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Comment by reisse | Hacker News Reader

Bybit trading volume is in tens billions of dollars daily. Their comission rate for the retail traders is up to 10bp (0.1%). Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates, I think they're surely making few million dollars daily on comissions alone, maybe tens of millions in a good day. And besides comissions, they also have other sources of profit, like staking, crediting customers, and forced liquidations.

Being a crypto exchange in current market is very profitable. If the crypto itself does not collapse, I think it's totally possible for them to repay that sum in a year or less.

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I'm nowhere near expert on any of the things below, but: My gut tells me if an exchange makes as much money as you suggest, people involved in that exchange are making even more profit from the said exchange, otherwise they wouldn't engage. The whole thing being literally money out of thin air, it feels like a huge bubble that should inevitably burst bringing down _ a lot _ of collaterals with it.

</speculation>

Coinbase charges 100bps (1%) between trader & maker fee.

Just last quarter, Coinbase had:

  Revenue:    $2.2B
  Net Income: $1.3B

https://help.coinbase.com/en/exchange/trading-and-funding/ex...

https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2024/q4...

Note that Coinbase (like most exchanges) charges retail clients outrageously high fees (orders of magnitude more than you would pay at a competitive FX or equity broker), but institutional and whales that trade a lot very small fees.

Yet another way crypto moves money from poor suckers to insiders.

You just described volume-based discounts.

What’s so wrong with that?

It’s the same reason why buying a single soda at a convenience store cost more (per unit) than buying a large pack at Costco.

Try to become an insider at one of these exchanges even with a couple million dollars. See how it goes.

This is like Coke ONLY giving discounts to Costco instead of anywhere else so that Costco can reap the rewards. Walmart, Target, they can all pay full price.

The convenience store spends more money to package individual items. A crypto transaction is the difference of a keystroke. They are not comparable on many fronts.

Just curious, do you have concerns/issues with progressive discounts?

  Tier        Taker Fee   Maker Fee
  ----------  ---------   ---------
  $0K-$10K    60bps       40bps
  $10K-$50K   40bps       25bps
  $50K-$100K  25bps       15bps

Everyone is still paying the same full price (for the volume tier they are in).

Only those transactions at the higher volume tier get the higher discount (and everyone is eligible for that same discount).

From a capitalist economic perspective, it makes logical sense to maximize your profits and entice wealthier customers with quantity discounts.

From a societal impact perspective, it adds transactions that may not have happened otherwise, but these are mostly isolated effects from what I can tell. This can spur the economy with spending, and be more efficient. Ultimately however, it ensures that those with more money and the ability to buy in bulk lose less money than the tired masses. This should lead to wealth inequality over time.

Without knowing what impact each of these individual variables has in isolation, it’s difficult to define metrics for “net benefit” to society with any real certainty, let alone begin to measure them.

They charged consumers on average 155 bp (!), and institutional 4 bp.

So consumers are charged 40x. Nice business. TradFi has wet dreams of margins like that for simple exchange business.

Source: Their 2024 10K, pages 92 and 94, and my calculation.

For 2024, in $bn:

  Transaction   Volume   Revenue   Cut
  Consumer        221      3.43   1.55%
  Institutional   941      0.345  0.04%

Yeah, as a layman this MSTR explainer was an "aha" moment for me:

No, what is likely happening with all the convertible bond issues is that MicroStrategy prices the bonds in a manner to attract market neutral hedge fonds, meaning arbitrageurs. Saylor has briefly mentioned these firms, as opposed to firms seeking actual Bitcoin exposure. For issue after issue, they can be spotted as the largest bond holders by anyone with a Bloomberg terminal. By buying the bonds, even when conversion price is at a large premium, and by simultaneously shorting the shares, these arbitrage funds can lock in close to risk-free profits. Due to the convex nature of the value of the convertible bonds, the hedge funds attempt to profit no matter whether MicroStrategy shares rise or decline

Like, a broker profiting off PFOF in the stock market makes sense because there's an underlying asset generating real cashflow that people are buying into. But where is the money in crypto actually coming from? You have to pay miners, brokers, rugpulls/thefts/etc and there's barely any cashflow from the underlying assets (dApps?). But if it really is ~just a casino, with retail gamblers as the only real source of cash, it can still be profitable for smart money to pour billions in and use their PhDs to trade the vol. It goes up, it goes down, overall retail is bleeding huge amounts of cash on a sort of 5 dimensional pyramid scheme but enough gamblers go viral winning the slots/blackjack that the casino doesn't run out of customers.

Can this continue indefinitely? Maybe / probably? Seems similar to sports betting, Polymarket, retail now ~70% of options trading. The west and especially America becoming a gambling culture. The "bubble" may burst and reinflate over and over.

https://medium.com/@bdratings/all-your-models-are-destroyed-...

> Due to the convex nature of the value of the convertible bonds, the hedge funds attempt to profit no matter whether MicroStrategy shares rise or decline.

This sounds exactly like the rationale for the box spreads incident on WSB a couple years ago.

"literally cannot go tits up!"

https://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/polytope.pdf

> But where is the money in crypto actually coming from?

Where does the valuation of a payment processor come from?

Or is the objection that no one is actually using them to process payments, only to gamble? If so I'd ask for citations regarding the exact market breakdown.

You might be interested in reading Warren Buffett's reasoning for not investing in crypto. Basically he says crypto produces no goods, products or services, and it's only value comes from finding a "bigger fool" to pay a higher price than you did for it.

It's value is from speculation assuming future speculation will assume more future speculation

It's easy to agree with this position if you deliberately ignore that the "service" crypto provides is a decentralized, censorship-resistent, self-contained, global system of finance that is designed specifically for the modern internet age and which does not need to be under the control of any particular nation-state or company in order to function.

Otherwise, it is clear where the value comes from.

Do you think Buffett isn't aware of these things?

Probably. That guy is really old.

Yeah yeah yeah, then why everyone is losing their shit when the amount of worthless, centralized dollars they can buy per one Bitcoin decreases? Hmmm...

Dunning–Krugerrands

Most of the trading is not done by retail traders but at much lower fees than that, if not being paid (market makers). I just can't make it add up.

Hyperliquid, a decentralized perp exchange, is a good proxy for ByBit’s revenues. On an average, Hyperliquid does between 800k-1M in revenue per day. ByBit is substantially bigger and easily does 50-100M in monthly revenue

I know! As I stated,

> Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates...

But the volume is huge. Even if we take the best publicly shared MM rates from Bybit (which is 1.5bp taker commission, 0.5bp maker rebate), and assume the whole volume is traded with these rates, it is still 1bp from 40B dollars, which is 4M dollars daily.

even if this is true, they'll use their entire cashflow for more than a year to cover a single loss? That's not how business works...

It's not like they have a choice. If they don't they have to declare bankruptcy because they can't honor customer withdrawals.

ByBit's trading volume is almost certainly largely wash trading. Most unregulated crypto exchanges are rife with wash trading.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30783

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