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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's the ruthlessness of dumping all the FTT tokens they had to crash FTX to buy it (which went pear shape once they saw FTX's books) makes me think that they're probably not in a strong of a position as they say they are. We see this all the time. Exchanges saying they're strong and assets are safe until suddenly a few hours later they're not.

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There are some possibilities. Binance could have just done so knowing that FTX's demise would concentrate their own market share. They also could have (sensibly) not wanted toxic assets on their books - FTX's book value was/is deeply negative so holding tokens correlated to a basically insolvent entity and/or buying them is just a bad trade that hurts their financial position.

It's ruthless but I don't think it says anything about their finances. Their play made sense whether they were strong or weak.

I agree with this. There are many reasons why Binance would say they'd buy FTX and there are just as many reasons for why they would back out of the deal. Binance reneging on the deal doesn't say anything about the state of their finances other than that they might not have been in a position to take on 32B in liabilities.

If they were weak, crashing FTX risks crashing themselves.

Is there some other action you can recommend for someone holding FTT tokens other than selling them immediately for the best price you can get?

Well hopefully it’s money you don’t need and can afford to lose. If so, ride it out and hope the Chinese government is propping up Bihance

If you hold tons of something that if you sell them all at the same time the price will drop the standard thing to do is to sell them over a period of time so you get the best price you can. The way Binance did it, they knew they wouldn't get the best price.

A good example of this is Tesla stocks and how Musk is selling them. He's not just dumping out all he wants to at this super high price he is slowly doing it. And it's still affecting share prices.

They have constant income. Their mostly daily gains are coming from liquidating people in futures not matter market crashes or not.

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