SBF says mea culpa. But obviously believes CZ was never serious about going through with acquiring FTX:
Echoing the contents of his leaked messages from FTX’s Slack earlier in the day.
One might ask why SBF is tweeting throwing stones in glass houses, instead of speaking to lawyers — especially given that most of his legal and compliance team has reportedly quit.
Reportedly SBF is still looking to raise money. With Dan Loeb mentioned as one potential taker. Though the fundraising efforts may be complicated by the fact that Bahamas regulators have frozen FTX’s assets.
On the one hand, even if FTX needs upwards of $8 billion to fill the gaps, which presumably would give the new investors 100% ownership, that would be a lot lower than the $32 billion FTX was valued at earlier this year. On the other hand the business was probably never inherently worth $32 billion, and especially not after what now has transpired.
But it may be too soon to write off FTX entirely yet. One can see a rational for vulture investors to enter the fray.
Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen is pointing out that “the future of crypto exchanges and the future of crypto assets are very different things” — a crucial distinction that have mostly been missed in the media coverage of the FTX debacle, with the likes of Jim Cramer being very quick to declare that the fall of FTX means the death of Bitcoin.
Cowen also speculates that the market for crypto exchanges might evolve into a natural monopoly over time — with Binance looking like the obvious monopolist following FTX’s demise.
It is also true that a dominant clearinghouse is much easier to regulate, and indeed modern central banks often sprung out of these earlier clearinghouse arrangements. Sooner or later, there is a tendency for the law to intervene and turn the dominant private clearinghouse into part of a more formalized central bank.
A future with Binance as the central bank of crypto? It is possible to imagine, even if it would be very far from Satoshi’s original vision.
MarkusReitan 