Castles Made of Sand Dollars: SBF, FTX, and other Three

By Bitcoin 杂志 - 1 年前 - 阅读时间：17 分钟
8 年 2022 月 1 日星期四 19:XNUMX

点击这里简单地创建您的免费交易账户并开始购买您最喜欢的加密货币几分钟内!

用沙币建造的城堡：SBF、FTX 和其他三字母特工

How stablecoins and the unstable con, Sam Bankman-Fried, built a corrupt castle of sand and how it all washed out.

的故事 Bitcoin has certainly had its fair share of nefarious characters, criminal activity, bad haircuts and worse wardrobes, and yet our anti-hero du jour has seemed to outdo them all. Sam Bankman-Fried, better known by the three letter acronym SBF, burst onto the scene at the peak of the 2017 bubble, founding Alameda Research that September, just four years after graduating from an internship into a full-time position at one of the world’s largest market makers, Jane Street Capital.

SBF is the son of Stanford Law professor and founder of left-wing super PAC Mind The Gap, Barbara Fried, and Stanford professor Joseph Bankman, an expert on tax shelter laws and government regulation. At the start of 2018, SBF had struck digital gold while taking advantage of the arbitrage opportunity presenting itself between a higher demand for bitcoin in the Asian market, colloquially known as the “kimchi premium”. By the end of the year, and after amassing a considerable fortune from this high-volume bitcoin/dollar spread, he officially moved to Hong Kong, formally founding the derivatives exchange FTX in the following spring.

Bitcoin network that SBF rode from rags to riches and back again was partially launched in direct response to the fiat money experiment rearing its ugly head in the subprime mortgage, real estate and eurodollar crises that culminated into what is now known as the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2009.

“??EThe Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on through bailout for banks%”

- 中本聪，3 年 2009 月 XNUMX 日

This now infamous inscription in the genesis block made clear the inappropriate fractional reserve banking and predatory loan fiascos of our regulated banking industry was to be put to rest once and for all by this emergent monetary protocol; a completely transparent and decentralized ledger would de-incentivize fraud and prevent obfuscation of illicit activity. A new competitor to the dollar arose from the ashes of the meltdown, and with it, a new standard for financial fairness, complete with predictable issuance, controlled once and for all by the people for the people. Yet in any system made with good intentions, criminals like SBF and his bought-and-paid-for political and media allies manage to find a way to hurt innocent people for the advantage of an unknown few. Like most intriguing stories of fraudulent financial crimes, this one starts in the Bahamas, and ends with a tidal wave of asset liquidations and broken homes.

“如果你认为巴哈马破坏了你的全球税收体系，那么你的全球税收体系就非常糟糕。”

- 史蒂文·迪恩，2020 年夏季 [1]

推出稳定币，CBDC 竞相触底

巴哈马群岛似乎无伤大雅，但美国避税的历史由来已久，在禁酒令时代还存在朗姆酒走私者。延续这一传统，截至 2022 年 2008 月，包括巴哈马群岛和开曼群岛在内的加勒比海银行中心是第四大国债外国持有者，仅次于日本、中国和英国。充分利用了从 XNUMX 年金融危机开始的自由货币时代，并得到了特朗普政府推行的低至零利率的支持。

These rate cuts were started by the Trump-nominated and Biden-renominated Jerome Powell and were further exacerbated by both of their administrations’ COVID responses. An unprecedented pumping of all things dollar denominated occurred, with real estate, stock indexes, bitcoin and a whole bunch of unregistered securities known as altcoins reaching new highs across the board. In June 2019, one month after the founding of FTX, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced Libra, a digital currency based on a basket of international currencies; a novel take on stablecoins. This launched the stablecoin and CBDC race in earnest, and coincidentally enough, the Central Bank of the Bahamas became the first such institution to announce its own CBDC, the sand dollar, in October 2020. The sand dollar itself was pegged to the Bahamian dollar, which is itself pegged to the United States dollar, and thus with its government-sanctioned launch, the birth of the first central bank-issued stablecoin dollar came to be on the sandy beaches of SBF’s new home.

“加密经济的储备货币是什么？现在毫无疑问是美元。有趣的是，无论你是否关注美国加密经济，它都是美元。”

- 萨姆·班克曼-弗里德，5 年 2021 月 XNUMX 日

虽然美国政府当时假装担心系统性风险，但中国政府将 Libra 项目理解为传闻中包括在其篮子中的 G7 货币的后门美元化。 Metaverse 持有 1985 年广场协议，这一协调中央银行计划将在互联网最大网络中传播美元网络用户，通过集中数字支付的高速加速，并通过 Facebook 用户群的无国界性质实现全球化.

The digital yuan was trialed in April 2021 with great haste in reaction to this development, and by the Winter Olympics 2022, had launched for foreign attendees in Beijing. Not to be outdone by these new-look, same-shit fiat cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin made its own financial history when President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador took to the stage at Bitcoin 2021 to announce the legal tender aspirations of his small but dollarized nation. On March 9, 2022 President Joe Biden signed Executive Order #14067–”Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which included aspirations for mitigation of financial risks in digital asset markets, as well as a clause stating that within 210 days, the attorney general, in consultation with the secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, must provide a formal proposal for a government-issued CBDC.

By this point, the Bitcoin financial system had been utterly and properly dollar-ified, with billions of dollars in liquidity of dollar-denominated trading pairs making up the lion’s share of market activity. The same can be said for the Ethereum network, which has seen its compliance-driven perversion by non-native assets taking the wheel from its token Ether, as stablecoin and other dollar derivatives now uphold the majority of economic weight of the system. Both stablecoin giants Circle, issuer of USDC, and Tether came out in support of the merge, further ossifying their stake in the now-nearly-70%-OFAC-compliant blockchain. [2] As of this article’s writing, over 15.5 million ether are currently staked without active withdrawals in the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, worth nearly $18 billion dollars.[3] Fortunately for Bitcoin, the consensus weight of its system is not manipulated by user stake, and thus the Bitcoin market has been seemingly unaffected – negatively anyway – by this decade-long development. At least until scammer Do Kwon and his ponzi-scheme Luna wreaked havoc on investors at the start of May of 2022.

“[Crypto is] 显然是严肃的......你想在监管领域正确对待它。”

- 比尔·克林顿总统，27 年 2022 月 4 日（据称）[XNUMX]

传染病蔓延

Only a few weeks after SBF hosted a keynote with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton at the FTX-organized Crypto Bahamas conference, one of the largest-ever over-the-counter bitcoin purchases was announced by the LUNA team.

Terraform Labs and the non-profit Luna Foundation Guard, two entities headed by Do Kwon, had begun a campaign to purchase bitcoin 作为储备资产，以防他们的算法稳定币 UST 偏离其 1 美元的锚定汇率。在他们崩溃之前不久，该计划已经膨胀到一个崇高的目标，即在人类已知的最难识别的数字商品中积累超过 10 亿美元。此次购买由三箭资本 (Three Arrows Capital) 或 3AC 提供资金，并由加密货币经纪人 Genesis 提供便利。

Genesis 衍生品主管 Joshua Lim 表示：“Terra 的显着增长在过去两年中不断重塑了加密货币市场。Genesis 很高兴成为 Terra 生态系统的流动性合作伙伴，将其与更广泛的机构市场参与者联系起来。” ”。

随着 bitcoin reserves of Luna Foundation Guard totalling 80,394 BTC, valued at over $3.1 billion on May 5, 2022, this purchase placed LFG among the top-10 bitcoin holders in the world. [5] But only for a moment, for while it might feel like a lifetime ago, what happened next should look awfully familiar; the peg was attacked, the recently-purchased bitcoin fortune was liquidated, Binance, led by CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), aptly halted all trading on LUNA and UST pairs – with notable exceptions to their own stablecoin BUSD – and Kwon seemingly fled to outside of U.S. jurisdiction to Asia. [6]

Thus begins our first of many repeatable points of inquiry; where exactly did this bitcoin go? According to an audit released in November 2022, over 33,000 bitcoin 被转移到 Binance on May 10, 2022, and sold along with other assets while failing to defend the peg. [7] The same day the nearly $1 billion dollars worth of bitcoin 击中 Binance’s order books, bitcoin’s USD price broke below $30,000, falling from $40,000 just a week before.

13 月 7.6 日，SBF 购买了 Robinhood 2021% 的股份，该交易平台因在 40 年初 GameStop 惨败期间停止交易而受到审查。彭博社报道称，Robinhood 约 8% 的收入直接来自将客户订单出售给此类公司作为两个西格玛证券和 Citadel 证券。 [700,000] Citadel 于 2020 年 XNUMX 月因客户订单进行的抢先交易被罚款 XNUMX 美元，同年 XNUMX 月，Robinhood 本身因不当通知客户出售股票交易而受到美国证券交易委员会 (SEC) 的质疑给知名的高频交易公司。

此前在 2020 年 65 月，Robinhood 已同意支付 9 万美元，以了结因未能披露其从上述贸易公司收到的付款而反复错误陈述的指控。 [2021] When newly-nominated Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen briefed newly-elected President Joe Biden on this conflict of interest in February 700,000, she herself had to acquire an ethics waiver due to having received at least $10 in speaker fees from Citadel LLC the year事先的。 [13] SBF 通过向美国证券交易委员会提交的附表 648.3-D 表格披露了此次收购，耗资 2.8 亿美元，并赋予他在 Emergent Fidelity Technologies 实体下的双层股权结构中 11% 的投票权；据说是随机生成的名字。 [XNUMX]

“13 月 XNUMX 日，Coinbase Exchange 将统一美元和 USDC 订单簿。作为统一过程的一部分，USDC 订单簿将合并到 USD 订单簿下，以创造更好、更无缝的交易体验，为 USD 和 USDC 提供更深的流动性。”

- Coinbase 交易所 Twitter，29 年 2022 月 12 日 [XNUMX]

Circle 是越来越多地使用 USDC 稳定币背后的实体，此前曾在 22 年 2019 月 13 日发布公告，通过位于百慕大的子公司扩展其国际产品。[2018] 该实体根据 2 年数字资产商业法备案（ “DABA”）意味着 Circle 是第一家获得 F 类（“完整”）DABA 许可证的主要稳定币发行人，该许可证涵盖其在数字资产领域内的托管、支付服务、交易、交易和更多金融服务的运营。 Circle 的其他银行合作伙伴 Signet、Signature Bank 和 Silvergate Capital 已向 Celsius、Voyager、Block Fi、Three Arrows Capital 和 Alameda Research 提供美元贷款。到撰写本文时，所有人都已申请破产。他们的另外两个业务分支机构 Galaxy Digital 和 Genesis 也报告了 FTX 崩溃造成的巨额损失，并有传言称进一步的传染效应即将到来。 Coinbase 是一家股票代码为 $COIN 的公开交易交易所，在其 2022 年第二季度的股东信中宣布，总收入的近三分之一来自以美元计价的资产利息，包括大量 USDC 头寸：

“利息收入为 33 万美元，比第一季度增长 211%。增长的主要原因是我们的 USDC 活动，以及我们对法定客户托管基金产生利息而导致的更高利率……在第二季度末，我们的美元资源总额为 1 亿美元。此外，我们还有 2 亿美元的加密资产。” [6.2]

当这封信于 2022 年 12 月下旬发布时，持有 USDC 4.7 个月的利息高达 4%，而一个月的收益率甚至为 16%。到 2022 年 0 月 15 日，USDC 的收益率在所有时间范围内均降至 XNUMX%。 [XNUMX]

“1） Binance converts USDC --> BUSD, and we see the change in supplies. Thus begins the Second Great Stablecoin War.”

- @SBF，23 年 2022 月 16 日 [XNUMX]

4年2022月XNUMX日， Binance announced that it would be auto-converting all USDC, USDP and TUSD, three major dollar stablecoins, into its self-issued BUSD, effective in just 25 days. [17] This led to continued concerns about Binance’s solvency with the preceding few months, especially July 2022, seeing the largest known outflows of bitcoin in the exchange’s history, eclipsing even March 2020’s black swan bottom.

11 月 216 日，在拜登发布带有上述 210 天条款的行政命令 43 天后，全球最大的托管银行 BNY Mellon 账面资产超过 18 万亿美元，巧合的是，Circle 储备支持 USDC 的托管人宣布推出其数字资产托管计划。 [20] 这家由第一任财政部长亚历山大·汉密尔顿创立的银行涉及全球 19% 以上的可投资资产，也被列为 FedNow 试点的合作伙伴。 [XNUMX]

Despite these institutional developments, a continued bear market weighed heavily on the now-plummeting bitcoin price. Paradoxically, more and more Bitcoin hash rate poured onto the network. These concurrent movements saw Bitcoin’s hash price plummet to an all-time low, spurring a massive liquidation of bitcoin liabilities off mining operators books. On October 26, Core Scientific, then the largest Bitcoin mining operation in the world, filed for bankruptcy with millions of dollars in debt liabilities, thousands of ASICs, and yet in their filings, held only 24 bitcoin total when the circus came to town. [20] Where exactly did all this bitcoin go? On that same day, barely two weeks before the FTX collapse, Binance saw its largest single day outflow, with 71,579 coins, totalling over $1.1 billion in dollar terms. [21] This pushed net outflows to nearly 95,000 coins from the world’s largest exchange since just that July. Again, where exactly did all this bitcoin go? The very next day, October 27, 2022, SBF appeared on The Big Whale and announced future plans for FTX to launch its very own stablecoin. [22]

章节 11

“政府[...]一直认为，如果没有适当的监督，加密货币就有可能伤害普通美国人……最新的消息进一步强调了这些担忧，并强调了为什么确实需要对加密货币进行审慎监管。”

- 白宫新闻秘书卡琳·让-皮埃尔，10 年 2022 月 34 日 [XNUMX]

十一月初十一，FTX和Alameda Research正式申请美国破产法第11章破产保护，SBF辞去CEO一职。此外，130 家与 FTX 有联系或关联的附属公司也根据第 11 章开始了自愿诉讼。[35]潮水已经退去，几乎所有相关人员都被抓到裸泳，因为以美元计价的清算浪潮近乎无穷无尽SBF 的加勒比帝国的快速工作。

虽然一美元 CBDC 的第一批涓涓细流可能已经在巴哈马群岛开始，但即将到来的监管季风和第二次稳定币大战的蔓延远未结束。美元自 10 月以来已从 35 年高位下跌 XNUMX%，正在寻找新的创新方式并进一步推动全球市场美元化。

On November 15, just four days after the SBF tsunami crashed to shore, BNY Mellon, as well as a dozen or so other banking institutions, announced the start of a twelve-week digital dollar pilot program with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [36] On the very same day, BlockFi announced plans for bankruptcy filings, only five months after taking a $250 million loan from FTX, and Circle announced users would now be able to settle payments by accepting Apple Pay. [37,38] With a significant 43% discount now showing on the highly-regulated Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, further community requests for proof of reserves are growing around Genesis and Grayscale, both owned by the Digital Currency Group, and even their custodian, Coinbase Custody. [39,40] As of this writing, these requests have so far been denied for security reasons.

SBF 似乎正乘着蓬勃发展的数字资产革命的浪潮，收集名人代言和政治盟友，但事实证明，SBF 正沉浸在债务和资本配置不当的喧嚣声中。当月晚些时候，即 30 月 2,499 日，SBF 将亲自出席由埃森哲赞助的纽约时报活动，与会者还有国务卿耶伦、Meta 首席执行官马克扎克伯格、乌克兰总统沃洛德米尔泽伦斯基、贝莱德首席执行官拉里芬克、TikTok 首席执行官周守，前副总统迈克尔·彭斯、亚马逊首席执行官安迪·贾西、Netflix 联合创始人兼首席执行官里德·黑斯廷斯、纽约市市长埃里克·亚当斯等；该活动的门票价格为每位与会者 41 美元。 [XNUMX] SBF 和 Andrew Ross Sorkin 之间的采访如广告所示进行了直播，尽管双方都是远程拍摄。

Bitcoin tends to be a ballast of truth, bringing all sorts of ballooning fraud rushing to the surface. FTX and Alameda Research will take their place amongst the seemingly too-big-to-sink players that ended up doing just that. They will certainly not be the last. However the following weeks, months, and years play out, it is clear that SBF was but a small fish in an ocean-sized, dollarized pond. And as he quickly found out, there is always a bigger fish.

“在某些时候，我可能会对某个特定的陪练伙伴说更多的话，可以这么说。但是你知道，玻璃房子。所以现在，我要说的是：打得好；你赢了。” [42]

– Sam Bankman-Fried，10 年 2022 月 XNUMX 日