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