There was never a business plan that made any sense—no actual customers happily paying for something that would exist in good times and lean, at least not in the amounts they were pulling out of it for personal/philanthropic/gambling reasons.
Why isn’t “people put money into the exchange and we let them trade it back and forth while taking a cut on each transaction” a plausible business model?
It’s a plausible business model, for a much smaller business than SBF was counting on. Honestly, if he’d run it for 10 years, getting through at least one bust cycle, before starting to use the capital for EA and personal investments, it might have worked. Or it might have lost out to a flashier, scammier version that customers liked more in the boom times.
It’s a plausible business model, but I assumed it’s not FTX’s business model (even before the event), because if it were so, FTX would have tried to acquire BitLicense from New York, like Coinbase did. The same applies to Binance and other exchanges uninterested in BitLicense.
I see many people saying things like “centralized cryptocurrency exchange is obviously dangerous, I told you so”, but I disagree. Yes, cryptocurrency allows you to self-custody, and option to self-custody is its main innovation, but it is an option: you don’t need to take it, and it does have significant convenience cost. I think the right lesson is something like “unregulated centralized cryptocurrency exchange has been historically dangerous”. It has been a while since BitLicense was introduced in 2015, and I think it proved to be a good regulatory framework so far.
Why isn’t “people put money into the exchange and we let them trade it back and forth while taking a cut on each transaction” a plausible business model?
It’s a plausible business model, for a much smaller business than SBF was counting on. Honestly, if he’d run it for 10 years, getting through at least one bust cycle, before starting to use the capital for EA and personal investments, it might have worked. Or it might have lost out to a flashier, scammier version that customers liked more in the boom times.
It’s a plausible business model, but I assumed it’s not FTX’s business model (even before the event), because if it were so, FTX would have tried to acquire BitLicense from New York, like Coinbase did. The same applies to Binance and other exchanges uninterested in BitLicense.
I see many people saying things like “centralized cryptocurrency exchange is obviously dangerous, I told you so”, but I disagree. Yes, cryptocurrency allows you to self-custody, and option to self-custody is its main innovation, but it is an option: you don’t need to take it, and it does have significant convenience cost. I think the right lesson is something like “unregulated centralized cryptocurrency exchange has been historically dangerous”. It has been a while since BitLicense was introduced in 2015, and I think it proved to be a good regulatory framework so far.
I don’t know anything about this, but it looks like FTX US was applying for a “trust charter”? And this is what Coinbase has https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-us-applies-for-trust-charter-in-new-york