I feel obliged to attest that the people I knew working at Jane Street at that time were some of the straightest shooters one could know. My anecdote is that SBF's toxicity didn't originate in their culture. Perhaps it was a counteraction to it, if anything.
What really gave FTX a competitive advantage was its cross-margining system. It was super easy to post collateral in any supported asset, and all open positions were automatically margined against each other. So if you were doing something like pairs trades between spot and futures, you didn't need to constantly monitor and manually move capital between the silos. In hindsight though it's not clear if this was possible because of better engineering, or just because Alameda was internalizing all the risk.
I'm not sure why crypto exchanges have such lousy technology. Lost acks, weird parser errors, missing order id fields, sessions giving no indication that the matching engine is down, etc.
It seems like any conceivable way an exchange can break will be encountered after only a couple months of trading. It's a complete shit show compared to traditional exchanges
I trade regular stocks in my Chase account. A few times, it was down for maintenance after-hours, meaning I couldn't enqueue trades to execute the next day. Not a big deal, but doesn't inspire confidence.
The market favors move fast, market to retail, etc etc over spending time cutting microseconds off the 99th%.
A lot of the exchanges also don’t have people who know what they’re doing. Lots of normal startup folks coming from an environment where “premature optimization is the root of all evil” and “move fast break things” is the norm.
Sounds like tuesday to me. One thing you learn about exchanges (I mean all of them as a software category) is that you can’t trust: documentation, reasonable expectations, the experience you’ve got last week, the idea that all symbols behave similarly, reproducibility on test servers and vice versa, to name a few. Don’t rely on these and you’ll be relatively safe.
But really, expecting a deterministic confirmation is a rookie mistake. Exchanges feel very asynchronous after a short while and the intuition should tell you that that a confirmation is just “ok, I hear ya”, not “effective immediately we’ll suspend our queues and reschedule trades to fulfill your urgent request”. The temporal uncertainty of order status is a quite common phenomenon, ime.
Occasionally sending out zero balances was another FTX special.