Alameda messed up in the same way that three arrows did. That’s not necessarily Sam’s fault, because he did not run Alameda at the time. However, it seems like you build them out by providing them with a ton of FTT collateral so he’s pretty much complicit.
What if I saw military helicopters flying above and told others “war has broken out!” I see how you can say that’s not misinformation, but wild speculation. For me, it’s both.
Sure you can say this is a stress test - I’m just saying it’s misinformation. I am annoyed by people who spread misinformation for clout. Applies to both the bullish credit and the bearish crowd.
I mean this guy as well as a bunch of people on Twitter who have been clout chasing ambulance chasers, running over the truth to chase a story.
The formula is this:
1. Create an helpful explainer thread to explain some crisis (ex-post)
2. Start to make vague predictions about relatively easy to predict things (like that Celsius is going to go down, a couple days before it technically goes down).
3. Refer your readers back to your foresightedness
4. Get extremely excited as you receive DMs from people to check out x or y.
5. Lock your eyes on a juicy new company and start to make unfounded claims about said company, referring to a sole rando as a “source” (eg Nexo is insolvent!)
6. Create an expose on your new target, run shoddy analysis based on no actual data, and throw it into a larger conspiratorial framework that starts to implicate other actors.
7. All the while, build a captive audience who doesn’t know the better and eventually use that audience to run ads or to pay for your newsletter.
8. They can run this affinity scam because 1. What they say is not falsifiable, 2. you have an infinite timescale for which to be correct about any one company going bankrupt, 3. there are people out there who are earnestly trying to learn about the market and don’t know who to turn to, and 4. if you’re wrong, you’re not accountable to your actions because there was never any actual money on the line.
There are serious issues in the industry, do not get me wrong. It’s kind of messed up that people who have no connections have to look into the void and decide whether they’re going to trust an internet rando or nobody at all. Disclosures need to be better. But the people writing these sensationalist pieces are part of the problem and not the solution.
Exactly. It seems like the author has very limited insight in the space. It makes you curious how they could come to such a headline/conclusion, when they spend the entire article, talking about the assets instead of the liabilities!
I really do not like this article and the discourse here for several reasons:
1. The entire Coindesk article lacks meaningful substance. For instance, we have zero idea about what those $7.4 billion of “loans” are. It’s really irresponsible to say that they’re insolvent. If you believe, so, you are applying no more rigor to your understanding of the space than the idiots who say HODL YOLO HFSP. If the liabilities are collateralized by assets on their balance sheet, then the financial risk is not to Alameda but the lender!
2. The entire article paints a dire picture based off of their appraisal of the assets. Again, nobody has any idea of what the liabilities truly are, so to speculate that Alameda is insolvent is making an unfounded leap. But the author of the article tries to lead us to believe that it’s an OK leap to make, because their assets are trash! Wrong. It’s lazy, it’s pandering to a certain crowd, and it’s dishonest.
3. Before reflecting on their extremely, extremely short handed analysis, they take their unfounded conclusions further and spin it through a prior framework that they made for Celsius, which is a totally different type of company with a totally different set of liabilities. Alameda does not lend money to retail. The author pulls a sleight of hand by taking one misleading statement, and transforming it before the reader can apply any skepticism to the original misleading statement.
4. Recently there have cropped up a set of anonymous people (otteroooo on Twitter, this guy) who purport themselves as insiders only to reveal themselves to be complete completely ignorant about the topic at hand. A lot of unsavory people have recognized there’s a cottage industry in endlessly pounding the table saying that the world is falling and that everything is a scam based off of extremely little public information and no access to any private sources. They are ambulance chasers.
5. We have a large contingent of people who just read the headline here, and assume, scam! And apply the pre-existing biases to the entire thing, with nothing insightful to add.