FTX (FTT)

FTX was a Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange

Alameda Research was a trading desk

Basics

• Founded in: 2019 (Alameda in 2017)
• Became known (25-6-2020) for gaming the BAL token when it launched.
• Went under within a week's time in November 2022.
• From Messari (22-1-2020):

"FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange launched in April, 2019 that offers futures, leveraged tokens and over-the-counter (OTC) trading. It is backed by Alameda Research, a trading firm accounting for between $600 million and $1 billion of volume a day or roughly 5% of global volume.

FTX was designed to prevent clawbacks using a three-tiered liquidation model that closes positions with rate-limited orders and leverages an insurance fund to prevent customer losses. Rather than fracturing liquidity across various tokens, collateral is shared in one universal stablecoin wallet to mimic the traditional futures market. FTX also allows traders to take leveraged or short positions without trading on margin or futures with their Leveraged Tokens that mimic the experience of trading on spot markets but allow 3x, -1x or -3x on various tokens. The FTX OTC desk is powered by Alameda and trades around $30 million per day with no fees."

History

• Went bankrupt in November 2022. One of the theories is that FTX provided a massive bailout for Alameda in Q2 which came back to haunt them.
• From Nansen (16-11-2022):

“Piecing together the pieces from our on-chain investigation, it was evident that the Luna/Terra collapse revealed a deep flaw between Alameda and FTX’s muddled relationship. There were significant FTT outflows from Alameda to FTX around the Terra-Luna/ 3AC situation.”

• From The Generalist (8-8-2021):

"Alameda is a crypto investment firm. It was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh to capitalize on the arbitrage opportunity presented in the Asian markets in late 2017. It has grown in the intervening years, becoming one of the most influential allocators in the ecosystem, investing directly in protocols as well as private companies. Several sources confirmed that Alameda may be the single largest investor in the crypto ecosystem, trading billions in assets a day. Alameda was FTX's primary market maker in its early days, providing liquidity. The firm makes up a much smaller percentage of volume today."

Exploits

• The tweet thread (10-2023) by a former engineer, Aditya Baradwaj, lists at least 3 security incidents totaling $190M in losses involving phishing, rugpulls, and even plain text key theft by an alleged insider.
• On November 12, 2022 FTX insider stole $380M from wallets across Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Tron, and Solana chains. The events surrounding the compromised resulted in many unfounded rumors such as a malicious mobile app update and a hacked website. FTX responded by moving remaining assets to new cold storage addresses. USDT and PAXG also responded by freezing attacker’s assets.
• On October 12, 2022 FTX lost about $100K in gas fees when an attacker tricked its withdrawal system to mint tokens.

Token

Utility

• From Messari (22-1-2020):

"33% of all fees generated from the exchange, 10% of net additions to the insurance fund, and 5% of fees from other uses of the platform will be used for repurchase and subsequently burned until half of the total supply is destroyed."

• From The Generalist (8-8-2021):

"Much like Binance’s BNB, FTT grants discounts on fees, along with other benefits. If you choose to stake FTT, perks include enhanced voting power, bonus NFTs, airdropped rewards, and further rebates. FTT can be used towards an account’s collateral requirements, too, something we’ll unpack in a moment. To maintain scarcity and create pricing pressure, FTX “buys and burns” FTT."

Token Details

• Is a centralized token (14-10-2020).
• From their website (20-4-2020):

"FTT — FTX Token

FTT will get socialized gains from the insurance fund on FTX.

FTX will buy and burn FTT equal to 33% of all fees generated on FTX markets.

FTT holders will get a fee discount and tighter OTC spreads.

FTT will be usable as collateral on FTX."

• From their About Us (20-4-2020):

"FTT is the FTX ecosystem utility token.  Holders of FTT receive numerous benefits, including:

1. Weekly buying and burning of fees
2. Lower FTX trading fees
3. Collateral for futures trading
4. Socialized gains from the insurance fund"

Stablecoin

• Right before FTX's collapse, they announced to work on a stablecoin, in hindsight, probably to try and print more money out of thin air to close their accounting holes

Their Other Projects

• The exchange offers (8-8-2021) the following products:

Tokenized stocks, Leveraged tokens, Volatility tokens, a prediction market and a fiat market.

Blockfolio (changed name into FTX as well)

• Changed name into FTX (like the FTX father company). No longer Blockfolio (28-7-2021).
• From EthHub #129 (1-9-2020):

"FTX has acquired popular crypto price tracking app Blockfolio for $150 million in one of the largest acquisition deals in the digital asset space this year."

DEX

• From Crypto Briefing (27-7-2020):

"FTX is building a DEX, Serum, on the Solana blockchain with the help of partners like Kyber Network and Multicoin Capital. Serum is cross-chain comptaible, giving it access to liquidity on DeFi dApps on Ethereum. The DEX will run on a central limit orderbook, but will still operate in a trustless manner."

NFT Marketplace

• Has launched a new NFT marketplace (3-6-2021). Seems to only have really launched now (6-9-2021).

Usage

• Revenue grew 1,000% over the last year (8-2022), topped $1B. Profitable, with 27% operating margins. Most biz coming from derivatives, outside U.S. - Global footprint growing through M&A. Revenue jumped from $90m in 2020 → $1.2b in 2021. Operating income spiked from $14m → $272m in 2021. Acquired ~15 smaller companies around the world to expand global footprint (Surprisingly, FTX US only makes up ~5% of total revenue).
• From The Generalist (8-8-2021):

"FTX grew daily trading volume from $50 million to $150 million in less than two weeks. It jumped to $300 million two weeks after that.

After its most recent fundraising round, FTX noted it was reducing the available leverage on the platform to 20x. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that leveraged trading makes up a relatively small portion of volume on the platform. Per SBF, the average investment on margin was 2x at the time of the update.

Reviewing data from March of this year, Turkey is actually FTX’s largest market from a userbase perspective, with more than 20% coming from the country. Others in the top ten including Korea, Gibraltar, Australia, China, and Japan.

These shares change when analyzing on a volume basis. Most volume comes from institutions, which FTX doesn’t nationalize. Beyond that though, most trading comes from Taiwan, followed by China, and Hong Kong. This breakdown indicates that FTX’s power base is really in Asia, with Singapore and Korea also included.

Finally, looking at revenue by country, we get yet another view. Though there are fewer Korean than Turkish users, for example, they are the biggest revenue contributors. Switzerland, Australia, Gibraltar, and Canada round out the top five. It is perhaps telling that the United States is not included in this analysis.

We can see that FTX’s userbase benefits from some serious whales. More than 25% of total volume comes from a grouping that moves more than $30 billion per month. More than 50% comes from a segment that moves more than $3 billion. This is a market designed for those with considerable appetites. "

Projects that use or built on it

• Serum

Competition

• Binance and other exchange tokens.

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Went bankrupt and turned out to have scammed user deposits massively. Their crash itself was also riddled with red flags. From The Defiant (10-11-2022):

"On Nov. 9, Semafor reported that most of FTX’s legal and compliance staff had quit the previous day. FTX was also criticized for continuing to accept deposits amid its liquidity woes. Earlier today, FTX published a notice on its website reading “we strongly advise against depositing.” Alameda Research’s website went offline on Wednesday."

• Their token is centralized (14-10-2020).
• Alameda is know to be ruthless and dumps on retail often (21-10-2022).

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Sam Bankman-Fried; ex-CEO (9-11-2022, stepped down during the crash) and Founder "Before founding Alameda and then FTX, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system.  He graduated from MIT with a degree in physics."
• Gary Wang; CTO and Founder "Gary was a software engineer at Google prior to founding Alameda and FTX with Sam.  There, he built systems to aggregate prices across millions of flights, decreasing latency and memory usage by over 50%.  He graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science."
• Sergei Chan
• From their About Us (20-4-2020):

"FTX is owned by FTX Trading LTD, a company incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda.

FTX was incubated by Alameda Research Ltd., a top cryptocurrency liquidity provider.  FTX has had industry-leading orderbooks from day one."

• During the market crash of 2022 it still continued hiring and had approximately 250 employees. Later on turned out to actually be trying to keep up appearances.

Funding

• A new list of creditors was released (26-1-2023):

"Wednesday’s matrix includes numerous companies native to the digital assets industry, such as Coinbase, Binance Capital Management, Chainalysis, Yuga Labs, Doodles, and Silvergate Bank. Reddit is also mentioned as a creditor. But Silvergate is only one of several banks mentioned in the creditor matrix, which lists others like CitiGroup and Wells Fargo. Companies that had also invested in the now-bankrupt venture, such as Blackrock and Sequoia Capital, are also listed. Some instances of companies being mentioned could pertain to money owed by FTX for goods and services. Pharmacy CVS is listed as one of the exchange’s corporate creditors, as well as Netflix and Comcast. Twelve different creditors that include Doordash in their name are listed in the matrix. Multiple departments of revenue from numerous states across the U.S. are included in the creditor matrix as well, from Alabama to Wyoming. The credit matrix also outlines the Bahamas Ministry of Finance as a creditor in the bankruptcy case."

And more:

"The creditors’ list includes government agencies from Switzerland, Hong Kong, the U.S., and Japan. In addition, the ledger features a myriad of well-known businesses, including Alibaba, Allied Sports, Airbnb, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Google, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonham Capital, Bitstamp, Bitgo, Infura, Inca Digital, Lightspeed Strategic Partners, Long Watch Security, Mercedes-Benz, Messari, Nomura, and O’Leary Productions. Creditors further include banks, Stanford University, Fox News, Coindesk, and the Wall Street Journal."

• For a full list of companies and projects FTX/Alameda invested in (255 companies) as of the time of their crash (11-2022), check here. "Some of the more recent deals included Martian Wallet, Lens Protocol, and Fordefi."
• Chris McCann was an early investor in FTX (20-3-2021).
• From their About Us (20-4-2020):

"FTX was founded with the goal of donating to the world’s most effective charities.  FTX, its affiliates, and its employees have donated over $10m to help save lives, prevent suffering, and ensure a brighter future."

• Aptos; took part in their $200m strategic round (15-3-2022). Lead their next round of $150M (26-7-2022).
• 1inch. Participated in a $2.8M raise for 1inch (11-8-2020).
• Bastion; part of the $9M Series A raise, announced on the same day as its token got launched (21-4-2022).
• Bitvo; got bought (17-6-2022).
• BlockFi; made a $680M credit deal with FTX US and an acquisition path (2-7-2022). Bought it for $240M on 1-7-2022.
• Celestia; FTX Ventures participated in their $55M raise (20-10-2022).
• Frontier. Participated in a $1.85M seed round for Frontier (1-9-2020).
• LayerZero; part of the Series A of $135 million (31-3-2022).
• Mina; Led a $92M raise on 17-3-2022.
• mStable. They invested in mStable together with Alamada Research (which also invested in Frontier)
• Paxos; part of their $300M D Series (29-7-2021).
• According to this twitter thread (7-9-2020):

"Binance backs Band, FTX (aka SBF Alameda, the new sushi controller), and Serum (via 3commas Cap)."

Update (25-7-2021): SBF has bought back the Binance shares in FTX, presumably due to regulatory issues around Binance heating up.

• Circle; was one of the investors in the $440M fundraise for Circle (28-5-2021).
• From CoinDesk (30-6-2021):

"Tom Brady and his wife, Gisele Bündchen, will each be taking an equity stake in FTX Trading Ltd., the company behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.COM and FTX.US.

The couple will receive crypto as part of a deal that makes Brady an exchange ambassador and Bündchen FTX’s environmental & social initiatives adviser, a press release Tuesday said. The specific financial terms of the long-term partnership with Bankman-Fried’s exchange company weren’t disclosed. FTX subsidiary Blockfolio is also involved in the package."

• From Decrypt (21-9-2021):

"FTX has raised $900 million from over 60 investors, bringing its valuation to $18 billion. Investors including Sequoia Capital, Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures. More than 60 investors participated in its Series B fundraise—the largest ever for a crypto exchange. Revenues have increased over tenfold in 2021, and over a million users now use the platform, which averages over $10B of daily trading volume.

• Sino Global launched a $200 million fund with backing from FTX (26-10-2021).
• StarkWare; took part in the $100M Series D (25-5-2022)
• Sui; FTX invested in both Aptos as Sui. It was one of the lead investors in Sui's $300M Series B (9-9-2022).
• The company raised $420 million from 69 different investors (22-10-2021):

"According to the announcement, FTX said Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, via its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Sea Capital, IVP, ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in the latest financing."

• Had a 3AC position which it liquidated after the UST fallout in May 2022.
• FTX and Alameda Ventures published a joint partnership proposal with the recently declared bankrupt Voyager Digital that would see FTX provide early liquidity to customers of Voyager (25-7-2022). Voyager rejected the proposal out of hand as “a low-ball bid dressed up as a white knight rescue,” according to a court filing.

Partners 

• Reddit has taken FTX as the partner for on-ramping (10-8-2022).
• From their About Us (20-4-2020):

"FTX is proud to have partnered or collaborated with many leading cryptocurrency firms, including but not limited to:"

Alemeda Research, Circle, BUSD, HUSD, TrueUSD, Paxos, BiLira, Fenwick and West, Galois Capital, Proof of Capital, TomoChain, Bitfinex, Mars Finance, Consensus Lab, CoinGecko, BitMax, CoinEx.com, FBG and Lemniscap.

• Is a partner with HUSD, also according to their website (20-4-2020).

Alameda Research

Basics

• Started in late 2017 by Sam.
• Quant trading firm / trading desk
• From The Defiant (13-7-2021):

"When asked about farming and dumping SUSHI tokens and reportedly shorting YFI on our podcast in November 2020, , Alameda chief Sam Bankman-Fried said his firm’s involvement in DeFi was motivated by short-term profits. He added that Alameda will not seek to have a long-term impact on protocols via governance."

• From Bankless (27-8-2020):

"Alameda Research took advantage of with the Balancer Protocol. As Sam Bankman-Fried documented on Twitter, Alameda was able to game the Balancer Protocol and should have received a ton of $BAL as a result. However, by decree of Discord chats, Balancer decided to enact a whitelist, meaning Alameda would not receive the rewards."

• Ran a validator on Klaytn (1-9-2022).

Reputation

• Alameda is know to be ruthless and dumps on retail often (21-10-2022).
• The trading desk is respected for its success at making money, but also deemed notorious; Rekt going so far as calling it "one of the most savage trading desks in the business".
• Alameda used CREAM as to "taking over a decentralised protocol by depositing his own centralised tokens, and using them as collateral to short other decentralised tokens." (9-10-2020)
• Alameda has been blamed for shorting YFI in the past (12-10-2020)

Funding

• Their investments got leaked in a large sheet (8-12-2022):

"The disparate bundle of nearly 500 illiquid investments is split across 10 holding companies. The total investment value is given on the spreadsheet as in excess of $5.4bn."

• From The Defiant (15-11-2022):

"Alameda Research owes various unsecured DeFi lenders almost $13M. While a relatively small figure, it accounts for about 7% of $176.8M in total value locked for those protocols. Major players in the space like TrueFi, dAMM Finance and Clearpool have all seen their TVL drop by over 40% in the last week — TrueFi led the way down, with its TVL dropping 71% to $12.4M. DeFi Llama founder, 0xngmi, cited a lack of confidence in lending to market makers as the reason for the drop in TVL. “I’ve got to imagine undercollateralized lending took a big hit here,” Adam Cochran tweeted in response to 0xngmi. “So many pool owners came out and touted no FTX exposure, but had large TVL  drops.”"

• Has been investing with CMS and Genesis Capital on at least two projects (24-2-2021). Also together in the aUSD fund.
• Acala's aUSD Ecosystem Fund; one of the founding funds to grow the Acala stablecoin (23-3-2022)
• Alchemix; part of a $4.9 million funding raise (15-3-2021).
• Anchor; Do Kwon mentioned them as part of a $20M raise, calling the participants the 'Anchor whales' (16-3-2021)
• APY.Finance. Participated in a $3.6M seed funding round for APY.Finance (26-9-2020).
• Arbitrum; took part in the $120M raise (1-9-2021)
• Armor.Fi. Joined Armor as one of its 'strategic investors' (31-1-2021).
• Balancer. From Paradigm (10-11-2020):

"Balancer Labs announced that Pantera Capital and Alameda Research have made an investment in Balancer, through the direct purchase of BAL tokens from the Balancer Labs treasury."

• Big Data Protocol. From a thread on the past of Alameda (21-10-2022): "This token once acquired 10% of all DeFi TVL in a single weekend, with over $6B in total value locked. ~$1B of the TVL belonged to Alameda, who dumped it relentlessly on plebs. From $114M mcap down to just $581K today."
• ChainSwap; backed it (13-7-2021).
• Dune Analytics; Dune mentions them as one of their backers (22-3-2021).
• Espresso Systems; is mentioned on their website as an investor, while the project has no tokens out yet (25-10-2022).
• Frontier. Participated in a $1.85M seed round for Frontier (1-9-2020).
• Hedgehog Markets; participated in a $3.5M funding round (27-7-2021).
• Helium; part of a $111M token sale (11-8-2021).
• InsurAce; participated in a $3M raise (4-3-2021).
• KeeperDAO; purchased 42,800 ROOK tokens (14-2-2021).
• Klaytn. Runs a validator on Klaytn (1-9-2022).
• Linear Finance. Participated in a $1.8M seed round for Linear Finance (9-9-2020).
• Liquity; part of their $6M raise (29-3-2021).
• Maple Finance; participated in a $1.3M raise (12-2020).
• Maps.me; participated in its $50M funding round (18-1-2021).
• Mask Network; part of a $2M funding round (17-11-2020).
• MathWallet. Invested $7.8M in MathWallet together with Multicoin Capital (12-10-2020).
• Messari; Alameda Capital took part in the $21M funding round (5-8-2021).
• mStable. They invested in mStable together with FTX.
• Nerve Finance; part of a $2M token OTC (12-4-2021).
• Opium Protocol. Part of a $3.25M raise (2-11-2020).
• Oxygen; from Coindesk (24-2-2021): "is leading a $40 million investment round in Oxygen, which aims to do for DeFi what Robinhood has done for stocks – only without the reliance on centralized legacy settlement systems. Alameda is joined by Multicoin, Genesis Capital and CMS in the round."
• Perpetual Protocol. Part of a $1.8M raise for Perpetual Protocol (1-9-2020).
• Razor Network; part of a $3.7M funding round (4-11-2020).
• Reef Finance; Alameda Research bought $20 million in REEF tokens according Reef (12-3-2021). Turned into a shit show in which both sides blamed each other (16-3-2021).
• Saddle; is mentioned as an investor on Saddle's website (17-6-2021).
• Secret Network; bought SCRT in an OTC deal (16-1-2022).
• Solana; part of a $314M raise with a token sale (9-6-2021).
• Stargate; from a thread on Alameda's ruthless past (21-10-2022): "The Alameda team sniped the $25M auction in the first block, and claimed they won’t be selling for “at least” three years. A short time after they secretly sent 8.4M STG to FTX & Binance. From $4.14 down to $0.42 today"
• StarkWare; part of a $75M raise (24-3-2021). Took part in the Series C raise of $50m (17-11-2021).
• Umee; is mentioned as a backer on the Umee website (14-11-2022).
• UNION. From Decrypt (10-11-2020):

"Raised $3.9 million for a platform to insure individuals and investors. 3 Commas, AAM, Alameda Research, Alpha Chain, Black Edge Capital, Solidity Ventures, and Spark Digital Capital provided the bulk of the capital for the startup, which is eyeing a platform release “in the coming months.”

• Voyager; Alameda was the second biggest borrower (6-7-2022) after 3AC, it did later on say they are ready to pay back the loan any time. All of this is confusing, since Voyager secured a $500M line of credit from Alameda to deal with its issues just on the 26th of June before.

Team, funding, partners

• Sam Bankman-Fried; founder
• Caroline Ellison; CEO
• Sam Trabucco; ex-co CEO, announced his departure on 25-8-2022.
• FTX says it has collaborated with them, they were also part of the same seed round for Frontier.
• The REN team has joined Alameda and says Alameda "will be helping to accelerate the decentralisation of RenVM by participating in the Greycore early on (in Testnet and Mainnet)" (2-2-2021).
• Mentioned (13-7-2021) as part of the Investor Network of Asia DeFi Network (ADN).