it's incompetence because in the US you aren't guilty of fraud if you are just unbelievably dumb.

Need to perp walk Bankman-Fried ASAP and put him in thumb screws until we have an employee list.

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