It's a holiday in the US, an opportunity to look back on one of our popular episodes. It was recorded with Joe Weisenthal from the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast shortly after FTX declared bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested.
We talked to Joe about “the box." Back in April 2022, long before Sam-Bankman Fried was tweeting threads about the collapse of his FTX empire, he joined the Odd Lots podcast and talked about this "box" - his metaphor for describing the crypto practice of “yield farming." SBF's description at the time raised many an eyebrow because it seemed too good to be true. Enjoy!
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This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg Ihad podcast, and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for Bloomberg News. It's Monday, February twenty hill, Stacy Marie here today in the US, it's a holiday, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to reshare an episode that we had previously recorded with my colleague from Odd Lots, Joe. And as an aside, you should definitely be listening to the Odd Lots podcast. We first recorded this episode in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Crypto Exchange f t X. Joe's comments are insightful and as always quite entertaining. I hope you enjoy. Have you heard the one about the box? Well. In April two, long before Sam bankmun Freed was tweeting rambling threads about the collapse of his f t X empire, uh, he joined the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast and talked about the box. What this protocol is, It's called protocol Eye. It's a box and you can can take it token, and you can take a theory and you can put it in the box and you can take it out like you put it in the box and you get like, you know, an I owe you for for having to put it in box, and then you can redeem that I owe you back out for the token. The box was bankman Fred's metaphor for describing the crypto practice of yield farming, and his description at the time raised many an eyebrow because it seemed well, both too blunt and too good to be true. I'm joined today by Joe Wisenthal, co host of the Odd Lots podcast, who at that time ended that episode with a deeply releasable comment, I don't know how to feel about it. I feel weird. We all feel weird. Joe, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and you know you range from like what's happening with trucking supply chains to Guyana to interviewing some bankman Freed. So for the for the purposes of this episode, we're going to talk about that interview. In April two. This was right before the Salt conference in the Bahamas. Things were still um i'll use the word frothy and optimistic. The vibe was very much, you know, to the moon, as the bitcoin folks like to say, and bankman. Freed came on the show, which was co hosted by Tracy and had a special guest to parents from Matt Levine. Among many other things you talked about, one of the things was about Defy and yield farming, and at that point, you know, he had this metaphor about the box, which is like you put money in and kind of money comes out, and what happens in between is mysterious. And I really listened to that episode before we recorded this one, and I just remember you, Tracy and Matt all doing variations on what it's interesting because the box comments, I think it's about twenty or so minutes into the episode, and I do think that if you sort of listened to the full episode, just the tone of it, we never quite recovered or got back on track after that, I think because we were all like a little like flabbergasted, a little bit surprised by the bluntness these sort of you know, after he described yield farming as like this sort of magic money box where you put money in and then money comes out, and Matt's first response was like, to be honest, that sounds like a Ponzi scheme. And I was like doesn't really seem like there's any economics value created at all. My expectation at that moment in the conversation was that he would push back a little bit, like he would say something like, oh, well, that's just sort of like the structure of it, but something cool and productive could theoretically happen in the box. So what surprised me at the time was not even the metaphor per se. But after a sort of said that sounds like Ponzi, after we all kind of said, oh, where's the value, there was like no pushback or anything. And I think that was actually the part, more than anything else that I found to beat Jarring. And then yeah afterwards, like you know, but yeah to the end and Tracey and I are did our outro, and I think we just sort of like stammered a little bit because after that moment we didn't really know what to say except wow, that was in a in a weird way, it seemed very honest. It seemed like he was being extremely candid about what he thought cynical. But it you know, it almost came off as like, well, yeah, here's a crypto person saying what many people outside of crypto believed to be the case about the industry. You, like many other people, have read the Vox story in which which was essentially like he was texting with a Fox Reports, and there was so much in there in which he indicated just how savvy he was about his public persona and the kinds of things that he had to say in order to seem credible. But you also got the impression that this is a person who, while he was doing that, while he was playing this part to some extent, believed that he was above the free right that he was to use a very old phrase and finance actually still the smartest guy in the room. Well, you know, one thing that I long thought about Sam and being separate, and so I don't know if above is right, but you know, maybe he did think of himself but definitely separate, which is that you know, in his public persona leg on Twitter, etcetera. He never really made the case that crypto is good. Most people in the space argue that, oh, yeah, of course, you know, they don't really talk about all the money they're making or they were making anyway. They talked about, Oh, we're changing the world, and we're gonna bring transparency and trustlessness and you're not gonna have your money do valued by the FED, and you're not gonna have to trust JP Morgan, etcetera, or the sort of other version that it's like, oh, well, people in emerging markets without access to reliable payments, there stable, whatever it is. They're all these stories that crypto people tell the public, and I think, to a large extent, tell themselves to put this gloss on making a lot of money so that sounds like important in world changing. And he never did that, as far as I could tell. It was always about the money, not just in that conversation but elsewhere, and so I always thought, you know, I remember, like even a friend of mine several months ago asked me what I thought of um SPF. I thought it was sort of refreshing that he didn't sort of like position making a lot of money and crypto is sort of this noble thing. And basically he was like he and the various Lamenta people who are on Twitter or like, they really just talked about the money. And they talked about the money. Obviously there was this backdrop, whether you believe that it was sincere or not of you know, what's called effective altruism. But the idea is like you make a bunch of money and eventually maybe you change the world. But it was also the way that they talked about the money was very matter of facts, and I think in addition to what you're identifying about the the self righteousness that can infuse crypto Twitter, sometimes there's also a lot of mud slinging. Right there's as is happening right now, various similarly disgraced crypto founders of spending quite a lot of time on Twitter redirecting attention towards you know, Sam Bankman, Freed and ft X right now. There were a couple of times I remember, you know when bank when Freed talked about like coin based earnings and various other things, but for the majority of his presence he was talking up or talking about like his own entities. And there were many when you were interviewing other folks in the crypto space, and you've talked to a lot of them, what was their perception of what was happening at Alameda, ft X, Bankman Freed himself. That's a good question. So I don't think in any of our interviews that we've actually done on the podcast that we actually like talked about f t X and later or SBF. What I do know is that, you know, when I spoke to traders just sort of independently or my curiosity about the industry, they really like trading on f t X, and I think this is like it from my perspective again, you know, sort of going back and like rethinking things. Like one of the through lines was that professional like crypto hedge fund traders, etcetera, thought it was a really high quality product for a number of reasons, that there was a high level of customer support, that there was a high level of up time. If you recall, sites like coin base have had some pretty big down times from time to time, it didn't seem like f t X had any I remember talking to a trader who once told me that, like, basically you can buy with a tremendous amount of leverage, so it's like ft X and binance, etcetera. And then if the position moves against you get the position liquid and your collateral gets taken away from you. But of course, any algorithm that determines with when your collateral is gonna get taken away from you, you know, it's gotta it's based on some sort of like you know, probabilistic measure. I don't really know the math, but some sort of probabilistic measure of your in risk of losing the exchange money. And what I was told by one trader is like that f t x is liquidation engine works so well, and they're like, oh, ft X is going to take over the world because their liquidation engine is so much better than everyone else's that they've trade with. There was also cross margining abilities, so you could post one type of token is a collateral and get leverage against the different asset you apparently could not get on binance. So I think there was another aspect in which, you know, you sort of like if you were to think about from an investor perspective, like doing due diligence on a company. We want to talk to to the customers like the product, and my impression always was that customers really like trading on ft X. You have this combination of software that seemed to be pretty decent, right and insofar as the value that the ft X trading platform is providing to institutional investors, a lot of intelligence, a lot of people who were all about the money, and yet the size of the losses that whether it's between eight or ten billion dollars, seems to have stunned a lot of people just in terms of the share scoope of it. Yeah, and I do believe that, like where the money went is still a mystery, but what seems like very plausible is that Alameda was lost a lot of money trading. I mean, on some level or another, that seems to be the case. And you know, this is something that, like I said, I never really heard people talk that much about Alameda. But you know, of course um Sam had a background at the famous quant trading shop Jane Street, as did some of his colleagues, and so the presentation of Alameda was that it was sort of like this market neutral quantitative trading shop. And I'm pretty sure on the Alameda website they also talked about that they were a market neutral firm. So not taking big directional that one way or another. But that being said, and you know, if you're like thinking, okay, like let's go back and think more about and flags, I do recall, you know, and people have since pointed these out, but I do remember thinking at the time that the former CEO of Alameda, San Trabuco, who left the company earlier in the year. At some point this summer he did hit these threads that did not seem like very quanty, did not seem like market neutral. And one of the threads that people point to, if I recall it like basically like, oh, we went long doorge coin ahead of elon Esnel, which maybe, you know, maybe a fine trade, although I think that was the peak. But it's like, oh man, this is not exactly what I thought. What my impression of what Alameda was doing, And I thought what he was doing was, you know, making markets and collecting spreads between the price of a coin on one side and the price of a coin on another side, or the price of a coin on a centralized exchange versus the price on the DeFi exchange. So I did, you know, I didn't think too much about it, but I did think, I guess I that it did seem different what I than what I thought Alameda was doing. We'll be right back with more from Bloomberg's Joe, wisn't all you said? The friends of the show, Katie and Tim that one of the signs that crypto is immature is that it's too hard to launder money. Yeah, well, without getting caught. Well, this is like so something I mean, I've been you know, from day one. It's like, this is the question. It's like, well, what is crypto good for? Right? We've probably both of us have asked this question a million guess like, Okay, it's fun as journalists we like looking at the lines going up and down, and it's probably fun is traders look, you know, big big swink, But like, what is it good for? Right? What is the point of any of this? And you know, one of the things you hear, particularly from the bitcoins side of the world, just like, well, it's good for censorship resistant payments, doing the payments that the state doesn't want you to do, doing the payments that would Venmo or PayPal or zel or your bank would kick you off for right, trustless money. And yet it doesn't seem to be that good for that either as far as I can tell. And so, like, you know, even the sort of like bare minimum things that like crypto proponents often say, which is like, well, person a can a person be money and persons? He can't say no, I'm not even convinced that it's true, because again, I think in the you know, the context we were discussing was like there was a big test of this with the Canadian trucker protests earlier this year, and a lot of that money got seized or blocked, and that was people trying to donate to the protesters. And so, regardless of what you think about the protesters mission or cause, it struck me as kind of a test of like cryptos as particularly bitcoins main claims. And I don't think I really lived up. They didn't really have a way of getting bitcoin to the protesters in a way that was trust list and could avoid blockage. Well, one of the things that the truckers did is they like put a bunch of wallet addresses on their signs and the size of the trucks, and they're like, send us money here, and then various regularly says well, like we're just gonna but you know, on the other hand, like there's no like I think, you know, I remember so after that happened, I remember seeing these discussions even among many like sort of bitcoin proromis like oh, they shouldn't have like, uh, you know, made the wallets address is so public, which fine, maybe, but I don't think I ever saw like a great alternative solution, and you know, it's like, Okay, let's say you are going to be the focal point for disbursing the money. I'm going to send it to you, and you know who the truckers are privately, and you're gonna dispurse it. How do I trust you? How do I know you're not gonna pocket it? Etcetera. And so even like if you could find a way like around the public wallet episodes, like, you still have the problem of trusting the intermediaries. So it's very tricky. And so I thought that that was like a pretty good test of whether you know, like bitcoins core claims and censorship resistance could be defended, and I thought it was lacking. Is there anything that you're seeing in the response to the fallout from algorithmic stable call Three Arrows, Capital Celsius Voyager SPF f t X that is suggesting what the next crisis could look like? So I did actually have one thought on this specific question, which is that one of the things you're hearing about now in the wake of f t X is this concept where they say, okay, crypto entities, particularly centralized ones, if they're going to be centralized, should produce some sort of proof of reserves. And this idea that with cryptographic technology you don't necessarily have to reveal your entire balance sheet or all the items on it, but you can prove your solvency in some way. And so you have some snapshot of coins that are yours and you could prove your solvency. And the first thought that went to my mind was sure, you might be able to do that, but how do you know that the marks are true? And of course in trand FI, you know, two thousand, two thousand nine, it was always like level on, level two, level three, Mark Smith, That's right, And we saw that a bit with f t X because part of the story is how much of the ft in seram tokens they had, and I think many people would say that those coins were marked Smith. You know, if the next stage of okay, what lessons learned from f t X, every exchange has to sort of like have some sort of cryptographic proof of solvency, then I think the next crisis after that could have something that's like, yeah, but where did these prices come from and how reliable are they? Because we do see that of course with the f t T and serum question with f t X, and I'm not sure that like a proof of reserves, had it been in place for f t X, would have necessarily been robust against that failure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. You can find more of Joe's work on the Bloomberg Ceminal and on Bloomberg dot com, and of course on the Odd Lots podcast, as well as the Odd Lots News less Of, and be sure to check out our twice weekly news less of Bloomberg Crypto. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Send us your comments, questions, or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky Verglina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed Faruk and Sharon Barriro. Our associate producers are Ty Butler and Moses on Them. Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm Stacy Marie schmal, We'll be back tomorrow.