(2/2) Commentary notes on Credit Suisse’s rescue deal and recent banking turmoils

By Stéphane Reverre and Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

March 2023

Following the first article last week, where we analyzed in detail the behind-the-scenes of SVB’s fall, and after another crazy weekend with the mega-deal between UBS and Credit Suisse, one of the biggest since the GFC in 2008, we are happy to provide some further analyses on the ongoing situation.

Deal terms:

Swiss authorities sprinted over the weekend to engineer a takeover of spiraling Credit Suisse before the markets opened on Monday, a globally accomplished mission. However, nervousness was mounting on Monday in the markets following Sunday’s announcement that UBS will buy Credit Suisse for CHF 3 bn, a 95% discount to the bank’s 2010 market capitalization levels. Under the deal’s terms, Credit Suisse shareholders will receive one UBS share for every 22.48 Credit Suisse shares held, or CHF 0.76 per share (Credit Suisse closed Friday at 1.86 Swiss francs). This rescue, organized by the Swiss authorities to avoid a loss of confidence in the global banking system, was made at the cost of significant guarantees given by the Swiss government to UBS. Credit Suisse declared it intends to hand out bonuses to its staff despite the rescue deal.

Moreover, following the historic deal on Sunday, FINMA ordered that CHF 16 bn of Credit Suisse’s additional Tier one (AT1) bonds be written down to zero. AT1s were introduced as part of the post-GFC regulatory reforms to push banks to increase their capital levels. They are a form of contingent convertible security (coco) that can be converted into equity in case of trouble. This surprising decision will likely shock the market due to the hierarchy inversion between equity and bondholders. European financial regulators expressed concerns around the Swiss authorities’ decision, issuing statements on Monday to reassure holders of additional tier 1 (AT1) bonds in eurozone banks that they would not suffer the same fate as those at Credit Suisse.

How did we get here?

The 167-year-old financial institution was mismanaged for years before its collapse: conviction for cocaine-money laundering in June 2022, leaks about $8 bn in accounts of criminals, dictators, and rights abusers held by the bank in February 2022, $5.5 bn loss following Archegos default and Greensill fund collapse in March 2021, etc. Last week, the global panic surrounding the banking industry caused massive outflows from the bank (up to $10 bn per day, according to the WSJ), bringing CS to the brink of collapse.

How is the situation looking from the US side?

We learned that SVB priorly hired BlackRock’s consulting arm, Financial Markets Advisory (FMA), to analyze the potential impact of various risks on its securities portfolio. The report found that the bank lagged behind similar banks on 11 of 11 factors considered and was “substantially below” them on 10 out of 11. BlackRock’s consultants found that SVB could not generate real-time or even weekly updates about the state of its securities portfolio, but the bank didn’t take any follow-up actions. The bank was also on the Fed’s radar for over a year before its collapse; the WSJ reported that SVB was using an incorrect model as it assessed its own risks amid rising interest rates and spent much of 2022 under a supervisory review. The fair conclusion is that we’re facing a massive failure of risk management, nothing more, nothing less. Senior management failed to adjust its practices and business mix and assess the implication of the yet all-too-visible inflationary pressures with its train of rate hikes.

Regarding the upcoming FOMC meeting this week, Whatever decision the Fed takes will be heavily criticized. Suppose it decides to raise its main policy rate by 50 basis points (which would be legitimate given the level of inflation). In that case, it will be criticized for adding to the banking sector’s difficulties. This will also be the case if it raises its rate by only 25 basis points (which the market sees as the most likely scenario). Some analysts consider that it could take a break from monetary policy. This is challenging as it risks losing credibility in the fight against high inflation. Moreover, resuming a rate hike cycle quickly after stopping it is difficult. Finally, a rate cut would risk accentuating the panic and underlining that the situation on the banking front is undoubtedly worse than expected… In any case, the Fed seems bound to fail on Wednesday.

What happened as well?

Last thoughts:

After Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, SVB, Credit Suisse, First Republic… senior bank management should not doubt anymore: poor risk management will kill in the blink of an eye. Crypto players, whether CeFi or DeFi, should not feel immune from this. If we had one primary piece of advice to the community, it would be K.Y.R, Know Your Risks! which is probably not so frequent in crypto.

Disclaimer

No Investment Advice

The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to invest in units of a fund. They do not constitute investment advice or a proposal for financial advisory services and are subject to correction and modification. They do not constitute trading advice or any advice about cryptocurrencies or digital assets. SUN ZU Lab does not recommend that any cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held by you. You are strongly advised to conduct due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Accuracy of Information

SUN ZU Lab will strive to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report, although it will not hold any responsibility for any missing or wrong information. SUN ZU Lab provides all information in this report and on its website.

You understand that you are using any information available here at your own risk.

Non Endorsement

The appearance of third-party advertisements and hyperlinks in this report or on SUN ZU Lab’s website does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, warranty, or recommendation by SUN ZU Lab. You are advised to conduct your due diligence before using any third-party services.

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboards & API streams or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

(1/2) Commentary notes on SVB’s failure Credit Suisse, implications for crypto, and where do we go from here

By Stéphane Reverre and Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

March 2023

To be clear from the start, we do not try to undermine the gravity of what happened this weekend. The implosion of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday could have quickly turned, under other circumstances, into a full-blown banking crisis in the US and worldwide. Contagion fears are far from over, as underlined by the events around Credit Suisse yesterday. We would like, however, to share some of our thoughts to reassure and clarify some points. There is already plenty of (more or less) good analyses around the bank’s failure, so we’ll dive straight into it.

1 — Summary of the events

The US banking sector had its worst week since the GFC in 2008. In a span of 2 days, Silvergate Capital collapsed, while Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) sent chills through the industry after it launched a failed effort to raise more than $2 billion in capital to bolster its capital base. SVB worked with nearly half of US VC-backed tech companies, and VC funds responded to this news by advising portfolio companies to withdraw capital. The media reported that Founder’s Fund and a16z advised portfolio companies to take these actions. SVB responded by informing select customers that it has ~$180B of available liquidity and top-tier capital ratios relative to its peers. Later the same week, US regulators closed SVB before moving to close Signature Bank as well, the last of the three crypto-friendly banks in the US. Now, one cannot help but wonder: would such a dramatic collapse have taken place if VCs had not advised their portfolio companies to withdraw their money? Intrinsically it was in their best interest to get their money out as quickly as possible, ironically though it was probably also in their best interest not to.

From the European side, stock markets fell sharply Wednesday, with banking stocks deep in negative territory following more bad news from Credit Suisse. The bank fell 24% amid growing concerns about a run after its biggest backer, Saudi National Bank, said it would not provide any further financial support.

2 — This was a very usual bank run on a very unusual bank

While Signature Bank faced a criminal probe ahead of its collapse, according to Bloomberg, Silvergate and SVB suffered from a lack of client diversification (crypto focus for the former and VC-backed tech for the latter). The events are also causing new investor concerns about some of the US and EU’s largest financial institutions. This is linked to two main factors, rising interest rates and the inversion of the yield curve, which recently dipped below 100 bps for the first time since 1981 for the 10Y-2Y yields. The inversion significantly affects banks as they usually invest their short-term client deposits into long-term bonds. As the yield curve inverts, they have to pay more on deposits than they earn on their investments, while higher rates lower the value of their existing bonds. In this context, SVB was forced to sell all its available-for-sale bonds at a $1.8 billion loss as its startup clients withdrew deposits. This situation is not unique to SVB; many banks have parked depositor money in fixed-rate government bonds that have lost value due to the rapid rise in interest rates. The FDIC recently reported that US banks are sitting on $620 bn of combined unrealized losses in their securities portfolios. SVB would have been capable of staying afloat had there not been this panic movement that eventually caused the run. (…apparently, they were already in trouble at the end of 2022 when losses were much higher than 2 bln$)

Many economists have thoroughly studied the mechanics of a bank run, but at the core of it, a run is a self-fulfilling prophecy that could annihilate the most robust of banks. As soon as a critical mass of clients is persuaded that the bank is likely to suffer a run, a race to zero is triggered by everyone trying to pull their money in an attempt to get ahead of everyone else. It all comes down to the confidence factor, and SVB’s failure was not the first but one of the biggest. There have been more than 500 bank failures in the US alone since 2008.

To prevent this vicious circle from getting into action, the FDIC in the US insures all accounts up to $250,000, which for a standard bank should amount to around 50% of the client base. The problem was that most of the deposits in SVB (c. 95%) were not FDIC insured as they were over the $250,000 limit. This is maybe the biggest cause of SVB’s woes: lack of client diversification outside the tech VC-backed startup base. It also needs to be clarified why so many startups were incentivized to use SVB as a bank instead of relying on a more classic and robust choice, such as JPM or BoA. Some plausible explanation would be that SVB was a primary lender to these startups, with the condition to keep their money in the bank. From this point, all it took was a bunch of prominent VCs, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund, advising their portfolio companies to pull their money out of SVB to run the bank in less than two days.

3 — The worst is never certain — “Le pire n’est jamais certain”

Over the weekend, much speculation existed about whether the US government would intervene to save the situation. Sunday evening, the Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC released a joint statement to inform SVB depositors that they would have access to all their money on Monday. The US startup ecosystem was saved from an “extinction-level” event, but there was little doubt that the US government would allow something this dramatic to happen.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen set things straight over the weekend: “Let me be clear that, during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again…”. The released joint statement later added that “Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”

Regarding the CS situation, Switzerland’s Central Bank pledged to fund the bank with liquidity “if necessary,” a first for a global bank since the GFC. In a joint statement with FINMA, they insisted that CS was sound and “meets the capital and liquidity requirements imposed on systemically important banks. Later the same day, we learned that CS would borrow around CHF 50 bn from a Swiss National Bank liquidity facility and repurchase certain OpCo senior debt securities of up to CHF 3 bn.

4 — Who lost what exactly?

Officials insisted this was NOT a bailout, as only the banks’ clients were getting their money back. President Biden later added, “That’s how capitalism works, “ referring to SVB and Signature Bank investors who lost their money.

As a reminder, the Basel III accord raised banks’ minimum total capital requirements to 8%, as a percentage of the bank’s risk-weighted assets (RWA), with a minimum Tier 1 capital ratio of 6%. Tier 1 refers to a bank’s core capital, equity, and the disclosed reserves that appear on the bank’s financial statements. Here, major US banks maintain Tier 1 capital ratios well above 10%. The Basel accords also require a minimum of 100% LCR ratios as of 2019 (The Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) refers to the proportion of highly liquid assets held by banks to ensure their ability to meet short-term obligations). SVB was a category IV bank; although it was the 16th largest bank, it was never subjected to the Fed’s LCR requirements.

SVB’s regulatory disclosures at the end of 2022 show the following:

The bank shows $17 bn of Tier 1 Capital and $111.4 bn of Risk-Weighted Assets for a CET1 capital ratio of 15.26%.

SVB Financial Group’s consolidated balance sheet is detailed below:

Was the bank solvent? Theoretically, yes! as of the end of 2022 it held:

These securities offer all the liquidity guarantees since they are HQLA-eligible (High-Quality Liquid Assets) and guaranteed by US state agencies. However, these securities are bonds whose value falls mathematically when rates rise, and the Fed’s rates have increased dramatically and faster than anyone had expected last year from 0.25% to 4.5%.

Moreover, the necessary disposal of part of the AFS securities to ensure the bank’s liquidity generated the aforementioned $1.8 bn in losses. The bank also disclosed in a footnote of its December 10-K Form that the HTM book had $15 bn of unrealized losses. Considering that SVB’s capital stood at $16 bn at the end of 2022, the bank only had limited capital to absorb the losses even before the run began. On paper, everything looked ok, but in reality, the rapid rise in interest rates had devastated SVB’s capital buffer (Before Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed Spotted Big Problems). The fair conclusion is that we’re facing a massive failure of risk management, nothing more, nothing less. It is a failure of senior management to adjust its practices and business mix and to assess the implication of the yet all-too-visible inflationary pressures with its train of rate hikes.

Here lies another important part of the problem. In a recent article following the events, the CFA Institute criticized HTM accounting, calling it “Hide-Til-Maturity” and advising FASB to eliminate it. They continue to precise that “Overall, SVB’s total assets at 12/31/2022 were $211.8 billion of which only approximately $40 billion (cash and available-for-sale (AFS) securities) were at fair value and immediately available to pay the $173 billion in deposit liabilities — which are all due within the next year, according to SVB’s contractual obligations table.”

Another interesting observation, rather than selling its securities on the market, SVB has liquidity lines in the form of repo agreements with bank counterparties, the FHLB, or the Fed, allowing it to collateralize its investment-grade bonds with cash. However, the management has decided to sell part of its bond portfolio quickly. We still need a convincing reason as to why they took this decision.

The deposits’ details were the following:

From the $173.1 bn in total deposits, $165.4 bn (95%) exceeded the FDIC insurance limit.

5 — What now?

Now that the FDIC controls SVB, its assets will be sold to the highest bidder. An auction on the assets already started Sunday, but there are very few banks capable of absorbing the significant quantity, and a deal has yet to be reached. SVB did not pose a systemic risk, and the US government’s quick actions over the weekend ensured the contagion didn’t spread. The events still negatively influence sentiment towards the financial sector, particularly US regional banks.

On the other hand, Credit Suisse is part of the closed club of Bulge Bracket banks imposing a global systemic-level risk. The fact that quotes for Credit Suisse’s 1yr CDS exceeded 3000 bps on Wednesday is historic and approaching a rarely-seen level that typically signals serious investor concerns.

Circle’s USDC was one of SVB’s most significant casualties over the weekend, as the firm confirmed having $3.3 bn of its $40 bn reserves in the failed bank. Over the weekend, USDC lost over 10% of its value, trading as low as $0.87 before regaining its peg on relatively joyful news Sunday evening. It is interesting to note the parallel with Tether’s USDT, which was trading at a premium for most of the weekend. In times of crisis, the market preferred Tether’s opacity to Circle’s mishandled communication. Some argued that trusting one entity with 8% of the stablecoin’s reserves was a strategic mistake.

The closure of Silvergate, SVB, and Signature, the last of the three crypto-friendly banks, creates a significant gap in the market as the industry lost 3 of its major fiat on-ramp/off-ramp partners. This will create a considerable liquidity decrease in the ecosystem, and other banks and financial intermediaries will have to step in to fill this gap.

Before last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell seemed determined to continue hiking rates until inflation returns to a long-lost 2% threshold. With the second and third largest bank failures in US history happening in less than two days, some economists predict that Powell will change his strategy to put the health of banks above all other considerations. Goldman Sachs no longer expects a rate increase at the Fed’s meeting next week, while Nomura made an even bolder prediction of a rate cut. According to Bloomberg, The ECB will forgo earlier guidance for a half-point interest-rate increase at this week’s meeting and only hike by half that amount amid concerns over the financial sector’s health. The European Central Bank should either delay or pare back this week’s planned interest-rate increase to avoid a policy error reminiscent of 2011, added former executive board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi.

We have indeed avoided, for now, a 2008-level crisis. Still, the events will not go unnoticed, with many debates underway regarding the utility and threshold of the FDIC insurance, regulation of mid-sized banks, and the Fed’s monetary policies in times of crisis. One thing is clear; we should, at all costs, avoid creating unnecessary panic given the current fragility of the world economy.

Disclaimer

No Investment Advice

The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to invest in units of a fund. They do not constitute investment advice or a proposal for financial advisory services and are subject to correction and modification. They do not constitute trading advice or any advice about cryptocurrencies or digital assets. SUN ZU Lab does not recommend that any cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held by you. You are strongly advised to conduct due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Accuracy of Information

SUN ZU Lab will strive to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report, although it will not hold any responsibility for any missing or wrong information. SUN ZU Lab provides all information in this report and on its website.

You understand that you are using any information available here at your own risk.

Non Endorsement

The appearance of third-party advertisements and hyperlinks in this report or on SUN ZU Lab’s website does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, warranty, or recommendation by SUN ZU Lab. You are advised to conduct your due diligence before using any third-party services.

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboards & API streams or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

The Future of Trustless and Decentralized Cross-Chain DeFi – Focus on Interlay

By Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

January 2023

This article was part of a broader report on the following theme: “Challenges and opportunities: The future of DeFi in TradFi”. Crypto Valley Association selected it among the top 5 pieces for its 2022 Call For Papers challenge.

Interlay came into existence based on the observation that all current existing cross-chain Bitcoin, and other digital tokens, are all centralized and custodial, like the major USD-pegged stablecoins USDT and USDC. These bridges make users give up control over their assets and trust a third party to maintain the bridge, thus creating a weak centralized link in the overall decentralized chain. DeFi Llama data shows that several dollar billions are locked in protocols that bridge tokens from one network to another, the majority of them being centralized, custodial bridges (wBTC, renBTC…), putting the whole crypto ecosystem in a catastrophic situation in case these custodial bridges are hacked, lose keys or commit fraud. Following a previous article on how Polkadot is tackling the complex blockchain interoperability problem, we analyze in this article Interlay’s potential to deliver a rock-solid decentralized cross-chain bridge.  

Questions and comments can be addressed to c.eladnani@sunzulab.com or research@sunzulab.com

Introduction:

Blockchain bridges have already suffered several hack attacks, exceeding $1 billion in cryptocurrency stolen. The latest significant episodes include Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge $600 million hack, Harmony’s Horizon bridge hack for $100 million, and the $190 million Nomad bridge hack in August 2022, described as one of the most chaotic hacks web3 has ever seen. In a much-publicized tweet earlier in 2022, Vitalik Buterin voiced his opposition to using cross-chain solutions in the blockchain ecosystem in favour of a multi-chain future, arguing that the former increase the security risks in the process of transferring assets. Indeed, the attack vectors of the assets are increased across a more comprehensive network surface area as it is moved across an increasing number of chains and dApps with different security architectures. We believe at SUN ZU Lab that a minimum of standardization is required for blockchains to co-exist in parallel. Several organizations (IEEE, ANSI…) are doing this very well, so why shouldn’t the core blockchain teams start integrating these organizations?

We will cover in this next part the specifics of Interlay, its technical design, and how it differentiates from its centralized peers.

What is Interlay?

Interlay’s flagship product, iBTC, is a 1:1 Bitcoin-backed stablecoin that can be used to invest, earn and pay with BTC across the DeFi ecosystem on Polkadot at first, with future deployment plans on Ethereum, Cosmos and many other blockchains. Interlay also deployed Kintsugi, iBTC’s canary network, a testnet with real economic value deployed on Kusama (Polkadot’s canary network). Kintsugi and iBTC share the same code base, with the difference that the former will always be two to three releases ahead with more experimental features. Interlay won Polkadot’s 10th parachain slot auction, while Kintsugi won Kusama’s parachain slot 11.

Interlay was created in 2020 by Alexei Zamyatin and Dominik Harz, who met in October 2017 as the first two PhDs in the Imperial College’s cryptocurrency research lab. They have worked together since, publishing more than 20 papers on specific problems such as blockchain security, scalability, interoperability and DeFi.

After the successful launch of its flagship product, iBTC, the company now sets its eyes on becoming a one-stop-shop for Bitcoin DeFi with a new roadmap that includes decentralized lending, borrowing and trading for BTC.

Tokenomics:

Interlay and Kintsugi will be governed by their communities via INTR and KINT, their governance tokens on Polkadot and Kusama, respectively. INTR and KINT tokens’ primary purposes are:

INTR and KINT have an unlimited supply with the following emission schedule:

The project emphasizes community, with 70% of tokens distributed as airdrops and block rewards. Moreover, starting from the 5th year, only the community will receive newly minted KINT and INTR tokens.

Technology:

The Interlay network operates as follows: collateralized vaults hold BTC locked on Bitcoin, while iBTC is minted on the parachain. These vaults can be individuals or service providers who lock collateral in a MakerDAO-inspired multi-collateral system to protect users against theft and BTC loss, and receive BTC into custody for safekeeping while iBTC exists.

There are four main phases in each iBTC life-cycle:

1. Lock: users can run their vault or pick one to lock BTC. BTC is always backed by the vault’s collateral

2. Mint: iBTC is created at a 1:1 ratio to locked BTC

3. BTC DeFi: iBTC could be used as collateral for lending or yield farming, for example, on Polkadot, Kusama, Cosmos, Ethereum and other major DeFi platforms

4. Redeem: iBTC is eventually redeemed for physical BTC on Bitcoin in a trustless manner

iBTC’s main difference from existing wrapped Bitcoin products is its trustless and decentralized aspect. It is secured by insurance as vaults lock collateral on the iBTC parachain in a multi-collateral system. In case of misbehaviour, the network slashes their collateral and reimburses users. Moreover, it is radically open, meaning anyone could become a vault and help secure iBTC. However, running a vault is currently a highly technical role, requiring advanced proficiency in computer system administration, which constitutes a high barrier to entry. The Interlay team is working on democratizing this role by making it simpler to run a vault.

Comparison between different wrapped BTC asset

Source: Interlay documentation

Use case: BTC DeFi on Karura with Kintsugi:

Karura is Kusama’s central DeFi hub, built as Acala’s sister network (Polkadot’s first parachain winner). Karura offers a suite of financial primitives: a multi-collateralized stablecoin (kUSD) backed by cross-chain assets like Kusama and Bitcoin, a trustless staking derivative, and a DEX to increase liquidity.

Kintsugi suggests many use cases for using kBTC with Karura’s DeFi products, for example:

Conclusion

These were just a few examples of what is possible with Interlay products today, and use cases will explode shortly as the DotSama ecosystem continues to grow and Interlay expands to other protocols. Overall, Interlay has a promising future in tackling the complex decentralized cross-chain bridge problem within the blockchain ecosystem. Its founders’ solid research background, combined with its unique decentralized and trustless network, gives it a considerable advantage over its peers. However, it still has a long way to go to compete against centralized, custodial wrapped bitcoin leaders wBTC and hBTC.

References

Disclaimer

No Investment Advice

The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to invest in units of a fund. They do not constitute investment advice or a proposal for financial advisory services and are subject to correction and modification. They do not constitute trading advice or any advice about cryptocurrencies or digital assets. SUN ZU Lab does not recommend that any cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held by you. You are strongly advised to conduct due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Accuracy of Information

SUN ZU Lab will strive to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report, although it will not hold any responsibility for any missing or wrong information. SUN ZU Lab provides all information in this report and on its website.

You understand that you are using any information available here at your own risk.

Non Endorsement

The appearance of third-party advertisements and hyperlinks in this report or on SUN ZU Lab’s website does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, warranty, or recommendation by SUN ZU Lab. You are advised to conduct your due diligence before using any third-party services.

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboards & API streams or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

On Blockchain Interoperability — Focus On The Polkadot Ecosystem

By Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

January 2023

This article was part of a broader report on the following theme: “Challenges and opportunities: The future of DeFi in TradFi”. Crypto Valley Association selected it among the top 5 pieces for its 2022 Call For Papers challenge.

Since the birth of bitcoin in 2009, the blockchain ecosystem has not stopped expanding. It is now based on multiple layer 1 (L1) blockchains, each with a different philosophy and unique infrastructure architecture. Such L1s include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, or Cosmos. While Solana’s approach to growth focuses on the network effect of bringing many developers and users on-chain, the Ethereum community believes that mass adoption will come primarily from blockchain security and decentralization superiority. These cultural differences are reflected in how these blockchains operate and process data, making direct inter-blockchain communication very hard and creating one of the most critical challenges for the web3, and hence DeFi, ecosystems: interoperability. The following metaphor best describes this situation: imagine an internet where it was only possible to send emails within isolated platforms, Gmail to Gmail, Yahoo to Yahoo, etc. This is the case today for data and tokens stored on different blockchains.

Questions and comments can be addressed to c.eladnani@sunzulab.com or research@sunzulab.com

Introduction:

The benefits of blockchain interoperability are necessary to achieve mass adoption and an optimized user experience. It also helps avoid “winner takes all” monopolies (think about the blu-ray technology, for example). It will allow for entirely composable web3 services, with interoperable smart contracts leading to primary industries exchanging important business information between private and public networks in a completely customizable and controllable manner. Moreover, blockchain interoperability should enable multi-token transactions and wallet systems, a significant phase for DeFi’s usage growth.

Another critical benefit to blockchain interoperability is the ability to create a more decentralized ecosystem (in terms of players/actors). Instead of having one blockchain like Ethereum processing transactions of thousands of dApps, leading to recurrent congestions in the network and excessive transaction gas fees, thousands of application-specific blockchains could communicate with one another through a decentralized central hub. Enter Polkadot!

Interoperability can also be achieved through cross-chain bridges that allow for digital assets owned by someone to be locked on one chain, while an identical asset is minted on another chain and sent to an address owned by the original owner. These bridges can be decentralized blockchain ecosystems or centralized custodians. Interlay, Polkadot’s 10th parachain, is working to provide similar services for Bitcoin. We make an interesting parallel in TradFi with the concept of American Depository Receipts (ADRs); an ADR is a certificate representing shares of a foreign security. It is a form of indirect ownership of foreign securities not traded directly on a national exchange in the US. Financial institutions purchase the underlying securities on foreign exchanges through their foreign branches, and these foreign branches remain the custodians of the securities. The financial institutions hold legal title to the underlying stock through these foreign branches. This structure of indirect ownership has caused non-negligible problems in the past.

In the following parts, we will dive deeper into how Polkadot operates. We will analyze in a coming article Interlay’s specific operating model. 

Polkadot – the first fully-sharded blockchain:

Polkadot is a layer 1, or even layer 0, nominated proof-of-stake (nPoS) blockchain protocol connecting multiple specialized blockchains into one network. It was founded by Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation’s first CTO, alongside co-founders Peter Czaban and Robert Habermeier in 2016. Dr Wood has an impressive background as he invented Solidity, the language developers use to write decentralized applications (dApps) on Ethereum. He developed as well in 2015 a company called Parity Technologies that maintains Substrate, a software development framework primarily used by Polkadot developers who wish to create parachains quickly. Polkadot is run by the Web3 Foundation and developed by Parity Technologies. It uses a relay chain / parachain model, allowing multiple blockchains to communicate and securely share information. This unique model allows digital assets and data to be interchanged and transferred within a multi-chain network through efficient and secure data exchange between private/public blockchains, dApps and oracles. The parachains are entirely independent in governance but have shared security structures through the relay chain.

Polkadot’s functioning structure is best explained by the United States model: each state (parachain) has its sovereignty and rights but must rely on the federal government (relay chain) for governance and security. To be more precise, parachains remain fully independent governance entities, with the relay chain only governing block production, DOT treasury or parachain slot auctions, among others. Parachains connect to Polkadot by leasing a slot on the relay chain for a renewable period of 96 weeks. Parachain slots are assigned through auctions, and auction winners lock up a bond in DOT for the duration of the lease. 

As of January 2023, the Polkadot network is ranked at the 13th position on Coinmarketcap, being the eleventh-largest blockchain in terms of its native token DOT’s market capitalization ($5.4bn), behind Dogecoin ($9.6bn), Cardano ($9.2bn), and Polygon ($7.0bn). Polkadot runs parallel to its twin canary network, Kusama, where teams and developers can build and deploy parachains or try out Polkadot’s governance, staking, nomination and validation functionalities in a living environment.

Polkadot’s technical documentation provides a good description of its architecture. There are three fundamental roles in the upkeep of the Polkadot network: collators, nominators and validators:

Polkadot’s architecture

Source: Polkadot lightpaper

For the main differences between Polkadot and Ethereum, let’s look at Polkadot’s wiki page. Here is an extract:

“There are two main differences between Ethereum 2.0 and Polkadot consensus:

Polkadot parachains started going live in December 2021. As of January 2023, 36 parachains have secured auction slots. These parachains include DeFi chains (Acala, Parallel, Centrifuge, Interlay), smart contract platforms (Moonbeam, Astar and Clover), and web3 infrastructure (Efinity, Nodle).

Moreover, a significant milestone was crossed in May 2022, with Polkadot finally enabling the Cross-Consensus Message Format (XCM). XCM is a communication language allowing parachains to exchange messages with other parachains, similar to Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) on Cosmos. At the close of Q2 2022, 16 parachains began opening bi-directional Horizontal Relay-routed Message Passing (HRMP) channels with other parachains to start communicating with each other, as can be seen via the following link.

XCM is designed around four principles:

The agnostic aspect allows XCM to be suitable for messages between disparate chains connected through one or more bridges and even for messages between smart contracts. For example, a smart contract, hosted on a Polkadot parachain, may transfer a non-fungible asset it owns using XCM through Polkadot to an Ethereum-mainnet bridge located on another parachain, into an account controlled on the Ethereum mainnet.

Market adoption charts:

We provide in the following section a comparison over October 2022 of different trading metrics between the following tokens: ETH (Ethereum), DOT (Polkadot), ADA (Cardano) and ATOM (Cosmos). The latter three are blockchains focused on tackling the interoperability problem.

Over October 22, DOT price-performance was +4%, against +20% for ETH, -7% for ADA and +11% for ATOM.

Conclusion

With the launch of XCM, DOT will finally be ready to be traded, sent, and composed across all parachains on the Polkadot network. The passage of this milestone represents a massive leap in blockchain interoperability. We will see in a future article how Interlay, Polkadot’s 10th parachain, has a promising future in tackling the complex decentralized cross-chain bridge problem within the blockchain ecosystem. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether the web3 ecosystem’s future will be cross-chain or multi-chain.

References

Disclaimer

No Investment Advice

The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to invest in units of a fund. They do not constitute investment advice or a proposal for financial advisory services and are subject to correction and modification. They do not constitute trading advice or any advice about cryptocurrencies or digital assets. SUN ZU Lab does not recommend that any cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held by you. You are strongly advised to conduct due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Accuracy of Information

SUN ZU Lab will strive to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report, although it will not hold any responsibility for any missing or wrong information. SUN ZU Lab provides all information in this report and on its website.

You understand that you are using any information available here at your own risk.

Non Endorsement

The appearance of third-party advertisements and hyperlinks in this report or on SUN ZU Lab’s website does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, warranty, or recommendation by SUN ZU Lab. You are advised to conduct your due diligence before using any third-party services.

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboards & API streams or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

DeFi and the rise of DEXs and DAOs (1/2): Qualitative Analysis

By Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

November 2022

Decentralized Finance and the rise of DEXs and DAOs

This article was part of a broader report on the following theme: “Challenges and opportunities: The future of DeFi in TradFi”. Crypto Valley Association selected it among the top 5 pieces for its 2022 Call For Papers challenge.

DeFi and DEXs have recently attracted much attention. Uniswap raised in October 2022 a $165 million Series B funding round that valued the company at $1.7 billion, and DEXs globally are profiting from the hit that confidence in CEXs suffered following the FTX fallout. We provide in this first article a general overview of DeFi, DEXs and DAOs, focusing on Uniswap V3. In the second part of this article, we will cover a more technical analysis of price discovery and on-chain/off-chain arbitrage opportunities.

Questions and comments can be addressed to c.eladnani@sunzulab.com or research@sunzulab.com.

1. General Overview

DeFi, an abbreviation for Decentralized Finance, refers to peer-to-peer finance enabled by Ethereum, Polkadot, Avalanche, Solana, Cardano and other layer-1 blockchain protocols. It is often depicted as the opposite of centralized finance (CeFi) or traditional finance (TradFi), where buyers and sellers rely on trusted intermediaries such as banks, brokers, custodians and clearing firms. While some trace DeFi’s origins back to bitcoin and Nakamoto’s invention of blockchain concepts, it mainly was the introduction of smart contracts by Ethereum that helped DeFi apps flourish in the following years.

There are some direct pros and cons that come out of this opposition. Due to blockchain technology characteristics and removing intermediaries, financial transactions are usually faster with lower costs using DeFi. On the other hand, the absence of centralized banks and custodians often means that DeFi app users need to ”self-custody” their assets in their wallets, with the risks and logistical difficulties that this may bring.

The proliferation of DeFi has also brought the concept of DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, into the central stage. DeFi apps are usually managed through a DAO, where the process of management decision-making is made by decentralized validator nodes who own or possess sufficient tokens to approve blocks.

Vitalik Buterin defined DAOs as entities with internal capital with automation in the centre and humans at the edges. In simpler terms, DAOs could be seen as multi-signature wallets (multi-sig), releasing funds based on predetermined voting thresholds. Several characteristics follow from this definition:

The above definitions put the DAO construct and existing legal categories at odds. Laws are nationspecific, and DAOs are nation-agnostic. Legal entities rest on the sovereignty of nation-states, while DAOs operate through the pure power of mathematics and cryptography. There exists, however, DAOs that are legally incorporated, but these are closer to organizations leveraging DAO tooling rather than pure DAOs.
The absence of a centralized authority characterizes DAOs; there is no executive management, a board of directors, or shareholders to satisfy. Instead, community members submit proposals to the group, and each node can vote on each proposal. The proposals supported by a certain percentage of voters (1/2, 2/3 or 3/4 depending on the structure) are passed and enforced by the rules coded into smart contracts.


DAO benefits could be summarised as follows:

According to Coinmarketcap, the top 5 DAO projects by market capitalization are the following (as ofNovember 2022): Uniswap ($5.5bn), ApeCoin ($1.4bn), Aave ($1.2bn), BitDAO ($0.9bn), and Maker ($0.9bn). We notice a clear DeFi dominance over the DAO category.

2. Focus on DEXs – Deep dive into Uniswap v3

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) are a set of smart contracts that run on different blockchains and allow for decentralized swaps of selected tokens. DEXs popularity and usage have grown exponentially during the 2020 DeFi summer period, marked by the launch of Uniswap v2, allowing for ERC20 / ERC20 token swaps on Ethereum and the liquidity mining frenzy with the launch of governance tokens such as COMP or UNI. This was followed in 2021 by the release of Uniswap v3, which provided increased capital efficiency, improved the accuracy of price oracles and introduced a more flexible fee structure.

In 2021, Uniswap launched its v3. While this version used a constant function market maker model (CFMM), it came with significant enhancements to capital efficiency (up to 4000x relative to v2), a more flexible fee structure, and a more accurate price oracle. [tea21].

Liquidity providers (LPs) are able in v3 to concentrate their liquidity by allocating it to a specific arbitrary range. Individual positions are aggregated into a single pool, forming a combined curve against which users can trade. This improvement has paved the way for low-slippage trade execution, surpassing centralized exchanges and stablecoin-focused AMMs. Users can also add liquidity to a price range entirely above or below the market price to sell one asset for another, approximating a fee-earning limit order that executes along a smooth curve.

In previous versions, every pair of tokens corresponded to a single liquidity pool, which applied a standard fee of 0.30% to all swaps. This uniform fee structure was not optimal, being too low for some pools (such as high volatility or illiquid token pools) and too high for others (such as pools between two stablecoins).

This is why Uniswap v3 introduced multiple pools for each pair of tokens, each with a different swap fee: 0.05%, 0.30% or 1%. Due to this new non-fungible nature of positions, fees earned are no longer continuously deposited in the pool as liquidity as before. Instead, fee earnings are stored separately in the form of the tokens in which they are paid.

Uniswap v3 is governed like the previous versions by UNI tokenholders, but it is more flexible regarding the fraction of swap fees that go to the protocol. Users can choose for each pool any fraction 1/N for N ranging from 4 to 10, or 0. UNI governance can also add fee tiers beyond the initial tiers of 0.05%, 0.10% and 0.30%.
Finally, users can transfer ownership to another address.

Uniswap v3 comes with three main changes to the time-weighted average price (TWAP) oracle that Uniswap v2 introduced. First, v3 removes the need for users of the oracle to track previous values of the accumulator externally, bringing the accumulator checkpoints into the core. Thus, v3 allows external contracts to compute on-chain TWAPs over recent periods without storing checkpoints of the accumulator value.

Second, Uniswap v3 tracks the sum of log prices instead of accumulating the sum of prices, allowing users to compute the geometric mean TWAP instead of the arithmetic mean TWAP. This change avoids the need to track separate accumulators for price ratios between tok1 and tok2. Indeed, the geometric mean of a set of ratios is the reciprocal of the geometric mean of their reciprocals. Finally, Uniswap v3 adds a liquidity accumulator that it tracks parrallel to the price accumulator, which accumulates 1/L for each second.

This liquidity accumulator is helpful for external contracts that want to implement liquidity mining on top of Uniswap v3. Although these enhancements to Uniswap v3’s TWAP oracle are encouraging, research was published suggesting that TWAP oracles are unsuitable for the vast majority of DeFi use cases compared to Chainlink’s volume weighted average price (VWAP) oracles. The main differences between these two systems can be summarised as follows:

For all the reasons stated above, TWAP oracles remain unsuitable for the vast majority of DeFi applications that secure user funds, compared to Chainlink’s VWAP oracles that provide DeFi with higher quality price data.


3. The dominance of Uniswap v3

In less than a year, Uniswap v3 has gained significant dominance over other DEXs and even CEXs. Some factors that could explain this meteoric rise include the composability enabled by AMMs with other DeFi protocols and the ability to trade without asset custody by intermediaries.

Another factor that gained in strength over 2022 is simply Uniswap’s ability to provide higher liquidity levels than larger centralized exchanges. The Uniswap team shows in an analysis titled ”The dominance of Uniswap v3 liquidity” that, compared to other larger CEXs, Uniswap v3 has around two times higher market depth on average for spot ETH-USD pairs (using the most liquid dollar or stablecoin on each platform for comparison).

Market depth in traditional limit order books is computed by adding the limit order amount at each price level. As there are no limit order books in AMMs, the Uniswap team provides a methodology to derive an equivalent market depth using liquidity distribution over a price range (detailed methodology available in the original document).

Figure 1: Market depth comparison for ETH/USD pairs.
Daily average +/- 2% spot market depth in $ millions for the sample period from June 1, 2021 to March 1, 2022.
The comparison uses the most liquid ETH/USD pair for each of these markets
(ETH/USDC on Uniswap v3, ETH/USDT on Binance, ETH/USD on Coinbase, and ETH/USD on Gemini)
Source: the dominance of Uniswap v3 liquidity [LR22]

The analysis further shows that Uniswap v3 has had significantly higher market depth throughout the
sample period compared to CEXs in spot trading, as can be seen in the following graph:

Figure 2: 7-days rolling mean +/- 2% spot market depth comparison for Uniswap v3 (ETH/USDC), Binance
(ETH/USDT), and Coinbase (ETH/USD)
Source: the dominance of Uniswap v3 liquidity [LR22]

Additionally, Uniswap v3 displays higher market depth levels across all price levels, making it more advantageous to choose Uniswap v3 for larger trades relative to CEXs:

Figure 3: Average spot market depth comparison for Uniswap v3 ETH/USDC vs Coinbase ETH/USD
from June 1, 2021 to March 1, 2022.
Source: the dominance of Uniswap v3 liquidity [LR22]

It is important to note that the above analysis does not consider transaction costs, including gas costs on Ethereum, fees, or unexpected pre-trade slippage. The Uniswap team advances that these costs are broadly comparable for Uniswap v3 and CEXs, and are small relative to costs associated with market depths for large trade sizes.

Fee tiers on Uniswap v3 range from 1 bps, famous for stablecoin-only pairs, to 100 bps for the most volatile long-tail assets. Fees on Coinbase Pro, for example, range from 5 bps to 60 bps depending on the monthly transaction volume. CEXs have bid/ask spreads that vary based on the market and time. On the other hand, network congestion determines gas costs for on-chain transactions through AMMs. Since its
inception, the Uniswap v3 team computes a $31 median cost of a swap transaction.

The benefits of trading on a more liquid market are directly visible. Trading an ETH/dollar pair on Uniswap v3 would roughly generate a 3.8 bps price impact on average, against a 5 bps average price impact in Coinbase Pro, saving 1.3 bps of the notional (0.6 bps net of gas cost). The savings are even more significant for larger trade sizes. For a trade size of $5 million, the savings would be around 0.5% of the notional given the expected price impact difference. A ETH/dollar trade executed on Coinbase Pro that results in an average price impact of 0.05% (corresponding to a notional size of $650,000 at 0.1% market depth, assuming linear scaling of price impact with notional) would only have an average price impact of 0.0375% on Uniswap v3.

This is equivalent to around $81 on the price impact and around $36 of saving net of gas and fees. The weighted average of fee tiers is around 20 bps for Uniswap v3, the same as Coinbase Pro for the 650k – 1m volume tier. For $5 million notional, the average price impact is roughly 0.5% on Uniswap v3 and 1% on Coinbase. The fee is about 2 bps lower on Coinbase.

In addition to this analysis, data from Chainalysis in its latest web3 report showed that DEXs had dethroned CEXs in terms of on-chain transaction volumes for the first time in 2021. Indeed, while most CEX transactions happen off-chain on centralized databases and are captured on their order books to save on transaction fees, every DEX transaction occurs on-chain through smart contracts.

This helps explain how DEXs are leading in on-chain transaction volume. From April 2021 to April 2022, $175 billion was sent on-chain to CEXs, well below the $224 billion sent to DEXs.

Figure 4: On-chain transaction volume on CEXs vs DEXs
Source: Chainalysis June 2022 web3 report

It is crucial, however, to put things back into perspective. The following graph, although a bit outdated (global cryptocurrency market capitalization is around $1 trillion as of November 2022, according to Coinmarketcap), gives a precise idea of the scale of DeFi and crypto markets compared to more traditional and mature stock, real estate or derivatives markets.

Figure 5: Comparison of on-chain and off-chain markets
Source: SmartContent

The following picture helps to better grasp what $100 billion represents in terms of value.

Figure 6: How much value is $100 billion?
Source: Markets Insider

Do you want to go further? Read our quantitative analysis here!

We would be happy to hear your thoughts about DeFi in crypto markets!

Questions and comments can be addressed to: research@sunzulab.com

References:

Disclaimer:

No Investment Advice
The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to invest in units of a fund. They do not constitute investment advice or a proposal for financial advisory services and are subject to correction and modification. They do not constitute trading advice or any advice about cryptocurrencies or digital assets. SUN ZU Lab does not recommend that any cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held by you. You are strongly advised to conduct due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Accuracy of Information
SUN ZU Lab will strive to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report, although it will not hold any responsibility for any missing or wrong information. SUN ZU Lab provides all information in this report and on its website. You understand that you are using any information available here at your own risk.


Non Endorsement
The appearance of third-party advertisements and hyperlinks in this report or on SUN ZU Lab’s website does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, warranty, or recommendation by SUN ZU Lab. You are advised to conduct your due diligence before using any third-party services.

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboard & API stream or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

FTX Post-Mortem Analysis – Why Transparency Matters?

By Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

November 2022

FTX collapse powered by SUN ZU Lab
FTX Collapse

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”

Sun Tzu – 500 BC

This quote by our spiritual father, Sun Tzu, has never been more true in the crypto ecosystem as we all battle to survive the most significant blow ever to the nascent industry. FTX’s bankruptcy was described as crypto’s Lehman Brothers moment, or as more evidence came to light, more “Enron” than “Lehman” moment. Trying to cover this story as it unfolded before our shocked eyes was like trying to catch a bullet bare-handed. This article provides a preliminary post-mortem analysis of where the situation stands today. Unfortunately, we sincerely believe that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg, and we brace for many more casualties to be affected in the near future. We have already covered in SUN ZU Lab’s weekly insights (here & here) the story’s timeline and the significant headlines surrounding it. We will therefore move directly into a more technical analysis.

As a reminder, FTX and Alameda Research constituted the bulk of ex-crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire. The former being the exchange arm and the latter being the trading firm.

Understand the man to understand his actions:

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) had a reputation for being very smart and a highly talented trader. However, as more revelations come to light, we are convinced now that his supposedly spectacular trading returns (as well as some of his peers) were mainly driven by 2020 and 2021’s bull run. His crypto empire’s implosion is due instead to his betting big philosophy! A leveraging strategy mainly fueled FTX and Alameda’s stratospheric rise in the last two years via deceptive fundraises and financial engineering before eventually using plain fraud, as was revealed by the preliminary investigation.

In this Twitter thread, we get an interesting glimpse of SBF’s motives behind creating FTX; he explains, among others, that he was deeply frustrated by two things in the way other crypto exchanges operated. Contrary to TradFi, where an exchange focuses on managing its order book matching engine, leaving margin handling to the clearing house, a crypto exchange has to handle both responsibilities. He was therefore losing millions from what he called “socialized losses”, where the collectivity ends up paying the losses of a liquidated negative account. The second reason was that he viewed BTC’s price as being hit every time it suffered selling pressure from a cascade of liquidated accounts, which wasn’t fair from his point of view.

He initially addressed white papers proposing new ways of functioning to other exchanges before creating FTX as a new crypto derivatives exchange where, we cite: “The entire margin system is reworked to a way almost no exchanges in crypto work. We can take huge size & also have lots of leverage & have a solid blocker against ever having clawbacks.”

A trending video of Alameda’s CEO Caroline Ellison resurfaced where she was saying: “Being comfortable with risk is very important. We tend not to have things like stop-losses, I think those aren’t necessarily a great risk-management tool. I’m trying to think of a good example of a trade where I’ve lost a ton of money … well, I don’t know, I probably don’t want to go into specifics too much.”

We can see a recipe for disaster starting to take form.

A complicated SBF-Ellison / FTX-Alameda love story

Alameda Research and FTX were supposed to be entirely separate entities in theory. We instead learn that Alameda’s CEO Caroline Ellison has dated at times SBF. More shockingly, several top execs from FTX and Alameda lived in the same luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, where Ellison was rumoured to have access to FTX screens showing client trades. A recent Wall Street Journal report indicates that Alameda was frontrunning FTX token listings. Between the start of 2021 and March 2022, the trading firm held $60 million worth of 18 different tokens that were eventually listed on FTX.

This intimacy could also explain why SBF later allowed customer funds to be used to pay for Alameda’s loans, building a software backdoor to outwit FTX compliance systems.

FTX and Alameda’s Balance Sheets were bad, very bad!

The massive bank run suffered between November 6 and 11 drove FTX and Alameda eventually to the ground, and the word bank is chosen wisely as it appears FTX was more a bank than an exchange! They suffered as much as $6 billion of withdrawals in the final 72 hours, except they didn’t have customers’ money as FTX had loaned it to Alameda, which used it to make venture capital investments!!

Let us stop a moment on the last revelation. Every first-year finance student could tell you to never, never use extra-short-term liabilities (client funds, with a theoretical maturity of 0) to finance the riskiest and most illiquid investment in the spectrum (VC investments, with an expected maturity higher than ten years).

Ellison explains in an interview with the New York Times that lenders moved to recall their loans around the time the crypto market crashed this spring. But as the funds that Alameda had spent were no longer easily available, the company used FTX customer funds in an emergency procedure to make the payments.

Let’s go back first to where troubles began to appear. Anyone remotely familiar with the hedge fund space knows that the financials (P&L and Balance Sheet, among others) are protected at all costs. The fact that Coindesk managed to put their hands on that “secret sauce” leaves a place for a plethora of conspiracy theories. We refrain from venturing into that territory.

On November 2, CoinDesk published an article highlighting the following facts from a private document they reviewed:

To put things into perspective, this puts a total of $5.8 billion in FTT tokens on Alameda’s balance sheet as of June 30. The market capitalization of circulating FTT was around $3.3 billion that day. Indeed, a quick look at FTT’s page on Etherscan shows that over 74% of the token’s total supply is held by two addresses belonging to FTX and Alameda.

FFT’s page – Source Etherscan

This partial information meant that most of Alameda’s net equity was comprised of FTT tokens, printed out of “thin air” by its sister company FTX.

In a volatile and fragile global crypto environment, rumours were quickly forming about how SBF could be just another flywheel / Ponzi scheme magician! Here is what we mean by a flywheel scheme in crypto:

  1. Create a token
  2. Artificially pump its price (wash trading through a market maker)
  3. Mark the artificial gains in the balance sheet
  4. lure the community and investors with “realized” gains
  5. Raise capital through equity sales, ICOs or loans
  6. the hype continues to fuel the token’s price, and the loop continues!

The fears were extreme, especially since the Celsius bankruptcy and the CEL token explosion still haunt most of us. Celsius was a multi-billion dollar crypto lending firm, or Ponzi scheme, which was destroyed in part by its own token, CEL!

As it appears, this is exactly what SBF was doing with some of his investments, known as “Sam coins”, including Serum, Raydium and FTT.

The way it would work with our exchange/trading firm duo is that Alameda would fund a project at a $50 million fully diluted valuation (considering the total number of tokens to be issued) with $5 million, for example. FTX would then list the token on its exchange, releasing only a tiny fraction of the total tokens to the market. Given the illiquidity of this token, Alameda could easily deploy a few millions to artificially inflate the fully diluted valuation 100x, increasing the stake’s value on its books to $500 million. This inflated figure is then used as collateral for borrowing purposes.

The Financial Times shared a copy of an FTX balance sheet dated November 10, shared with prospective investors one day before the company filed for bankruptcy.

Here is a visualization of this balance sheet provided by Visual Capitalist:

FTX Balance sheet provided by Visual Capitalist
FTX balance sheet | Source: Visual Capitalist

We fell from our seats when we first saw this balance sheet! And we wouldn’t put it better than Bloomberg’s Matt Levine:

“It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane.”

Citing the FT, we learn that “A spreadsheet listing FTX international’s assets and liabilities, seen by the Financial Times, point at the issues that brought Bankman-Fried crashing back down to earth. It references $5bn of withdrawals last Sunday, and a negative $8bn entry described as “hidden, poorly internally labled ‘fiat@’ account”.

“Bankman-Fried told the Financial Times the $8bn related to funds “accidentally” extended to his trading firm, Alameda, but declined to comment further.”

When we look at the “less-liquid assets” category, the most considerable number is $2.2 billion of SRM, the Serum DEX native token (we will talk later about Serum). This is a clear example of the flywheel scheme described above in the article. As of November 17, CoinMarketCap shows a $70 million market cap for SRM (market cap of circulating tokens) against a $2.7 billion fully diluted market cap (theoretical figure taking into account the token’s max supply). The FTX team are basing their $2.2 billion valuation on an impossible illiquid scenario.

Okay, but one big question remains: how did they manage to burn through more than $10-15 billion of “realized” profits?

In our eyes, the bad VC investments and mishandling of client funds don’t explain alone the $8 billion hole in the balance sheet, especially when taking into account FTX and Alameda’s extremely profitable history due to high trading fees and lucrative venture deals. The only plausible explanation we see is that Alameda was bleeding money for a long time in 2022’s harsh bear market and possibly long before that, slowly decaying from its market-neutral market-making strategies into taking losing directional bets.

This seems to be exactly what we learned from a recent motion filed in the Delaware district court handling the bankruptcy procedure. The entities’ 2021 tax returns collectively showed a net operating loss carryover of $3.7 billion, meaning that the main entities (FTX & Alameda) had posted that much in losses since their inception. This completely contradicts the image SBF was circulating of his businesses and is quite shocking when considering that several competing crypto exchanges and trading firms, such as Wintermute or Coinbase, have realized significant gains over 2020 and 2021’s roaring crypto bull runs!

We end this paragraph on the wise words of newly appointed FTX CEO John Ray III: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

The biggest winners & losers:

Losers:

It is tough to choose one big loser from the FTX fiasco. There is obviously SBF himself, whose net fortune went from $26 billion at its peak to less than $1 billion. FTX employees are set to lose big, having most of their wealth linked to the exchange. VC and institutional investors have bet big on the disgraced young prodigy: between 2021 and 2022, SBF raised more than $1.5 billion from esteemed investors such as SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Temasek, Tiger Global Management, Paradigm or the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Without forgetting the more than a million creditors still waiting to see how this insolvency will be unpicked. It was typically revealed in a court filing that FTX owes almost $3.1 billion to its top 50 creditors. 

We want to focus on the Solana ecosystem as one major casualty. The Solana Foundation declared days after the bankruptcy that it held 134.54m SRM tokens and 3.43m FTT tokens on FTX when withdrawals went dark on November 6. Those assets were worth around $107m and $83m one day before the freeze. It also held a 3.2 million common stock ownership in FTX.

As we can see, Solana and FTX maintained deep financial ties. The problem gets bigger when considering Serum, a DEX created by SBF and at the centre of much of Solana-based DeFi. SBF even went on to call Serum the “truly, fully trustless” backbone of Defi on the Solana blockchain. DeFi protocols across the Solana ecosystem were rushing to unplug from Serum after the post-bankruptcy hack at FTX. It was reported that the true power over Serum rested with FTX and SBF, which continue to hold the program update authority keys. This led the Solana community to move to create a new version of Serum that they could govern without influence from FTX.

The total value locked (TVL) on the Solana network has seen a 70% drop in November 2022 alone, reaching lows of $300 million from a $10 billion peak in November 2021. SOL is down more than 60% since the start of the month and the Coindesk article release.

In a previous article by SUN ZU Lab titled “What is Tokenomics and why does it matter?”, we interestingly took the Solana case study to highlight the importance of good governance practices that protect users. One of the main questions we left our readers to reflect upon was the following: Is it really that decentralized? – We now have our answer!

Winners:

There aren’t many winners from this situation, except maybe DEX’s, which are seeing an impressive peak in interest since FTX’s implosion. Uniswap, in particular, has risen to become the world’s second-largest venue for trading Ethereum, having recorded more than $1 billion in ETH trades in 24h, surpassing Coinbase (c. $0.6bn). Since the news that Binance was about to bail out FTX, DEXs around the crypto ecosystem saw $31 billion in trade volumes, with Uniswap alone accounting for $20 billion.

We want to highlight, however, that while DeFi’s “permissionless, trustless self-custody” ideology seems to be winning short term, we don’t bet a lot on new institutional money going directly into DeFi, mainly for KYC and AML reasons, among others.

How did crypto markets react to all this?

Whether we analyze crypto markets from a price, bid-ask spread or volume perspective, we see that the turning point in FTX’s downfall was the announcement of Binance’s non-binding offer to buy its rival (11/08/22 around 5 PM UTC). It was the first major event that worried the markets that something was off. FTT’s price dropped by more than 80% in the following hours, while bid-ask spreads on FTT briefly reached 400 bps.

Bid ask spread | Why transparency matters
Bid ask spread | Why transparency matters

Could we have seen this coming?

Yes! We have already voiced our opinions and concerns over crypto risk assessment in general and how crypto venues should be managed and audited in these previous articles: “Everything you’ve always wanted to ask your crypto exchange” and “Crypto Risk Assessment: Way to Go“. FTX was ranked among the top crypto exchanges, just days before its fall, by major industry players, non of which were able to underline the significant governance, operational or counterpart risks surrounding FTX and Alameda. We believe the crypto industry now has few shots “to get this right” after this spectacular failure.

We put the emphasis again on this table from the Crypto Risk Assessment article, which summarizes, in our opinion, the significant risks that should be closely monitored and audited regarding crypto exchanges.

crypto risk assessment and the need for transparency

The magnitude scale is as follows (applied to capital at risk, whether it is a nominal amount for cash products or notional amounts for derivatives):

+ (very small to small): a fraction of a percent to a few percents

++ (medium to significant): a few percents to a few tens of percents

+++ (high to very high): up to 100% and beyond. The vital prognostic of the firm may be engaged

who knows? This one is exactly what it reads; possible losses range from trivial to life-threatening

We also highlight this chart from the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (FSOC) latest report, released in early October 2022. It highlights the major parties related to loans or investments made by 3AC, where we can see all the now-troubled actors following the explosion of the Terra ecosystem.

Interconnections of Three Arrows Capital

Where do we see things going from here?

For one thing, the FTX and Alameda implosion will hurt crypto liquidity badly. Alameda was one of the largest market makers in a space dominated by a handful of actors, among which we can cite Wintermute, B2C2 or Genesis. More disturbing, 56 market makers and fund managers reported FTX exposures of up to $500 million in an invite-only Telegram chat reviewed by TechCrunch.

As of November 24, the expanding list of FTX casualties now accounts for crypto-giants Genesis and Grayscale, BlockFi, Gemini, Multicoin and CoinHouse to cite a few. Genesis Global announced having lent around $2.8 billion to various crypto firms, including large loans to its parent company DCG. It confirmed that it had hired investment bank Moelis & Co to explore how to shore up its crypto-lending business’ liquidity and address clients’ needs days after halting withdrawals.

The bankruptcy procedure will surely be a long, drawn-out court case in which depositors will try to recoup their losses. But at which cost and after how many years?

FTX’s failure is unsurprisingly sparking a massive regulatory response, with several US state and federal agencies launching or expanding investigations into the company, including the DoJ, the SEC, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas and the Bahamas’ Financial Crimes Investigation Branch. More globally, crypto regulation in most markets has been slow to materialize. We see that changing in the wake of these recent events, with MiCA regulation in Europe heading for final approvals in 2023.

As this situation continues to evolve, we can’t yet draw final lessons and conclusions, except repeating our core message and belief at SUN ZU Lab: liquidity and transparency are core constituents to every efficient market worthy of the name. Remove one or both, and even “Too Big To Fail” giants start to shake.

We would be happy to hear your thoughts. You can address questions and comments to c.eladnani@sunzulab.com or research@sunzulab.com

About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboard & API stream or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

Opinion article: How a simple “heads or tails” game illustrates the importance of transparency in crypto markets?

By Stéphane Reverre and Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

November 2022

The importance of transparency in crypto

Crypto will always fascinate us. Who would have thought that we would manage to find a link between a famous 60’s American television game show, a Kevin Spacey poker movie, a heads or tails game and crypto market liquidity transparency? But here we are at SUN ZU Lab, always striving to push the boundaries of common perceptions.

The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle named after the host of the American game show “Let’s Make a Deal”. The problem was initially posed and solved in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975. It became famous after Parade magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant responded to a reader’s question regarding it in 1990. Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) later uses it to clarify his point about the Change Variable’s importance in the famous movie Las Vegas 21, released in 2008 (link).

It goes as follows:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Counterintuitively, the odds are not at all 50-50. You have a 2/3 (67%) probability of winning by switching doors!

We would not explain why this is true using conditional probability and Bayes theory (interested readers can check the paper in the reference section). Let’s instead see the problem from the following perspective:

Do you remain with your original door (1/10 chance of winning) or the other door, which was filtered out from 9 other possibilities?

Monty is improving your 9 choices set by removing 8 goats. Once he’s done “cleaning”, you are left with the top door out of 9 for you to choose from.

The question asked differently is: Do you want a random door out of 10 (initial guess) or the best one out of 9?

Now coming back to our initial pain point, crypto liquidity transparency, the question becomes:

As a professional crypto user, do you want one random liquidity venue to execute your trades or the best of 9 liquidity venues, carefully analyzed and filtered by an independent entity?

We give another example to illustrate our opinion better. Let us consider a game with three coins: one is two-headed, the second is a biased coin that shows heads 75% of the time, and the third is unbiased. One of the three coins is chosen randomly and tossed. What is the probability that it was the two-headed coin?

Without additional information, the chances of getting the two-headed coin are 1/3 (33%). Knowing that the tossed coin showed heads, the probability becomes 4/9 (44%)!

The previous probability is computed using Bayes theorem. Let E1, E2 and E3 be the events of choosing a two-headed coin, a biased coin and an unbiased coin, respectively. A is the event that the coin shows heads:

P(E1|A) = P(E1).P(A|E1) / [P(E2).P(A|E2) + P(E3).P(A|E3) + P(E1).P(A|E1)]

P(E1|A) = (1/3) / (3/4) = 4/9

Without this crucial information, the player would be at a clear disadvantage, as it is not “fair” to play against a game master that dissimulates essential information.

What we refer to in the previous example is non-other than information asymmetry. This problem has been studied thoroughly in contract theory and economics, and regulators try to eradicate it as much as possible. Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, leading to severe market inefficiencies such as moral hazard risks or the establishment of monopolies of knowledge.

The general idea, put simply, is the following: Information is King! The more you know, the better (crypto investment) decisions you make. That’s why transprency is key.

Between an opaque liquidity venue on which no information is available and another independently audited for a significant period, the chances of taking the best decision are far from 50-50. While past performance is not a guarantee of future results, you should at least be able to tell if your crypto liquidity venue is sharing necessary information with you. We are convinced at SUN ZU Lab that as the crypto market matures, the need for transparency-enhancing players will materialize to the point of absolute necessity. 

We would be happy to hear your thoughts about transparency in crypto markets!

Questions and comments can be addressed to: founders@sunzulab.com

References:


About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboard & API stream or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.

Opinion article: Why has liquidity become a question of survival for crypto venues?

By Stéphane Reverre and Chadi El Adnani @SUN ZU Lab

October 2022

Having already covered in this previous article the basics of market liquidity, with a focus on crypto markets, we decided to turn our attention to a new question: Has crypto liquidity become a question of survival for crypto venues? Indeed, the current harsh global macro environment has caused a liquidity crunch across all asset classes, especially risk-on assets such as cryptocurrencies. This situation has left crypto venues with no choice but to enter a race-to-zero on trading commissions to try and protect their market share, at the expense of revenues. Is this situation sustainable? When and how is this deadly spiral going to end? This is indeed a question of survival: trading venues and intermediaries cannot afford not to monitor their liquidity against their competitors. It is fast becoming a significant competitive advantage, probably the only one that will allow a favorable re-pricing of commissions.

Amid an overall bearish year for cryptocurrencies and other risk assets, Binance-US “surprised” the crypto ecosystem recently by adopting a zero-commission policy for BTC and other cryptos. The announcement led to an all-time high of more than 600K BTC traded on Binance the day the policy took effect, while Coinbase shares fell by almost 10%. 

The effect on Coinbase’s shares is not a surprise. Like any exchange, it has historically relied heavily on fees from trading volumes. Unfortunately, those have declined in sync with prices, creating instantaneous and significant pain, leading all crypto exchanges to look for ways to diversify their revenue streams.

The zero-fee trading phenomenon is not an innovation by Binance; US neo-broker Robinhood first introduced it a few years ago. Major stock brokers soon adopted the disruptive business model shift, including Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments or E*Trade Financial. Presumably, the measure will generalize in the crypto space, which will also create tremendous revenue pressure on non-exchange liquidity providers. 

In TradFi this cannibalization of revenues has been addressed in different ways. For example, large established brokers are offering premium services such as wealth management. By contrast, Robinhood is a bare-bone online broker without much in terms of service to make up for zero-fee transactions. It had to implement Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) to generate revenues.

In the PFOF model, a broker routes its clients’ orders to market makers. The market maker earns a profit by collecting a spread between buying and selling prices, paying the broker in return for the right to fill the investors’ orders. PFOF came under a harsh spotlight in early 2021 after chaotic trading by a group of retail investors on Reddit led to the spectacular GameStop short-squeeze. This episode put Citadel Securities and Robinhood on the SEC’s radar for potential conflicts of interest on how retail investors’ order flow data is being used against them. According to Bloomberg, the largest US brokerage firms earned a combined $3.8bn in 2021 for selling their customers’ stock and options orders. Interestingly even service-rich brokers adopted PFOF: Charles Schwab racked up $1.7bn, followed by Robinhood with $974m, for which Citadel Securities accounted for 22% according to the company’s 2021 annual report (34% in 2020).

Two things should be noted about PFOF:

What’s the relationship of the above with the original crypto introduction? Well, we venture one recommendation and one supposition. Under pressure on commissions, exchanges should consider liquidity as the “gold standard” of their future profitability. Hence the recommendation: “know thy liquidity”. Monitoring it and measuring it to assess, for example, its robustness across different market regimes should become a strategic objective. 

As for the supposition: the same cause having the same effects, we should expect some form of PFOF to emerge in crypto markets sooner rather than later. All of which raises again the question of value creation, repartition and eventually transparency: of the value extracted, what should the “fair” partition be? Regulators in traditional markets have looked hard at this question, and no doubt they will also consider crypto soon enough – an excellent reason to look at it beforehand.

References: 

Questions and comments can be addressed to research@sunzulab.com


About SUN ZU Lab

SUN ZU Lab is a leading data solutions provider based in Paris, on a mission to bring transparency to the global crypto ecosystem through independent quantitative analyses. We collect the most granular market data from major liquidity venues, analyze it, and deliver our solutions through real-time dashboard & API stream or customized reporting. SUN ZU Lab provides crypto professionals with actionable data to monitor the market and optimize investment decisions.