From the Sequoia article on SBF / FTX, it's very likely to be able to trade internationally because each country requires you to have a bank account in that country to be able to access their markets.

In the Sequoia article, SBF gained his initial funding for FTX from executing trades from the US to Japan, where BTC was overpriced because no one bothered to arbitrage it because of the setup difficulty. The way he did this was by contacting a friend to open a bank account in Japan and manage the funding over there while he managed the account US side.

I am sure some of it is normal corporate shell game but I'd imagine at least 50% of this setup was for regulatory purposes. Even small fintechs will have "shell game like" company structure to please regulatory forces that require having certain things be independent from the consumer platform even if the two companies are working towards the same goal.

What do you even need a blueprint for? The guy did an interview with Matt Levine and laid the Ponzi scheme straight out: scammers make boxes that pay fake coins when you store your money in them, they put so much money into the boxes that the fake coins seem valuable, then they rug pull everyone and move on to the next one. That's how he described his own business.

Someone needs to replace calling cards with crypto-currency in this Office skit:

https://youtu.be/lC5lsemxaJo

It fits perfectly

It is not "like" a blueprint. It IS a blueprint.

To be fair ikea corporate structure looks like the mini boss before the real boss compared to this lol.

You need that many companies trading with each other to create value and muddle the waters... Intangible assests and future flows passed from one entity to the other and priced at some unrealistic assumptions create/raise paper value.

This is how you blow the ballon...

SBF would be a nobody without Sequoia and others throwing money at him. I'm more concerned about the judgment of monied people who are so desperate to find their own Adam Neumann, that they forgo common sense and invest based on 'feel'.

It's almost like they asked GPT3 or Dall-e to create "a corporate structure that is so confusing it will be a liability shield to keep my ass out of jail", and then used whatever came out

You should see the structure of companies like IKEA or others who really have a complicated corporate structure.

It's quite common to spin off daughter companies per project, it isn't unusual or illegal in any way. Without at least type and ownership information it's hard to tell if it's iffy.

That’s actually just a tiny, tiny subset of the overall Enron corporate structure. The chart you linked just shows the capitalization and ownership of one of the off-balance sheet structures that Enron used to conceal debt. This structure was capitalized with Enron stock, which worked great as long as the price kept going up, but once the value of that stock fell beneath a certain value, the single-purpose entity used here became insolvent and accounting rules (finally) required that that debt be consolidated back onto Enron parent’s balance sheet.

It’s a situation with many interesting parallels in the crypto industry. Not only does history rhyme, but sometimes it really does repeat.

To balance this: I work for a US-based, US-only top N financial institution that's all of <10 corporate entities.

All day I've been seeing reserve audit posts from all the crypto companies. To me this also screams "Please don't make a run on us or we're screwed"

Binance is effectively saying “I’m not going to tell you where I am but you should let me manage your money.” It takes a special kind of gullibility to accept that, but in the crypto world left has been right and black white for a very long time.

Binance’s US subsidiary is just as safe as FTX.US was, despite their claims otherwise. It will fall along with the other dominos.

Yeah! That was the tweet that made me suspect an anxiety attack / some other health condition.

The weirdest part is that all 23 tweets were posted simultaneously at 8:13am. So he had the opportunity to say nothing; he could’ve clicked “save draft” instead of “tweet all”.

"Your honor, whatever I've said should not be used against me in the court of law"...I can't make up this parody if I was a scriptwriter.

Here's another...SBF has stepped down, and his replacement is John J. Ray III, a famous bankruptcy lawyer who helped clean up Enron...yes, that Enron.

Twitter should add Miranda warnings to the before-you-tweet prompts. It would be a reasonable use-case for ML classification.

Especially on twitter, where by default you only see the first few tweets of a chain.

"Here is a bunch of information about the ongoing potentially criminal collapse of my company - oh by the way I'm a bad dev so some of what I said above might be wrong, don't act on this information."

I'm sure they have; does this look like someone who would listen to his parents?

It’s not really sympathy though. From a game theory perspective, what benefit did he get from saying FTX US wouldn’t be impacted?

It seems like there was negative benefit: not only did it accomplish nothing in practice, but it couldn’t have helped even theoretically.

So when someone does something like that, I can’t help but speculate.

Remember when Biden said the Hunter Biden laptop was fake?

It is very common