SBF Profile picture
10 Jul, 17 tweets, 5 min read
1) Do you feel bullish?

theblockcrypto.com/linked/110950/…
3) Alright, so what's going on with Bullish?

Well really it's two different companies combined into one.

It's an exchange, and it's a pile of crypto.

About $6B of crypto and USD: businesswire.com/news/home/2021…
4) It's SPACing at $9B, so that means $3B is the exchange if you value the crypto at market prices.

So, what _should_ Bullish, the exchange, be worth?
5) Well, they have a website, and a Twitter, but neither of those are going to help much:

bullish.com
twitter.com/Bullish
6) As I understand it, Bullish is basically:

a) build a centralized crypto exchange
b) Require KYC
c) write trades etc. to EOS blockchain
c) have an AMM that provides on the exchange with the $6b of crypto Bullish owns
d) let users provide in the AMM too

(it's not live yet)
7) So basically, Bullish going to is a standard exchange, except that it'll use it's $6b of capital to provide a bunch of liquidity.

Is that worth $3B?

You can be the judge of that.
8) What about that liquidity providing?

Well let's dive into an example.

They have ~$5B of BTC on hand, and ~$1B of cash.

Let's say they raise more and end up putting $1B each of USD and BTC in a BTC/USD pool, using x*y=k.

Then, the pool has ~$5m offered within 1%.
9) Right now, ftx.com/trade/BTC-PERP has roughly 900 BTC offered within 1%, or about $30m.

So while the Bullish treasury will help with liquidity, it won't be enough to make it top tier.

How much will that providing cost in IL?
10) They're assuming 75% annualized BTC volatility, which isn't crazy.

If BTC goes up 75% this year, ignoring fees/spreads:

Without providing: $1B USD, $1.75B BTC = $2.75B
With providing/IL: $1.32 USD, $1.32B BTC = $2.64B

So it's paying ~$100m/year to get 20% of FTX's depth
11) Which means paying $500m/year in impermanent loss to get top tier liquidity for BTC/USD.

Maybe $1B/year for all their books combined.

That's..... a lot to pay.
12) Which is just a way of saying that, usually, exchanges don't scale up liquidity by just putting out never-moving scales with their internal capital.

Ok, so what's up with Bullish's "illustrative" P&L?

(from sec.report/Document/00011…)
13) Well, basically, they're:

(a) ignoring IL
(b) assuming that customers are paying 16bps to trade
(c) assuming $1b/day of volume
(d) assuming they have $2.5B of USD to provide with (for BTC/USD--and more for others)

Wouldn't we all love to have those!
14) Also, just for fun, here's a chart of competitors' 2023 EV/EBITDA.

I love these charts! Though somehow they bury the lede: if I knew every company's 2023 EBITDA, I would go bet on stock and crypto prices, not think of relative exchange valuations.
15) But anyway, maybe this is all besides the point.

Bullish seems to be comparing itself to Bakkt and Coinbase, but maybe that's not really what it is.

Maybe Bullish is really another MicroStrategy.
16) Create a company, put $6B of crypto in it, SPAC it at $9B, and now people have a way to buy crypto with their brokerage accounts at a 50% premium.

Maybe they will!
17) I guess we'll see exactly how bullish the world feels.

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More from @SBF_Alameda

9 Jul
1) Why do we have to be so tribal?



Sometimes @elonmusk is wrong, sometimes he's right.

This time I think he's mostly right.
2) I mean, the reliance on DOGE is a bit odd--it's not exactly what I'd choose for a high-throughput L1.

But fundamentally, he's got a decent point here: trying to patch slow L1's with a fast L2 only sorta addresses the problems.
3) A few months ago, we applauded everything @elonmusk wrote, even when it was just memes.

Now we decry it, even when he's making a good point.
Read 6 tweets
6 Jul
1) On advice
2) Lots of people have advice to give you.

Sometimes it's pretty straightforward, like "your fan is smoking, you should turn it off".

But sometimes it's about how to run a business, and then it's complicated.
3) It's a really tricky balance.

On the one hand, you are the one who knows your business the best; everyone else is giving advice from a position of relative ignorance.

On the other hand, you're just one person, and they're many; most important things come from others.
Read 24 tweets
3 Jul
1) Mistaking easy for excellence
2) NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE
3) One of the beautiful things about crypto is how easy it is to build stuff.

Want to mint a token? spl-token-ui.netlify.app/#/
Read 21 tweets
1 Jul
1) What does FTX look for in partnerships?
2) There are a ton of ways that we can work with others!

From ftx.com/pay to FTX whitelabels to ftx.com/nfts to liquidity to otc.ftx.com to branding to investments to advising, our surface area is only growing.
3) The potential of our partnerships gets bigger each day.

This also means, though, that we're unlikely to be able to guess everything ahead of time.

And so when we partner with people, a _bit_ thing we try to figure out is:

how excited are they to work with us?
Read 6 tweets
29 Jun
1) Working together
2) Before crypto, I worked on Wall Street.

There were some partnerships there. there had to be; each trade relied on like 12 companies coming together.

The buyer, the retail broker, the PFOF firm, the dark pool, the prime broker, the clearing and settlement, the exchange...
3) And then again on the seller's side.

And maybe an ETF issuer and an AP while you're at it.

But given that, things were pretty cutthroat.

Not fucking each other over actively--at least where I was, there was a strong ethos against doing anything that seemed negative-sum.
Read 16 tweets
28 Jun
1) why most things suck
2) ok so we're currently trying to pay a company money

like, we want to use their service.

they charge for it, and we're happy to pay.
3) The problem is, they don't really seem to want to let us.

We said "hey we're ready to pay now can we have access to your API?"

They said "no sorry first let's have a phone call".

so we had a phone call, and they walked us through the product (unnecessarily).
Read 6 tweets

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