저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
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2022년 11월 FTX 파산 직후 크립토 폭락 상황을 다룬 토론이다. 결론: FTX 사태는 단순 유동성 위기가 아니라 고객 자금을 Alameda로 유용한 사기에 가깝다는 시각이 중심이다. FTX 사태 경위: 출연자는 Alameda가 이전 크립토 충격(Terra Luna, Voyager, Celsius, Three Arrows)에서 큰 손실을 봤고, 이후 SBF가 고객 자금을 Alameda로 빌려주거나 지원해 붕괴를 막으려 한 것이 선을 넘은 지점이라고 주장한다. 그는 SBF가 사기를 저질렀을 가능성과 투자자·고객에게 거짓말을 했을 가능성을 언급한다. 파산 절차 전망: 파산법원이 자산을 찾아 매각하고 고객에게 배분하는 과정이 Madoff 사례처럼 수년 걸릴 수 있다고 본다. SBF가 Robinhood 지분 약 9%를 보유한다는 언급이 있다. 비교 논의: Larry Summers의 'Lehman보다 Enron에 가깝다'는 견해에 동의하며, 고객 자금 이전이 핵심 사기 행위라고 본다. 규제 전망: 중앙화 거래소(커스터디·거래소)는 기존 금융 규제 틀에 넣어야 하며, 미국은 상품(commodity)과 증권(security) 구분, CFTC와 SEC 관할 문제가 불명확해 규제 불확실성이 크다고 지적한다. 집행 중심 규제(regulation by enforcement)가 미국 밖으로 거래를 밀어냈다고 주장하며, 거래량의 약 95%가 미국 밖에서 이뤄진다고 말한다. 탈중앙 영역: 스마트컨트랙트 감사 가능성과 자기 수탁 지갑의 장점을 강조하고, 소셜 리커버리 등 기술적 보완 필요성을 언급한다. 토큰 경제 비판: 가치 근거 없이 만들어진 토큰이 담보로 쓰이는 구조가 문제이며, FTT 같은 거래소 토큰의 실질 유용성은 의문이라고 본다. 다만 토큰 자체를 부정하지는 않고, 기업 자금조달 목적 토큰은 증권으로 규제 등록하고, 실제 탈중앙 프로토콜 토큰은 다른 규제 틀(CFTC)로 다루자고 제안한다. 개인 회고: SBF와 여러 차례 만났으며 신뢰할 만한 인물로 봤고 사기를 예상하지 못했다고 밝힌다. 2021년 FTX 매출이 약 10억 달러 수준이었는데 자금 출처가 설명되지 않아 의문을 가졌다고 말한다. 2022년 17억 달러 라운드 제안 때 이사회 구성, 듀얼 클래스 문서, 특수관계자 거래 진술보증 등을 요구했으나 거절당했다고 회상한다. 출연자 전망: 이번 사태는 일시적 후퇴이며 크립토는 계속 존재할 것이라고 보고, 미국에서 명확한 규제가 만들어져 국내 기업이 세계 금융 허브에서 서비스하길 기대한다. 투자 관련 특이사항: 개별 자산(BTC 포함) 가격의 1~3개월 방향에 대한 구체적 예측은 없다. 앞으로 크립토 산업이 존속한다는 장기 견해만 제시되어 있다.
다듬은 글
do you think now that we have to open the gates on regulation like the whole point of crypto in some ways was you know trust nobody and you know decentralization is the key but here what we see is a lot of people were tricked into trusting FTX and having their deposits there and it was a centralized exchange which caused all these problems so it's like it almost violates the principles of what the whole product Market fit was supposed to be so what should sort of the Observer expect and what do you expect as a business in terms of how governments now react to all of this I think the problem is bigger than FTX and I'll say the uncomfortable part out loud and nobody needs to necessarily comment if you don't want to but there were an enormous number of venture firms that Hawk their their way into just completely doing zero work I mean the tip of the spear is this thing well who's the guy that works at Founders on bulgar that tweet that he had where he basically took the snapshot of the Sequoia transcript was one of the funniest things that I've ever seen I mean this was a 215 million dollar decision and Sequoia documented it and put it on their own website and I think that's an example of something that was happening which is people just looked the other way and didn't even want to do the layer of work a lot to unpack but maybe we can just take a step back and for the uninitiated or for the person who's only been just following this very superficially can you just in a nutshell explain what happened yeah so my understanding is and again this is from people I've talked to and I spoke with Sam and CZ briefly during this but I didn't get details from them I got it from other people I spoke to Sam about you know he was trying to raise emergency financing and things like that and I spoke to Cece about why he was considering buying the asset I thought it was a bad idea but my understanding of what happened at this point again I don't have all the facts this is just my my understanding is that you know FTX was in a position where they had this Market maker Alameda that was investing in Risky things and that's fine like market makers hedge funds they're designed to take more risk it appears at this point that back during the last uh shakeup in the crypto industry where you know it's Terra Luna and Voyager and Celsius and three arrows went under it appears that Alameda took a big loss at that time as well they may have even been underwater and instead of just saying hey you know this hedge fund's going to blow up too which would have been unfortunate people would you know Sam would have lost money it's embarrassing but it's not illegal for a hedge fund to blow up it happens with some regularity instead of just letting it blow up it seems like at this point he took customer funds so it seems they had this solvency issue and instead of just letting it blow up Sam basically said hey we have a bunch of customer assets over here at FTX or he somehow basically made a loan from FTX into Alameda to try to prop it up I don't know why he did that I mean that's the moment in my mind where he crossed the line into probably committing fraud and I I think he probably lied to users lied to investors and he went around and tried to bail out these different companies like like Voyager and blockfy and to sort of prop up this thing and maybe he thought he could trade his way out of it or something I I'm not sure but that seems to be where the mistake was made this happens in the public markets a lot as well so like when you see heavily shorted names or when you know that certain hedge funds are on the brink other hedge funds will go in and essentially force a margin call and a stop out because then it's what causes all these runs and if you look actually inside of GameStop the reason why you got all this gamification application in the game stock equity and a bunch of these other names was in part because of this Dynamic folks that are highly levered folks that don't have the right matching of risk and what happens is they're solvent but a liquid and then if you run the instrument into the ground they both become insolvent and illiquid all at the same time Brian the question is now that we know what happened which is all of these crazy inner party related transactions and you know all of this stuff seems very illegal there is a bankruptcy filing today and up until today it seemed like this issue was really about FTX International and Alameda and it didn't touch FTX us which for a lot a long time tried to position itself as you know well run and regulated as coinbase to be you know they tried to say that but now if you look inside the Wall Street Journal all the Articles say that this is actually FTX group so the whole thing seems to be imperiled can you just help us explain that because there now that's a lot of us people that were following the rules thinking that this thing was matched one to one that maybe also affected look I I don't know who inside ftx's and its orbit of companies actually knew that the the fraud had been taking place I it would not surprise me if FTX U.S people and employees had no idea that this was happening I'm imagining if Sam was doing when he when he started doing this he probably wanted to keep it to a very small group otherwise this is the kind of thing that leaks and the whole thing blows up now that being said I don't necessarily think FTX us is worth anything as a business right now because of the brand being so tainted and there probably was not great separation of these entities in the sense of you know like did they have truly separate boards and beneficial owners and governance and it Sam seems to have you know it appears that they did FDX didn't really have a CFO or maybe even like a real board or anything like that and so it's hard to imagine we found it there was an article that appeared that said that the head of compliance at FTX was also the head of compliance at a poker site called ultimate bet which in the 2010s did this exact thing apparently some version of this where they went in and they looked at whole cards of poker players and then a few employees inside the business would basically play against these folks knowing what the whole cards were ran this cheat stole millions of dollars so now what happens now is you have the international business and the US business and Alameda research all rolled up into this one Frozen entity right so do you know what happens in a process like this like is it that the the doj and the SEC get priority or is there some international monetary like who unwinds all of this how how do people get their money back if at all so I'm not an expert at this but my high level understanding is that the bankruptcy courts will essentially the bankruptcy court will basically go through and try to find any assets of value so I mean they must they still have some tokens and value they have a venture portfolio they you know I think Sam owns nine percent of Robin Hood there's various things that they may own and then they'll kind of auction those off to various bidders on distressed assets and then try to distribute those funds to the customers I don't know the exact process beyond that though I mean if you remember the Madoff wind down took many years and for years he was uh trying to find assets and then he found a market sold them there's this the trustee and he's still active and then you know it's tried to redistribute the funds obviously so many more customers here than I was with Madoff but it can be a very long and winding process to identify all the assets then run the market sale process on them then figure out who gets what first and then distribute there was an interesting thing that Larry Summers did I think for Bloomberg where he was asked whether this was Lehman or Enron and he said it seems more like an Enron than it is a Lehman and Brian I'm just curious how you think about it like is this sort of a fraud perpetuated by a group of Executives to essentially take advantage of the situation or do you think that this is more like a Lehman situation which is a well-run business I guess that just you know got caught in a liquidity trap my guess is it's a little more like Enron in the sense that I mean yes they were over levered and that kind of thing but the minute that they moved customer funds in some way shape or form to backstop the hedge fund that that was in my mind fraud and you know that's more like Enron do you think now that we have to open the gates on regulation like the whole point of crypto in some ways was you know trust nobody and you know decentralization is the key but here what we see is a lot of people were tricked into trusting FTX and having their deposits there and it was a centralized exchange which caused all these problems so it's like it almost violates the principles of what the whole product Market fit was supposed to be so what what should sort of the Observer expect and what do you expect as a business in terms of how governments now react to all of this I think it's really important to distinguish between the centralized players in crypto which are custodians exchanges Etc coinbase has a big business there and the decentralized players the centralized players should be regulated and today they're regulated already like like kind of traditional Financial Service businesses but they don't have the regulation clear when it comes to the crypto aspects so for instance in the US we we actually don't still have clarity about what is a commodity what's a security should which one should cftc regulator versus SEC that kind of thing and that lack of regulatory Clarity and frankly the climate of Regulation by enforcement the negative rhetoric from you know chair gunzler in particular has created this sort of chilling effect in the US that has pushed a lot of that centralized actors activity offshore in fact 95 of the trading volume in crypto is now outside the United States and it's come down a lot since the beginning of this year even now the decentralized players self-custodial wallets D5 web3 this is where crypto really has an opportunity to make a more fair and free and transparent system because you can go look at any smart contract to see exactly what it's doing anybody can audit the code if you have a self-custodial wallet you you can just trust yourself you don't have to trust any other intermediary out there and that's where you get true decentralization and I think that's actually no those areas still have a couple of their own challenges you know sometimes people will lose their password or their phone and they'll lose their own money so if you're if you're trusting yourself you still have the you have to trust you know that you're going to do that piece correctly but there's a lot of good things we can do there around making social recovery mechanisms and NPC wallets and things like that to me it seems the whole issue if you come back like what is the first string that you pulled that unraveled the sweater was the fact that these tokens were created out of thin air they had no meaningful value somebody prescribed a value and all of a sudden everybody else in the economy all of a sudden said yeah I'll take that as collateral look you cannot do that in the regular World explain like there's a ton of these tokens that have been engineered and there's been a ton of these tokens that have been sold so what should people do that own these things thinking that there was going to be some safety or value or like how do you think about all of these tokens that are that that could be as basically as as fragile and shitty and worthless as ftt there is this concept of like an exchange token and there's a couple other firms out there that have them and that's something we haven't done and I do I think I think you're right like the actual utility of those things is a little questionable but look I don't want to throw out the entire concept of people creating tokens I think there's actually a lot of good stuff there and it comes down to this idea of if you're trying to raise money for your company and through a token that's fine that should be a security and there should be a regulated way to do that in the US like go register it with the SEC you know let it trade on broker dealers that's that's what we've been wanting to do for a long time and the SEC is taking their time getting there they don't you know cancer to be honest he doesn't seem that excited about the idea of this whole industry Street existing and so anyway but it should it should exist and it should be happening in regulated ways so if people want to issue a token that's raising money for a company let's regulate it as a security if they want to issue a token that's truly on a decentralized protocol or it has some other purpose like voting in a dow or Rewards or something like that then that's probably not a security and let's be honest about that and allow those things to trade in a different environment a different regulator under the cftc so again I'm speculating here I mean I've spent time with I've met him a bunch of times and I have to say I did not see this coming like he he appeared to me to be a very bright credible competent person perhaps a bit young perhaps you know a bit Reckless at times but not unethical and not committing fraud I definitely did not see that if I look back to see were there any warning signs that I should have thought twice about it one of the things I noticed was that in 2021 coinbase had a good year we did 7 billion in Revenue four billion of positive ebitda we went we became public as a company at that time FTX did about 1 billion in revenue and I knew how much money we had for our Venture budget and just like different Investments we wanted to make and I knew their revenue and I had to scratch my head a bunch of times and I was like where is this guy getting all this liquidity because he was like buying nine percent of Robin Hood he was putting like a billion dollars into this he was donating to all these politicians and I was like I it did not make sense to me where he was getting all this cash people just kept telling me Oh his Market maker Alameda is just printing cash like I was like okay I guess you know it seems like a conflict of interest to own an exchange to Market maker that's why we haven't done it but more power to him I guess and so I was surprised I didn't speak up I cannot I can't explain the psychology of it at this point whether he's a pathological liar or if he's started off good and somehow under the pressure of this whole thing went bad but the minute you can you can go watch the interviews he's he's lying to people about why he's bailing out Voyager and blockfi and Nissa and he he knew at that time that most likely he knew at that at that time that they were not solvent Alameda was not solvent and so that's where he crossed a major line in my book I'll tell you an even more explicit signal he pitched Us in that 17 billion dollar round and I did a zoom with him and after the zoom I'm like this doesn't make much sense but I'll have my team do some work we did some work and we sent him a two-page deck and we said here are our recommendations for taking the next step one was the formation of a board the second was the creation of dual class doc the third was some reps and warranties around Affiliated transactions and related party transactions and the person that worked there called us back and literally I'm not kidding you said go [ __ ] yourself was quote unquote the response to us we're like okay so that was the easy decision but I still thought okay I'll just put that in the bucket of these guys are unbelievably arrogant and smug but Brian I thought what you thought which is maybe it's because they've print they've created some money making machine in the Bahamas and so they they have that level of it of confidence it but then to see this thing to the extent event of which is now we're only scratching the surface guys you know that we're going to find out stuff every day I hope that they use this as a moment to come together and help you know local companies in the US being built here to end up in a better place and I do believe you know David I think said it's right it is a political issue at this point there's going to be a major impetus to get the clarity here in the U.S and hopefully to help build the companies here in the US that are going to serve the rest of the world and in every major Financial Hub so we're committed to building that together with all the Regulators around the world and crypto is here to stay this is a temporary setback um but I'm I'm here to keep building and make this thing happen
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