I suspect we will never get to the point where SBF admits "Stuff I made up and then assigned arbitrary value to doesn't really count as collateral". But we'll continually hear "Mistakes were made" as an attempt to avoid jail time.
I suspect we will never get to the point where SBF admits "Stuff I made up and then assigned arbitrary value to doesn't really count as collateral". But we'll continually hear "Mistakes were made" as an attempt to avoid jail time.
Yeah, this is just absurd. It's an illiquid self made token which only a small percentage was circulating. Even a fairly unsophisticated trader would know that you can't just mark that to market at spot and get a reasonable price!
I agree that has to be a feint to avoid criminal charges. I hope the prosecutors see it for what it is, it's essentially one notch improvement to writing: "Our bank account is down to $5000. However, I checked the break room and our copy Monopoly still has $20,000 so we're solvent against our liabilities of $19,000 and can continue to operate as usual."
The letter does include a hint to where more of the real assets could have gone: "included buying out binance". -- presumably clawing back that transaction is at the top of the bankrupt entities priorities. The realestate purchases for SBF and his family are more obvious but taking those back is less urgent.
This pretty well summarizes all of crypto.
BTC and ETH are assigned arbitrary values by people outside of FTX, which makes all the difference here.