The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Bankman-Fried: FTX's revenue is clean, clear, and completely transparent
“When you talk about, like, recurring revenue, like, there's sort of, like, doesn't exist a clearer example of that than, like, you know, I don't know, we have volume each day, and we charge a transaction fee on it, right? It's incredibly clean, right? People a…”
Lewis lacked an ending for his SBF book until FTX collapsed
“With Sam Beckman-Fried, I was a year into it, and I did not know what I was gonna do with it until it blew up”
Gilbert: Sarbanes-Oxley shifted corporate fraud from public to private markets
“The result of Sarbanes-Oxley being stay private longer, that it's much more likely that fraud now happens in the private market than the public market, and that is basically what we saw with Theranos, with FTX.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX hired for composure under pressure rather than prior experience
“Experience is very much not what we hire for. Right. In fact, sometimes we're almost like, you know, I wouldn't quite say we're anti-selecting for it, but, like, we like flexibility, and we like, you know, much more than, like, I don't know, we can teach thing…”
Bankman-Fried: Becoming the second largest crypto exchange would be a 'C' grade
“I think the plausible C is we just kind of don't really grow, you know, like you kind of look back at us like, you know, in a year and you're like, where is F, or in five years, you know, where is FTX now? And the answer is like, you know, they're like, you kn…”
Bankman-Fried: FTX ranks third globally by volume and second by open interest
“Today, we are the third biggest by volume. We're the second biggest by open interest and actually pretty close to first, I just realized.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX endorsement deals are for brand building, not customer acquisition
“When you look at sort of the customer acquisition side, I think it's easy to see a lot of the endorsement deals that we've done and think of that as like customer acquisition. It's actually not really how we think of it. It's not the most effective way to acqu…”
Bankman-Fried: FTX typically processes $15B in daily global volume
“And I, you know, we have fifteen billion dollars of volume globally in the last day. That, that's about typical for us. You know, that, that's typically where we are.”
Rosenthal: Acquired regrets lending its podcast platform to Sam Bankman-Fried
“We lent our platform to Sam and to FTX, and yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time, and I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies, so.”
Gilbert: EnronOnline Launched in November 1999 as Counterparty to Every Trade
“In November of 99, they launched something called Enron Online, and what this is, is it allows all of Enron's counterparties to trade with them electronically. So they stand up and exchange, like an exchange you can access through a web browser, much like FTX,…”
Gilbert: Enron differed from FTX by operating publicly with larger sums
“The biggest difference really is that somehow Enron managed to do it all as a public company in plain daylight the entire time and with much bigger dollar amounts.”
Bankman-Fried: Aggressive headcount growth creates uncontrollable organizations
“Because I think if you, sort of, like, if you're too aggressive about, like, overgrowing the team, then you get this, sort of, monstrosity that no one can control anymore, and these are, like, an underestimated factor often, and we see time and time again this…”
Bankman-Fried: Gary Wang wrote FTX's core risk engine in three weeks
“Yeah, it's basically true. And obviously it's gone through a lot of iteration over time, but I mean, I think like he's an incredibly impressive person.”
Bankman-Fried: US spot Bitcoin is clean legally but hard to differentiate
“If you look at the US crypto ecosystem the product that is
Relatively clean, at least today, to get off the ground is a spot Bitcoin USD, right? And the thing about that is that it's clean, but it's not super compelling as a product. It's like a lot of people…”
Acquired's podcast revenue plummeted 40% during the late 2022 advertising downturn
“So end of 22 FTX happens interest rates go up, you know, all the podcast advertising market, you know, falls off a cliff. Our revenue dropped 40%.”
Bankman-Fried: The Blockfolio acquisition marked FTX's shift toward mainstream retail
“It represented a pretty clear, I don't know if shift in strategy is quite right, but at least a pretty clear, like, a strategy that we'd not previously been emphasizing. Where I, you know, we're looking beyond the power user. And I think it was sort of the sem…”
Gilbert: FTX grew trading volume 10x in H1 2021 alone
“And found out that they actually 10 X just in the first half of 2021.”
Gabriele: FTX headcount neared 200 employees by late 2021
“I think it is, you know, just pushing 200, and when I sort of wrote my pieces in, in summer it was closer to, I want to say, 70, 75.”
Bankman-Fried: Early FTX users were split between institutions and individuals
“They were about half and half really. You know, the thing that, that really, you know, set them apart was less being institutions and more being power users. And I, some of those were institutions, some of those were individuals.”