"Coinbase recklessly delivered false, misleading, or inaccurate reports concerning transactions in digital assets, including Bitcoin, on the GDAX electronic trading platform it operated."
4) But sometimes...
idk, something about an onion.
5) First, the actual accusations aren't that bad.
a) they had two bots which traded against each other, but "Hedger and Replicator had independent purposes"
b) "The GDAX Trading Rules specifically disclosed that Coinbase was trading on GDAX"
6)
c) The actual manipulative behavior came from an ex employee, not the company, and given the lack of cited magnitudes, I'm guessing it wasn't that big.
7) But beyond that, this isn't the type of notice the CFTC publishes if they're gearing up for war.
This is what they publish when things are settled. Not just this charge, but probably most charges.
8) I don't have any background information here!
But this seems most consistent with, roughly, "Coinbase had to do 200 things to go public. One was settling all disputes with US regulators. They just checked that one off."
9) In addition, there's no disclosure here about what "hedger" or "replicator" are, which I'm guessing Coinbase is happy about.
10) [COMPLETE SPECULATION]
My guesses?
Hedger: retail buys 1 BTC on the Coinbase mobile app (paying 5%!). Coinbase internalizes, then "hedger" slowly buys back on the Coinbase orderbook.
11) Replicator: retail buys 1 BTC on the Coinbase mobile app (paying 5!). "Replicator" buys 1 BTC immediately on the Coinbase orderbook.
Hedger would trade with Replicator if retail had been net buying but then someone sold, and one of the two (hedger, probably) was providing.
12) Anyway, TL;DR: think about what Coinbase would be valued at if it had someone like @elonmusk as its public face!
For a while there's been something annoying about FTX referral accounting.
All of the ref fees are paid out, but it often takes a day to do so.
That means that they will sometimes show up in the next day's bucket.
2) Going forward, this should be cleaner; each day's referral fees should correspond exactly to trades that happened on that (previous) day.
This should make it easier to track what's going on.
We're also considering changing the interaction of FTT with fee tier 6.
3) Fee tier is is capped at 3bps taker post-referral; this means if someone was fee tier 6, and had $5k of FTT making their actual fees ~3.5bps, then they would only give ~0.5bps of ref fees.
We're considering changing this to be a 3bp min pre-FTT.
If Nomi hadn't fucked up, maybe SUSHI would be at $100.
If the team hadn't built, maybe it would be at $1.
But it had a shot, because much of what we thought was sacred was in fact chasing yield.
3) There are people whose beliefs in a product or a chain will always dominate other factors.
But most of the people you see using something aren't trying to express their faith. Most people are still searching, and using whatever seems best for them at the time.