Bernie Madoff reported data to the public that was clearly fake.
If there wouldn’t have been a run on FTX and they could have slowly sold their FTT tokens to turn them into money, their balance sheet would have again been fine. Something similar was never an option with Bernie Madoff.
Are you saying that Madoff would have been less of a fraud if he had sold some of his hairs for $1,000 each to co-conspirators, then noted down the market value of his remaining hair in the billions and posted it as collateral for debts and also as backing for people invested in his Ponzi scheme?
I guess that’s technically true because people should’ve known what they’re buying (FTT worked as advertized*). But it seems like a small difference to me.
*EXCEPT that no one advertized that it would be used to secure deposits or be relied on heavily as collateral.
The FTT token was freely traded and held by plenty of people who aren’t co-conspirators and it used to be valued at a price where it would have enough collateral for the debt. On the other hand, nobody holds Madoff hair who wouldn’t be a co-conspirator.
There’s no realistic future world where you could expect any money to made by selling his hair, but the same isn’t true for the FTT tokens. You can easily sell a small portion with them at the price. It’s just that you can’t sell billions worth of them at once.
FTX had $1 billion yearly revenue in 2021 which is a 1000% year-over-year improvement. 20 billion market cap for FTX is a 20x revenue multiple. 20x revenue multiples for startups aren’t uncommon and 1000% year-over-year improvement means startup.
I think that revenue is mostly trading fees which are a reasonable service. The speculative profits seem to be made by Alameda.
You can argue with all startups about whether or not they are overpriced but it’s qualitatively different than Madoff hair which has zero market value.
FTX was working on new financial products like prediction markets as well, so even in a crypto downturn, they could expand to new markets.
If you take the business part of the business and separate it from the Ponzi part of the business, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. But apparently it was a package deal—at least until Alameda were to weather the crypto crash? Like, we just need to siphon FTX customer funds over to Alameda until they recoup $8-10 billion over time in profits, which have not been forthcoming lately. But oops, we “forgot” that when we transferred that money over, it affected our financials—there it is, fake books. And that’s not even getting into the laughable valuations of their other “shitcoin” assets, or even of FTT itself, just the flow of funds!
This also speaks to further impairment of FTX’s value by management—if you separate the business part of the business from the management part of the business...and you can to some extent, but the damage has been done. Who is going to trust FTX as an exchange going forward even with a new structure and management team?
Finally, it’s not like Madoff vaporized the money and SBF/FTX/Alameda didn’t. If anything, it’s the opposite; Madoff was a far better steward, making the assets recoverable. SBF/FTX/Alameda simply gambled them away. Put differently, the non-Ponzi part of the business was a bigger share of Madoff’s fund than of SBF’s bundle. Obviously the valuation in either case was fake, based on a multiple of both real assets and Ponzi accounting over time, but Madoff skimmed customer funds while SBF/FTX straight-up embezzled them to prop up the husk of Alameda. In its death throes, FTX was in straight-up Ponzi mode, making withdrawing customers whole to maintain the facade at the expense of those last in line.
I think the comparison is quite apt, and the points of contrast are more interesting than absolving. I was initially hesitant to say there was some fraud/Ponzi beyond just accidentally falling into borderline insolvency, but by this point, especially with how enormous the hole, it looks much more intentional, and Matt Levine has even dropped the P-word because of it.
I’m wondering if one should not think of this as Bernie Madoff 2.0.
Bernie Madoff reported data to the public that was clearly fake.
If there wouldn’t have been a run on FTX and they could have slowly sold their FTT tokens to turn them into money, their balance sheet would have again been fine. Something similar was never an option with Bernie Madoff.
Are you saying that Madoff would have been less of a fraud if he had sold some of his hairs for $1,000 each to co-conspirators, then noted down the market value of his remaining hair in the billions and posted it as collateral for debts and also as backing for people invested in his Ponzi scheme?
I guess that’s technically true because people should’ve known what they’re buying (FTT worked as advertized*). But it seems like a small difference to me.
*EXCEPT that no one advertized that it would be used to secure deposits or be relied on heavily as collateral.
There’s no realistic future world where you could expect any money to made by selling his hair, but the same isn’t true for the FTT tokens. You can easily sell a small portion with them at the price. It’s just that you can’t sell billions worth of them at once.
Who do you suppose will buy them?
FTX had $1 billion yearly revenue in 2021 which is a 1000% year-over-year improvement. 20 billion market cap for FTX is a 20x revenue multiple. 20x revenue multiples for startups aren’t uncommon and 1000% year-over-year improvement means startup.
I think that revenue is mostly trading fees which are a reasonable service. The speculative profits seem to be made by Alameda.
You can argue with all startups about whether or not they are overpriced but it’s qualitatively different than Madoff hair which has zero market value.
FTX was working on new financial products like prediction markets as well, so even in a crypto downturn, they could expand to new markets.
If you take the business part of the business and separate it from the Ponzi part of the business, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. But apparently it was a package deal—at least until Alameda were to weather the crypto crash? Like, we just need to siphon FTX customer funds over to Alameda until they recoup $8-10 billion over time in profits, which have not been forthcoming lately. But oops, we “forgot” that when we transferred that money over, it affected our financials—there it is, fake books. And that’s not even getting into the laughable valuations of their other “shitcoin” assets, or even of FTT itself, just the flow of funds!
This also speaks to further impairment of FTX’s value by management—if you separate the business part of the business from the management part of the business...and you can to some extent, but the damage has been done. Who is going to trust FTX as an exchange going forward even with a new structure and management team?
Finally, it’s not like Madoff vaporized the money and SBF/FTX/Alameda didn’t. If anything, it’s the opposite; Madoff was a far better steward, making the assets recoverable. SBF/FTX/Alameda simply gambled them away. Put differently, the non-Ponzi part of the business was a bigger share of Madoff’s fund than of SBF’s bundle. Obviously the valuation in either case was fake, based on a multiple of both real assets and Ponzi accounting over time, but Madoff skimmed customer funds while SBF/FTX straight-up embezzled them to prop up the husk of Alameda. In its death throes, FTX was in straight-up Ponzi mode, making withdrawing customers whole to maintain the facade at the expense of those last in line.
I think the comparison is quite apt, and the points of contrast are more interesting than absolving. I was initially hesitant to say there was some fraud/Ponzi beyond just accidentally falling into borderline insolvency, but by this point, especially with how enormous the hole, it looks much more intentional, and Matt Levine has even dropped the P-word because of it.