Alright, I just crawled from under a rock.<p>Reading all these articles and tweets about FTX and Binance -- and frankly I have no freaking idea what is the background.<p>So would any kind soul enlighten me on what's the backstory here?<p>PS: I think there is a should be a service that provides you a background for any given news article. You paste in the url and it gives you the "need to know before you read this story"
This also is good. I googled “ELI5 FTX”. Regarding the comment below, Binance was asked to buy FTX, and they inspected their books - and found $6B missing. Whether that was embezzlement or poor reinvestment, I don’t know.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yr3ypv/comment/ivs2i9c/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yr3ypv/c...</a>
Pretty confusing, but finance always seemed like voodoo to me.<p>Here is an explanation that seems biased against CZ (Changpeng Zhao).[1]<p>Here is an explanation that seems biased against SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried).[2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSLmnH0QKPk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSLmnH0QKPk</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbDeQRsMJY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbDeQRsMJY</a>
Super oversimplification:<p>FTX was an exchange for Cryptos. No problems there. They also offered a coin of their own. Also, no problems.<p>But then they borrowed a bunch of money against the value of their coin. Fundamentally not good, because it means they now owe customers more money than the customers put in.<p>There was also a trading house that they ran on their own exchange, a competitor who might have triggered the collapse as a prank (Binance), and an over exuberant owner who always seemed to be above this sort of mess.