CEO of Alameda explained how they lost it all
All-Hands meeting:
FTX Ventures was a large money sink. These various illiquid assets were also money sinks. I think one of the investments was like 1bb on a crypto mining company that went bankrupt? Alameda had also bought out Binance’s stake in FTX for ~1-2bb.
FTX was buying luxury apartments in The Bahamas, building an office in The Bahamas and then currently in the middie of building a newer, costlier office that would be in the shape of an F. Stadium naming rights, advertisements, endorsements also aren't cheap.
It's important to note that at this point in time, none of the user funds had been touched and this had all come from mainly from Alameda loaning FTX money and being given FTT as collateral. Alameda was able to loan so much money to FTX partly because they just had a lot of money, but also because they had many loans themsevies from lenders such as Genesis.
Getting loans at that time was generally pretty easy. There is where the hole in the balance sheet came from Around 6 months ago.
LUNA crashed to 0, sending reverberations across the crypto world as they wiped out ~800bb in market value. Alameda didn't actually lose much money directly from Luna crashing, in fact they were probably net short at the time of the crash.
However, the Luna crash caused many firms to become liquidated, the most notable one being 3 Arrows Capital(3AC). 3AC had taken out a ton of loans (see point above about loans being easy to get), and 3AC defaulting caused a lot of these loaners to go bankrupt.
This event created what is known as the “credit crunch”. In the credit crunch, many loaners suddenly recalled all of their loans just to see who was still liquid.
Alameda lost a lot from giving out loans to firms who defaulted. Alameda was now also on the hook for money they didn't have, since they had given a lot of the loan money to FTX or had lost it loaning to now bankrupt counterparties.
SBF had two choices at this point, let Alameda get liquidated or send user money from FTX to ensure Alameda’s survival.
As you read online, SBF chose the latter. From this point onwards, it was just a ticking time bomb before the truth was found out and both FTX and Alameda liquidated.
No one at FTX or Alameda knew how much was spent and that FTX user funds had been used to save Alameda. All the credit crunch did was expedite how quickly FTX/Alameda's frivolous spending would be found out. Caroline painted Alameda and FTX getting liquidated as a likely event rather than a tail event (which would've been helpful to know before they hired me...).
It was also revealed at this time that Binance had stepped away from their deal to acquire FTX, citing that the hole in the balance sheet was too big to fill.
