YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Fiebach

lines on the record: 48
first: 2022-11-08
most recent: 2022-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And a lot of people would say that the solution to that is regulation. And while I think regulation is good, I think transparency is really the key word here. Your exchange should not be using your deposits to go do things like VC Invest if that's what Alameda and FDX were doing. Who knows? But that's not something that should be going on. Celsius should not be giving all of their money out to a random trader to go trade in DeFi on a lot of Ponzi scheme type vibes. And it's just, you know, we need more transparency in the space, especially from these centralized companies with the DeFi and decentralized protocols. It's actually extremely transparent. It's unbelievable that I can go see exactly how much TrueFIO, how much Alameda owes to TruFi. It's actually like beautiful because we have no idea right now how far the butterfly affect, how far the contagion from FTX and Alameda is going to go. So if it was all on chain, you know, everyone would know.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the Federal Reserve and other central banks, as well as governments, crisis was kind of avoided. And I feel like in the crypto world, one of the big principles is there is no centralization and not just bail people out. And that's when people were talking about Sam Bakeman Fried as the JPMorgan of his day. JP Morgan saved the stock market in 1907. And that was kind of the point of the analogy of like, oh, he's the JPMorgan because crypto needs a JPMorgan because there is no Federal Reserve. Like the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 because they looked at JP Morgan's bailout in 1907 and said, hey, we actually need to, maybe this shouldn't be just one guy who's designed to save the market. And yeah, now the JPMorgan of crypto is having a lot of problems.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There we go, Matt. It's been an absolute pleasure. The final thought I want to say is. That the traditional financial world, you know, I feel like market systems are inherently unstable, whether they're relying on code or whether they're based in the 1700s and before a computer was even invented. But central banking, which gets a lot of flack, in some cases, I think for good reasons, it has been quite successful in quelling instability. In other words, so during March of 2020, I was just rereading this book by Nick Timoros, like, I mean, the level of instability in the markets was so high of no one wanted to do a deal. You wanted to issue a bond in February, you could get it at Treasuries plus 50 basis points. Now you have to pay Treasury plus 500. It's not that the Treasury markets were expensive. It's just that they literally weren't working. And because of the coordinate act.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investing, and like we give context around them, so what we do with them and how we find them valuable. So that's Blockworks research. And for me, I'm a research analyst there. Find me on Twitter at Mattfeb, F-I-E-B-A-C-H.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a bit of a shameless shell. Blockworks research.com. Blockworks Reese on Twitter RES. What Blockworks Research really tries to do is get investable insights to subscribers. So whether it's going to be to avoid a potential coin or narrative that's maybe not going to do so hot in our opinions or if it's catching something before crypto Twitter like a governance update, tokenomics update, anything like that, we spend most of our time on chain and discords and in governance forums. So like we tend to catch narratives before they get to other people. We write pretty in-depth long reports on them, but they're still digestible. So something like five to ten pages kind of different than a lot of the 60 to 80 page report models out there. And our whole idea is, you know, investable insights and investable data. We just launched an alpha of our data product and kind of the idea of our data is charts with context. So instead of like, you know, we're on API, nothing like that. More so it's charts that are supposed to help you with.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say they're not scrupulous, but whatever they are being difficult, whatever their listening criteria is, I'm sure it's actually pretty in-depth, but it doesn't seem to care too much about longevity, potential longevity of a token. It seems to care more about, I guess, potential likelihood of getting called a security and things of that nature. That's another guess. I'm not actually sure what their listing criteria is. That would just be speculation.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very lax. Yeah, so like if a hallmark of kind of unscrupulous behavior in TradFi is, and this is been going on for hundreds of years, listing a company that sounds exciting, but it sounds like it's legit. It's like, oh, we're going to be diving in the ocean and catching pearls and we're going to be selling those pearls for a profit. At least hypothetically it could make sense. I feel like in crypto, you're really embraces the meme, you know, the memetic sort of nature of it where it's like, you know, 69420, it's like, you're not even saying that you're going to have this huge profitable business. It's kind of just like the narrative that people are. And yeah, so Coinbase is not at all scrupulous, sounds like.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I feel terrible saying these ones because I don't even know what they are, but they have like A, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, C, they have plenty of Justin's son Tron coins listed, Dogelon Mars. I love that one, Doge Elon Mars, good name. You know, the list just goes on. I think that there's not a single crypto protocol that's in the top 200 that I haven't heard of and I haven't heard of half the coins that Coinbase has listed. So it's like, you know, I don't know what they're doing to get listed. I don't know if they're paying. I don't know what possibly could be their listing criteria at this point, but it clearly they've listed some stuff that's gotten them.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I believe so. I got very interested in Bitcoin when I was a 14 year old in 2013. And then when I was 16, 17, I really kind of got super deep in this space, building Ethereum mining rigs. And that was like 2016, 2017, and kind of just always been working in crypto all through school. I went to school for computer science and finance because I thought it would be good for learning about DeFi. Turns out that it was not so good for learning about DeFi, but it was a good experience. So yeah, I've been in crypto for a pretty long time. But I'm not retired, so clearly I'm doing something wrong.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not financial advice, complete speculation, complete opinion, but I don't think we're done yet. You know, right now we're sitting at 1350 ETH, some odd, something around there. I could see us going a good amount lower, maybe even like, I don't want to give price predictions, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another hundred billion dollars wiped off the crypto market cap. I do think that this will over the next period of time call it two weeks, become a very good buying opportunity, at least in my head. But that is in no way advice for anybody else. I've spent 100% of my time in crypto. It's like a completely different lifestyle than most I could say is like do your own due diligence.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't even want to say the one that comes to mind because the name was so vulgar, but they just got a coin they'd listed, I believe, library just got the SEC just said it was a security. They have 100 plus assets listed dog coins, pretty much everything. I would say that I'm not going to take a look real quick, but at the end of the day, they've listed a lot of stuff that's distasteful to say the least.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, so in the long term, maybe, but who knows who Coinbase is, you know, in. Who knows who Coinbase's counterpart of your risk is? I would say I would leave it at that, right? This could be like far fetching and it's bad for the entire industry. I do think that it's good for US the other US exchanges on more like a three to five year like a three to five year view. But at the same time, you know, and this is Coinbase lists a lot of coins that would be questionable to say the least in regulators minds. They had a controversy with an insider that was trading on their their potential listings. I would say Gemini would be the big winner in my head. They're a lot more, at least seemingly, you know, just from outsider point of view. They're more compliant with like government regulators. I think that they might see a big step up. But again, I think everybody, this is bad for everybody, at least in the short term.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think custodians are important too. It's not like everyone should be keeping their money on chain. You know, if your grandmother's interest in keeping crypto and she's never, you know, has very little technical skills with using a computer. Okay, fine. Custodians should exist. But maybe custodians should have way better regulation, way more transparency. So the space today just doesn't have these things. It's like a requirement of when you're trusting someone else with your funds.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I feel like I'm someone who can wrap my head around the sort of ideology of crypto, but I'm not a technologist. I'm a finance person, but not a technology person. And I feel like people like me are very vulnerable to not putting their assets on chain because they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Matt, Matt, but don't worry about it. But times like this show that that's important.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would just add that that contagion could be contained or it could be extremely far reaching the butterfly that could be pretty crazy. This is probably like one of the craziest days in crypto I've ever seen the last 72 hours some of the craziest 72 hours I've ever seen the fact that all of this went down so quick Absolutely screwing over their depositors. It's like, come on, guys, it's time to learn how to keep your money on chain, be your own bank. You know, it's the whole thesis of the space”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And you have to imagine their trading arm is bringing in more revenue than their journalism arm, although who knows, but you'd have to imagine.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Market makes pretty much everything across the board. Genesis already had a large mishap this year with 3ac. So, you know, for Genesis, this might be, I don't want to say it, but it could even potentially be like the nail in the coffin for them. And they're a huge company. They're owned by digital currency group, which is actually, it's actually like, this is funny something someone mentioned to me earlier, like DCG actually owns Coindesk too. So if this is true in Genesis is in big trouble, their sister companies. Genesis and Coinesk. It's almost like Coindesk screwed over their own parent company. That's almost like if”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we do know is that there were a ton of different companies and crypto protocols with liabilities that had lent out money. There was a ton of crypto protocols and companies who had lent out money to Alameda. So we don't know what the collateralization on these assets were, but we know that that's a fact. So like, you know, for DeFi, it's really transparent. It's easy to see who's lent out money. So you can look at something like TruFi. I believe they have about $12 million in uncollateralized loans to Alameda. They're probably in trouble, you can imagine outside of DeFi, it's a lot less transparent. You don't really know who's got who's lent out and it's all behind closed doors, but you could, I've heard, you know, just rumors, and again, it's only rumors, nothing at all that would confirm this in my head, but I've heard jump and genesis were both very exposed to Alameda. Again, speculation, but, you know, jump is one of the biggest quant funds in crypto.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, wow. Yeah, what do you think this means for other players in crypto? And I guess that means crypto hedge funds, whales, retail, Other exchanges like, yeah, how does this impact the ecosystem? And yeah, here we are moving out of pure fact into pure speculation. So yeah, no one knows what's going to happen. Yeah.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not good at all So that not only were they overexposed to FTT, at least according to this Coindesk balance sheet, but also they had a huge amount of liabilities against FDT. So it's kind of like double trouble on that one.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe their debt, well, although there's no specifics out yet, I do believe their debt was in other assets with the collateral being their FTT.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to revisit a question that I asked, and you gave me a good answer, but I just want to re-explore it. So I feel like to have a liquidity crunch, you have to have a debt and a currency which you don't control. So for example, if I have a debt denominated in US dollars, I can go bankrupt because I can't make dollars. Likewise, if Argentina, the country of Argentina has debt in dollars, they can go bankrupt because they can't print dollars. But the US government can print dollars. It seems like a lot of FTX's debt was in, correct me if I'm wrong, an asset FTT, which they did control. They could print, or no, I'm wrong.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would believe that they had more money on chain and untracked wallets, meaning in order to actually track someone's money that's on chain, you have to know, you have to be able to connect the entity person organization with the wallet address. So astute people out there went and figured out that this wallet was FTXs, this wallet was Alamitas, that happens all the time. Nansen, the Thai, there's literally big data companies who solely exist with the purpose of doing this wallet tracking type of thing. They definitely still could have had obfuscated wallets, meaning wallets that you didn't know that they were tied to Alameda. But realistically, no matter what, they still are going to have the majority of their funds on centralized exchanges. That's where the deep liquidity is, especially for Alameda again, speculation. But you would assume that their relationship with FTX involved that they probably had lower latency to the FTX exchange and were able to market make their really easy, especially compared to other market makers. So they might have been like the sole benefit.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All speculation, right? All I can do is give my best guess, but my best guess is that they were doing things with customer assets. It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in my head that they would be in such a, you know, rush to fire sale off FTX if they actually had enough liquidity and enough liquid assets to back their customers' deposits. They would be able to wait it out for a higher bidder. You know, it just doesn't really make sense. I could be wrong. There could be something I'm missing for sure, not even a question, but that's definitely kind of my take on it. They were most likely giving money to Alameda, what Alameda was doing with those funds. It's hard to, it's hard to guess because Alameda pretty much did everything. They'd seed invest, they'd ICO invest, they yield farm, they market made, they literally, you know, across the board traded pretty much everything. They took directional positions as well. It's really hard to know what they were doing. They had about $200 million on fund, sorry, on chain, meaning there's about $200 million that anyone could track. But at the same time, that's such a tiny.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And you never know at the end of the day, there are lobbying groups in crypto now, and he's an unbelievably rich person. He can fund lobbying for what he likes, but it won't be as transparent, at least in my opinion. It's not going to be the stuff that we see YouTube videos of, and it might be a little bit less ideal having a non-American, at least as an American and as like a patriot, it would be less ideal having a CZ lobby than SBF, in my opinion.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Sam Bakeman Fried was one of the biggest donors in DC, particularly due to the Democratic Party. And yeah, rumor was had it that he was quite cozy. I imagine he's a star has fallen perhaps a little bit. And as you say, now CZ, he does not have those relationships. So the thesis that, oh, someone from within crypto will sort of infiltrate the politician world and make them more friendly to crypto, that seems a little bit less likely.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No longer China, but still not the United States, you know, Binance offers perpetual futures and options. They're not tradable in the United States. They do have.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge, absolutely huge. They have their own stablecoin. They have their own layer one blockchain, Binance chain. So yeah, they're really moving into a legitimate power player position FTX depositors will be okay. Everyone will be happy. Binance this morning, right after their announcement to purchase, said that they are going to have proof of their liquidity in the future. So they're going to actually be able to show through cryptographic proofs that they have your user deposits locked up. It's not going to some hedge fund investing in VC deals or something that sounds pretty ridiculous to most people listening, I would imagine. And I think that this is the best outcome we can hope for. I would also say that one thing that's not ideal is SBF was a huge proponent of crypto and DC. Well, not everyone in crypto agreed with his ideals and what he was aiming for. Regulators listened to him. Regulators probably aren't going to listen to CZ in the same way. I believe he was born in China. I'm not sure where he's based now.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say they're really moving up in all of 72 hours. They're going to have gone from the biggest to almost like an incumbent, someone that's just too big to fit. I don't want to say that on your podcast.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you just made a very important point of distinction, which when I said earlier that, you know, this announcement came out that Binance was buying FTX. It was actually, the only announcement was that CZ had signed a letter of intent to buy FTX. There's a chance that that doesn't go through, right? If there's things going on in FTX that CZ doesn't like, if there's suspicious stuff going on, which it does seem like there is, he doesn't actually have to go through with this purchase. If he doesn't go through with this purchase and my speculation is correct and FTX doesn't have liquid assets to cover depositors, well, now we're in the most bearish situation. I know you asked for the most bullish one. Sorry, but it's as simple as start with the most bearish one. The most bullish one would be it does go through, right? So finance does actually purchase FTX. Users get all their money back. You know, at the end of the day, crypto is more centralized at finance is already the biggest player in centralized exchanges, but they're going to go to a very hard Goliath to top.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So MIM's actually not that bad, right? So MIMS an over collateralized stable coin. It sounds ridiculous because they do call it magic internet money. But what MIM really is, is users can go deposit a plethora of assets, including some long tail ones, which does make it a little bit suspicious, but they have to be over collateralized and they can borrow this stablecoin mem against it. If their collateral assets start losing value, they get liquidated when they fall below a certain health factor, a certain loan to value, meaning that, let's say, it's 120% that if you're over collateralization, if the money you've put in the protocol isn't 120%, 1.2 times the amount of MIM or the equivalent of dollars that you have borrowed against it, it gets liquidated. The protocol makes some money, whoever liquidates it makes some money. So it's actually not the worst model. It's pretty sound. It's what maker DAO and DAI used to deploy. It's changed a little bit since then. But yeah, so it's like MIMS not actually the worst thing.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas FTX, We thought of them as the blue chip of the blue chips. But it's disclosed recently, one of their big holdings was in MIM, which for people who don't know stands for Magic Internet Money, which is on the Abrakadabra protocol. So doesn't sound very blue chip to me when it's, you know, what you own is on the Abrakadabra protocol.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your funds could be a liquid, right? You knew they were going to go take those funds and lend them out or do something with them. What we found out was that they had them in potentially in things that were less than AAA loans, they had it in DeFi and they lost money in hacks, they lost money in UST and Terra Luna.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. SBF was one of the most well respected people in crypto, maybe the most well respected person in crypto. Alameda was looked at as the top tier hedge fund where Quantz wanted to go work. I believe it's a prop shop. But anyways, the amount of respect that was put on SBF and Alameda is really incomparable to any other person or organization in crypto. When you look at the government, the regulators were listening to him when you look at hedge funds, you know, the amount of counterparty risk to FDX. I can't even imagine how many hedge funds are either going to go belly up or lose a huge portion of their AUM because the counterparty risk FDX if they're unable to get their deposits out. It's really, really insane. It's probably the craziest thing I've ever seen in crypto, at least to the downside. When you look at the situation with Celsius, it was also like out of this world ridiculous. But it was a little more, I don't want to say expected because there's plenty of people out there who didn't expect it. But Celsius was A, like you knew.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seven or eight figures locked up in FTX that they weren't able to get out, and they're basically extremely, extremely nervous on the phone today”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So their liabilities are to the users, token holders, token depositors, anyone who's custodying their money with FTX, those are who their liabilities really should be to. There's a good chance that they also have liabilities to Alameda, meaning, or sorry, I guess Alameda would have liabilities to FTX, meaning that FTX was giving some user deposits to Alameda to trade with, VC invest in, whatever they might have been doing with it. And then this created illiquidity in user deposits, which may or may not have led to the withdrawals. Again, that's speculation. There's no confirmation yet that FTX doesn't have all the money, but why else would they be pausing and halting withdrawals? You know, I talked to someone today who had.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one would hope that FTX didn't have any liabilities when me or you were user trader, whatever, depositing money into an exchange, you'd hope and expect that they have that money stored in cold storage or even in hot wallets. It doesn't really matter, but you hope that those assets are liquid and they're truthfully holding your assets. So you'd hope that FTX didn't actually have any liabilities. What I expect, and I don't know if this is true or not.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are the liabilities for FTX and what are the liabilities for Alamedas? Because to have a real liquidity crunch, it's not just that your assets have to fall in value. Also, you have to have people calling you up saying, hey, give me my freaking money back. So who is that? And for the case of FTX, the exchange, and who is that for the case of Alameda, the hedge fund?”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There could be a huge hole in their balance sheet where there might have been something suspicious going on, where, like, Alameda was giving, or sorry, FTX was giving money to Alameda. And, you know, they were doing things that would result in illiquidity on users' deposits. This is probably the most likely situation in my head, although, you know, it's complete speculation and there is no confirmation of it yet.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, we can only speculate on why. He said no, but I would believe that the reason he wanted to say no was because he had an idea of what would end up happening, which was, you know, two days later today, FTX announces, or FTX doesn't announce anything, but Binance ends up buying FTX today this morning. I think he probably knew that with FTT's token going down in value, Alameda might have been screwed and he might have knew something that other people didn't. There's a chance that, you know, FTX, that Alameda just lost so much money and had such a big ownership in FTX that they decided to sell it. But I believe more likely based on the fact that FTX has since paused withdrawals, meaning anyone who has money in FTX, and it's worth noting this is FTX's global exchange, not FTX.us. Ftx.us is still okay, but normal FTX is there, you cannot withdraw your money currently. Who knows how many billions of dollars are still in there? But yeah, there's a ton of money that's just, you know, frozen in FTX at the moment. And for all we need.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So FTT at the time was at $23. Now, by the way, it's at $4, the CEO of Alameda Research said, oh, don't worry about liquidity. We can buy them all from you at $22, a small discount. And the reason that CZ, who is the CEO of Binance, said no is because he didn't want to pay that small discount.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Positions, you know, who knows staked lots of different things in crypto, very much could be a liquid. So, you know, there's no way to really know exactly what these assets are. CZ continues, you know, well, we're still market dumping our coins. Caroline says, we'll buy them all at $22 at the time FTT is trading around $23 and CZ says, no, you know, not interested. I'm going to keep my market exposure. I don't want the $22 offer. The Dead Next Debt.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had $550 million in FTT tokens, and a couple days after this CoinDesk report launched, they said that they were nervous about the financial stability of, you know, FTX Exchange, Alameda, and that they were going to market dump their $550 million in FDT. Now that's when everyone really crazy. It went from just a little bit of nervousness and all the group chats to really worry all across the board, you know, ever in a blockworks is talking about it, everyone pretty much anyone who's on crypto, Twitter, this is like on their radar at this point. The CEO of Alameda, who's not Sam, it's this, it's a lady named Caroline, although today she changed her Twitter bio to crypto trader, so maybe not anymore, but as of two days ago, she was the CEO of Alameda. She tweeted that they actually have $10 billion in extra assets that were not included in this report. You know, if they actually have these $10 billion in assets, that should calm a lot of the worries. They should be able to cover their margin. But who knows what those assets actually are? Are they liquid? Are they illiquid VC investments direction?”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not like on the Forbes 100 list or whatever, but he owns 100% of the biggest crypto exchange in the world. Very wealthy man. He tweets that they're going to, so sorry, just one more thing, which is that Binance was a seed investor in FTX and helped incubate the exchange.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct And Alameda came first. Anyways, this balance sheet had some worrisome details on there, and the one launched by Coindesk, it basically said that they had $14 billion in assets out of those $14 billion. I believe it was something like $7 billion or $8 billion in liabilities. And out of the $7 billion that was actually like, you know, their assets that they owned, I think something like $5 billion of that was the FTT token. So not only were most, were they overexposed to the FTT token, according to this report, but also they had a huge amount of liabilities against it. This is really worrisome because, you know, if the FTT token decreases in value, they're going to get a margin call and do they have the assets to cover their margin? Who knows? Everyone gets worried, starts kind of like a run on the bank type situation on FTX. People start leaving, getting worried, just nervousness all over the place. And I think maybe two, three days later, CZ of Binance. So CZ is the founder of Binance, the guy that created it. I believe one of the richest people in the world.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the FDX exchange was live. A week ago, Coindesk released a report that had the leaked balance sheet for Alameda, the hedge fund. It's worth noting that Alameda and FTX don't have any direct relation, as in no one knows their relation, but there is one there. Alameda did start the exchange after all. Anyways, they...”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“SBF is Sam Bankman Freed. He's, I believe, 29, maybe 30 year old. I think he's 9, 10 billion dollars, or that was his estimate net worth before today. Who knows what it is now? And he's just like generally recognized as one of the smartest people in the crypto space. He's not an OG. I think, you know, the first time I heard of him was probably 2019, 2000, something around there. So, you know, he's kind of new, but he quickly rose to fame and became, in my opinion, probably the best known name in crypto, maybe even more so than Satoshi, which is crazy to say. Anyways, he starts a hedge fund. They make a ton of money arbitrage in 2017, 2018, 2019, early supposedly. That's kind of the word on the grapevine, or has been for a very long time. Alameda is like this huge hedge fund, market maker, killing it. And they start the FTX exchange. FTX quickly became known as one of quote unquote, the safest exchanges in crypto. SBF was doing a lot of lobbying in DC. He's well known. They launched the FTT token at some point.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I guess let's start with some context and background, right? FTX has this token FTT. FTT's main value proposition is that a third of trading fee revenue on FTX goes to buying and burning the FTT token. When it comes to tokens in the crypto space, it's actually pretty valuable tokenomics. You know, two weeks ago, I probably would have said that it's one of the better tokenomic models out there. Week ago, so I believe around last Wednesday. I'm not sure the exact date. Coindesk released a report that had a leaked supposed balance sheet for Alameda. Alameda is a hedge fund started by SBF prior to FTX.”
2022-11-08 · Forward Guidance · Everything You Need To Know About Crypto's FTX-Driven Downturn | Matt Fiebach · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT