SBF

Chapter 43Alameda and the ftt Shuffle

After the troubles at FTX, lots of firms came out to offer real talk about how they had had concerns about FTX and/or Alameda Research from long before. They just hadn't made them public.

For all its tough talk about rebellion and adversarial thinking, the truth is that the blockchain industry is a tiny world, and most of its bigshots don't like to offer negative opinions about anyone but the worst possible actors. There are lots of projects that few successful crypto entrepreneurs have any respect for, but good luck getting them on the record before suspicions resolve into certainties.

For example, Orthogonal Credit was a small institutional credit company built on an Ethereum‐based protocol called Maple Finance. The idea of Maple Finance was to extend unsecured or undersecured credit to very good borrowers (hedge funds, well‐resourced traders, etc.). Maple did this by onboarding firms such as Orthogonal who would do the work of vetting the companies that borrowed its capital.

In a thread released the same day that Binance announced it would not acquire FTX, Orthogonal Credit's official account tweeted:

During our Alameda due diligence earlier this year, the team identified a number of key weaknesses: a) declining asset quality, b) unclear capital policy, c) less than robust operational and business practices, and d) an increasingly byzantine corporate structure.

Orthogonal Credit, as it happens, was an independent subsidiary of Orthogonal ...