走向破產：山姆·班克曼-弗里德的興衰

By Bitcoin 雜誌 - 7 個月前 - 閱讀時間：17 分鐘
5 年 2023 月 2 日星期四下午 00:XNUMX

走向破產：山姆·班克曼-弗里德的興衰

本文收錄於 Bitcoin 雜誌 「破碎的問題」。 點此即刻訂閱.

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.

“The Times 03 / Jan / 2009 Chancellor瀕臨銀行的第二輪救助”

- Satoshi Nakamoto, January 3, 2009

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.

“如果你認為巴哈馬破壞了你的全球稅收體系，那麼你的全球稅收體係就非常糟糕。”

- Steven Dean, Summer 2020 [1]

推出穩定幣，CBDC 競相觸底

巴哈馬群島似乎無傷大雅，但美國避稅的歷史由來已久，在禁酒令時代還存在朗姆酒走私者。延續這一傳統，截至 2022 年 2008 月，包括巴哈馬群島和開曼群島在內的加勒比海銀行中心是第四大國債外國持有者，僅次於日本、中國和英國。充分利用了從 XNUMX 年金融危機開始的自由貨幣時代，並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.

"What is the reserve currency of the crypto economy going to be? Right now it's unambiguously the USD. And interestingly it's USD whether or not you're looking at the American crypto economy."

- Sam Bankman-Fried, November 5, 2021

雖然美國政府當時假裝擔心系統性風險，但中國政府將 Libra 項目理解為傳聞中包括在其籃子中的 G7 貨幣的後門美元化。 Metaverse 持有 1985 年廣場協議，這一協調中央銀行計劃將在互聯網最大網絡中傳播美元網絡用戶，通過集中數字支付的高速加速，並通過 Facebook 用戶群的無國界性質實現全球化.

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 納伊布（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.

至此， 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] 顯然是嚴肅的......你想在監管領域正確對待它。”

- President Bill Clinton, April 27, 2022 (Allegedly) [4]

點擊上面的圖片購買 The Broke Issue。

傳染病蔓延

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 作為儲備資產，以防他們的算法穩定幣 UST 偏離其 1 美元的錨定匯率。在他們崩潰之前不久，該計劃已經膨脹到一個崇高的目標，即在人類已知的最難識別的數字商品中積累超過 10 億美元。此次購買由三箭資本 (Three Arrows Capital) 或 3AC 提供資金，並由加密貨幣經紀人 Genesis 提供便利。

"Terra's remarkable growth has continuously reshaped crypto markets over the last two years”, said Joshua Lim, head of derivatives at Genesis. “Genesis is excited to be a liquidity partner to the Terra ecosystem, connecting it to a broader audience of institutional market participants."

隨著 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 被轉移到 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 擊中 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 購買了 Robinhood 2021% 的股份，該交易平台因在 40 年初 GameStop 慘敗期間停止交易而受到審查。彭博社報導稱，Robinhood 約 8% 的收入直接來自將客戶訂單出售給此類公司作為兩個西格瑪證券和 Citadel 證券。 [700,000] Citadel 於 2020 年 XNUMX 月因客戶訂單進行的搶先交易被罰款 XNUMX 美元，同年 XNUMX 月，Robinhood 本身因不當通知客戶出售股票交易而受到美國證券交易委員會 (SEC) 的質疑給知名的高頻交易公司。

此前在 2020 年 65 月，Robinhood 已同意支付 9 萬美元，以了結因未能披露其從上述貿易公司收到的付款而反复錯誤陳述的指控。 [2021] 當新提名的財政部長珍妮特·耶倫在 700,000 年 10 月向新當選的總統喬·拜登介紹這一利益衝突時，她本人不得不獲得道德豁免，因為她當年從 Citadel LLC 那裡收到了至少 13 美元的演講費事先的。 [648.3] SBF 通過向美國證券交易委員會提交的附表 2.8-D 表格披露了此次收購，耗資 11 億美元，並賦予他在 Emergent Fidelity Technologies 實體下的雙層股權結構中 XNUMX% 的投票權；據說是隨機生成的名字。 [XNUMX]

“13 月 XNUMX 日，Coinbase Exchange 將統一美元和 USDC 訂單簿。作為統一過程的一部分，USDC 訂單簿將合併到 USD 訂單簿下，以創造更好、更無縫的交易體驗，為 USD 和 USDC 提供更深的流動性。”

- Coinbase Exchange Twitter, June 29, 2022 [12]

Circle 是越來越多地使用 USDC 穩定幣背後的實體，此前曾在 22 年 2019 月 13 日發佈公告，通過位於百慕大的子公司擴展其國際產品。[2018] 該實體根據 2 年數字資產商業法備案（ “DABA”）意味著 Circle 是第一家獲得 F 類（“完整”）DABA 許可證的主要穩定幣發行人，該許可證涵蓋其在數字資產領域內的託管、支付服務、交易、交易和更多金融服務的運營。 Circle 的其他銀行合作夥伴 Signet、Signature Bank 和 Silvergate Capital 已向 Celsius、Voyager、Block Fi、Three Arrows Capital 和 Alameda Research 提供美元貸款。到撰寫本文時，所有人都已申請破產。他們的另外兩個業務分支機構 Galaxy Digital 和 Genesis 也報告了 FTX 崩潰造成的巨額損失，並有傳言稱進一步的傳染效應即將到來。 Coinbase 是一家股票代碼為 $COIN 的公開交易交易所，在其 2022 年第二季度的股東信中宣布，總收入的近三分之一來自以美元計價的資產利息，包括大量 USDC 頭寸：

“利息收入為 33 萬美元，比第一季度增長 211%。增長的主要原因是我們的 USDC 活動，以及我們對法定客戶託管基金產生利息而導致的更高利率……在第二季度末，我們的美元資源總額為 1 億美元。此外，我們還有 2 億美元的加密資產。” [6.2]

當這封信於 2022 年 12 月下旬發佈時，持有 USDC 4.7 個月的利息高達 4%，而一個月的收益率甚至為 16%。到 2022 年 0 月 15 日，USDC 的收益率在所有時間範圍內均降至 XNUMX%。 [XNUMX]

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

- @SBF, October 23, 2022 [16]

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，在拜登發布帶有上述 210 天條款的行政命令 43 天后，全球最大的託管銀行 BNY Mellon 賬面資產超過 18 萬億美元，巧合的是，Circle 儲備支持 USDC 的託管人宣布推出其數字資產託管計劃。 [20] 這家由第一任財政部長亞歷山大·漢密爾頓創立的銀行涉及全球 19% 以上的可投資資產，也被列為 FedNow 試點的合作夥伴。 [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, 核心科學, 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11

“The administration [...] has consistently maintained that without proper oversight, cryptocurrencies risk harming everyday Americans…The most recent news further underscores these concerns and highlights why prudent regulation of cryptocurrencies is indeed needed.”

- White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, November 10, 2022 [34]

十一月初十一，FTX和Alameda Research正式申請美國破產法第11章破產保護，SBF辭去CEO一職。此外，130 家與 FTX 有聯繫或關聯的附屬公司也根據第 11 章開始了自願訴訟。[35]潮水已經退去，幾乎所有相關人員都被抓到裸泳，因為以美元計價的清算浪潮近乎無窮無盡SBF 的加勒比帝國的快速工作。

雖然一美元 CBDC 的第一批涓涓細流可能已經在巴哈馬群島開始，但即將到來的監管季風和第二次穩定幣大戰的蔓延遠未結束。美元自 10 月以來已從 35 年高位下跌 XNUMX%，正在尋找新的創新方式並進一步推動全球市場美元化。

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 似乎正乘著蓬勃發展的數字資產革命的浪潮，收集名人代言和政治盟友，但事實證明，SBF 正沉浸在債務和資本配置不當的喧囂聲中。當月晚些時候，即 30 月 2,499 日，SBF 將親自出席由埃森哲贊助的紐約時報活動，與會者還有國務卿耶倫、Meta 首席執行官馬克扎克伯格、烏克蘭總統沃洛德米爾澤倫斯基、貝萊德首席執行官拉里芬克、TikTok 首席執行官周守，前副總統邁克爾·彭斯、亞馬遜首席執行官安迪·賈西、Netflix 聯合創始人兼首席執行官里德·黑斯廷斯、紐約市市長埃里克·亞當斯等；該活動的門票價格為每位與會者 41 美元。 [XNUMX] SBF 和 Andrew Ross Sorkin 之間的採訪如廣告所示進行了直播，儘管雙方都是遠程拍攝。

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.

“在某些時候，我可能會對某個特定的陪練夥伴說更多的話，可以這麼說。但是你知道，玻璃房子。所以現在，我要說的是：打得好；你贏了。” [42]

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

本文收錄於 Bitcoin 雜誌 「破碎的問題」。 點此即刻訂閱.