It has completely transformed the way investors look forward to financial independence. This could be seen as a way to freedom from the dictates of central banks and regulations. However, It always took investors on a roller coaster ride. Few of them became ‘instant’ millionaires while others are still in the process.
Since its arrival, cryptocurrencies are going through their worst crisis. Bitcoin faced a straight fall on the face in late 2020 and is yet to recover, the collapse of some so-called ‘stablecoins’ have put a question mark on the crypto industry. To make the industry even more volatile, the giant cryptocurrency exchange failed. Allegations of fraud layered on the FTX case.
When it hit the bottom last year, it was all tears. With the collapse of FTX, the third-largest crypto exchange platform, and other crypto projects, the last year seems to be the darkest hour in the crypto sphere. It is filled with many ‘Hows’, ‘Whys’, and ‘Ifs’!
Sam Bankman-Fried(SBF) co-founded Alameda Research in September 2017, which made profits by hedging crypto assets. Looking at the exponential growth, SBF founded FTX Trading Ltd. (Futures Exchange), an exchange platform for cryptocurrencies. Other than providing exchange services, FTX created its native token, called FTT.
A report revealed, the sister firm Alameda held a large portion of its assets in FTT tokens. After this report, a series of not-so-good events bombarded FTX.
Changpeng Zhao(CZ), CEO - Binance- the leading exchange announced the sale of all of his holdings of FTT. When FTX’s customers found out, they panicked and tried to withdraw their money. FTX could not handle such a massive amount of withdrawals and buckled under market pressures, inching closer to insolvency. When the layers of the case unfolded themselves, another shocking revelation was made. FTX’s bookkeeping system allowed them to secretly shift $10 Billion to Alameda without alerting anyone. Thus, it gradually slipped into bankruptcy, filed in November 2022. In a meager 8 days, the company had Zero valuation. The users were to bear a loss of almost 800 Million. Amongst all the hues and cries one can observe that the death of FTX was majorly because the face behind it misused the technology.
It is not wrong to believe that malicious intent, manipulating data, and unstructured and unauthorized use of finance led to the gradual bankruptcy of the exchange platform.
Stablecoins are often assumed to be safe havens in the crypto space. Impliedly, they’re meant to have a fixed value. Terra was becoming one of the biggest red-hot crypto projects. The network and its founder, Do Kwon, took four years to get pride and prestige in the crypto world. In just a matter of a few days, it hit the bottom, crashing down.
TerraUSD (also known as UST) and Luna are two sister coins on the Terra network.
The idea was to leverage the arbitrage to take advantage of Luna and maintain the price of UST constant at $1. This would eliminate the requirement for the platform to maintain US dollar reservoirs. The platform would use built-in algorithms to monitor supply and demand market forces for both coins to maintain equilibrium. The belief was that Terraform Labs could use clever mechanisms along with billions in Bitcoin reserves to maintain the peg of UST without the backstop of the USD. As depositors lost faith in the tokens in May of 2022, They rushed for the exit in the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. Media sources had begun to label the Terra stablecoin and Luna token a Ponzi scheme and a rug-pull scam.
The cryptocurrency sector has been through a rough patch this year, and while it has been shaken up, all of us can use the disruption as a learning experience. Moreover, this is seen as a welcome change. With emerging technologies like Web3, Metaverse, and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) technologies, it is quite evident that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and that too for an infinite time!
It is a learned opinion now that cryptocurrency is not just a fad, it is not going to disappear anytime soon. The durability of crypto-assets will continue to evolve and transform with the technologies that support them. Black Swan events like Luna crash and FTX will just rebalance the industry to shed the unhealthy ecosystem.
