I came across this really good summary of FTX's fraud on Reddit the other day:<p>"SBF/Alameda's initial strategy was arbitraging price differences between US and Korea/Japan. The different crypto exchanges in different countries would have different prices for the same coin. In theory this was possible but in practice it was basically impossible. They lost money in Korea due to capital controls, they made some money in Japan but still lost money overall due to the enormous amounts they had to borrow and the high interest rates they were paying.<p>The arbitrage strategy wasn't working so they switched to shilling shitcoins. Basically they would create a new token backed by say $5m seed money, put like 1% of the total number of tokens created on the market, then use their own money to pump up the token price by 100x. Since they owned and controlled 99% of the total amount of tokens, this was easy to do. Now their initial $5m is worth $500m, but only on paper because liquidity on these tokens is tiny and if they actually tried to sell it would immediately crash.<p>Alameda did this in order to get loans using the tokens that they created and pumped as collateral. Then they took the borrowed money to make large directional bets on crypto prices. However it turned out they were bad at trading crypto and took billions in losses and the margin calls started coming in for their loans.<p>At this point Alameda was stuck, the collateral backing these loans were all shitcoins and if they started selling them the price would crash causing the entire company to go under. Since SBF couldn't meet the margin calls by liquidating the underlying collateral, he and the other founders decided to steal money from customer accounts at FTX to meet the margin calls. Basically they would give Alameda their own FTX token(FTT) and then have FTX loan customer funds to Alameda using the tokens they just gave them as "collateral". It was essentially the same scam as the one they pulled on lenders, only now they're doing it to customers while promising they would never touch customer funds.<p>Alameda kept losing money and eventually the scheme was discovered and it ended up being they stole something like 2/3 of the customer funds at FTX. Current estimates are at about $10 billion they lost gambling on crypto with customer money. It was a classic case of a gambler kept doubling down and borrowing and stealing until it came crashing down."
The entire crypto sector is fraudulent and hidden behind layers of nonsensical theory.<p>What started as a way to anonymously pay for illegal services on the dark net, morphed into a Ponzi scheme aimed at low IQ tech bros.
Good question.<p>The simple answer is that they were doing many transactions internally. If you kept your BTC at FTX, FTX should have put your BTC in their wallet. Even though FTX customers would have been able to trade with each other off-chain, the total amount of BTC at FTX should have been visible.<p>They must have been playing some kind of shell game that made this kind of auditing ineffective.
I had the same question, and the past 2-3 weeks I am still not able to find the answer.<p>If FTX gave alameda shit tons of FTT and customer funds from FTX reserves by 'transferring' the amount, it should have been visible on the blockchain.<p>The FTX collapse happened only because of an internal balance sheet leaked to coindesk. Why did coindesk require a balance sheet to write the story? Coindesk probably could have just done it, by looking into the blockchain ledger instead of the balance sheet.
Maybe the answer is as simple as you have to be looking for it. How many naysayers or watchdogs understand it enough to know where to look? All I know is it would be very sad if all of crypto vanishes because of a relatively miniscule number of bandits.
These scams are alot easier to catch when central banks don't have a too big to fail policy that ensures bailouts will always be available when things get too bad.