As someone who was both part of the team at IEX, the company featured in Flash Boys, and a former executive at ErisX, a US-based CFTC regulated crypto derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, I have first-hand knowledge of these stories in reality. Not the second-hand hearsay of friends. Was Flash Boys embellished? Absolutely. Written for…
As someone who was both part of the team at IEX, the company featured in Flash Boys, and a former executive at ErisX, a US-based CFTC regulated crypto derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, I have first-hand knowledge of these stories in reality. Not the second-hand hearsay of friends. Was Flash Boys embellished? Absolutely. Written for accessibility and entertainment over technical accuracy? Certainly. Mostly fiction? Depends on who you ask and their motives. The list of fines and penalties levied for practices illuminated in the book in the aftermath of its publishing are evidence that it was not.
Were there reasons to have questions and concerns about FTX's operations before it collapsed? For someone sufficiently inclined there is a long-read comment letter to the CFTC from ErisX regarding FTX's margin application. For the TL;DR skip to page 9: the Appendix with Open Questions. We now have the answers to a number of those questions. There were, in fact, people raising concerns ahead of the collapse. Theirs were unpopular perspectives when the money was flowing.
I've spent almost 25 years building financial exchanges and electronic trading products. I've worked on crypto and blockchain related products and businesses for 10 years, giving me a pretty firm understanding of both traditional financial infrastructure and crypto financial infrastructure. There are a long list of frauds and manipulations and scams in crypto. They tend to be fundamentally the traditional sort that have happened for the past four centuries in traditional financial markets long before crypto was invented. That is unfortunate, but does not diminish the value and capabilities of the new technology, the business models and products that it enables that have historically not been possible. My bet is that it isn't the naysayers that will be vindicated in the long run, but crypto technologies and new modalities of finance, art, business, and gaming that they enable.
As someone who was both part of the team at IEX, the company featured in Flash Boys, and a former executive at ErisX, a US-based CFTC regulated crypto derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, I have first-hand knowledge of these stories in reality. Not the second-hand hearsay of friends. Was Flash Boys embellished? Absolutely. Written for accessibility and entertainment over technical accuracy? Certainly. Mostly fiction? Depends on who you ask and their motives. The list of fines and penalties levied for practices illuminated in the book in the aftermath of its publishing are evidence that it was not.
Were there reasons to have questions and concerns about FTX's operations before it collapsed? For someone sufficiently inclined there is a long-read comment letter to the CFTC from ErisX regarding FTX's margin application. For the TL;DR skip to page 9: the Appendix with Open Questions. We now have the answers to a number of those questions. There were, in fact, people raising concerns ahead of the collapse. Theirs were unpopular perspectives when the money was flowing.
https://cdn.cboe.com/resources/government_relations/comment_letters/CFTC_Margin_Final.pdf
I've spent almost 25 years building financial exchanges and electronic trading products. I've worked on crypto and blockchain related products and businesses for 10 years, giving me a pretty firm understanding of both traditional financial infrastructure and crypto financial infrastructure. There are a long list of frauds and manipulations and scams in crypto. They tend to be fundamentally the traditional sort that have happened for the past four centuries in traditional financial markets long before crypto was invented. That is unfortunate, but does not diminish the value and capabilities of the new technology, the business models and products that it enables that have historically not been possible. My bet is that it isn't the naysayers that will be vindicated in the long run, but crypto technologies and new modalities of finance, art, business, and gaming that they enable.