Coppola Comment

Today, I bring you the sad tale of a crypto lender that promised safety and high returns to its depositors, but whose promises have proved to be as hollow as its name.  Donut Inc., a self-proclaimed DeFi" lender, has a "Proof of Reserves" section on its website . This is supposed to reassure customers that their deposits are matched one for one by the platform's liquid assets. I am firmly of the opinion that "Proof of Reserves" statements prove nothing without a corresponding statement of liabilities, since deposits aren't the only form of liability, and encumbered assets can't back deposits. But in this case, the "Proof of Reserves" is worse than useless. It is actually fiction. And it conceals a truly dreadful situation for Donut's customers.   As of today, this is what the "Proof of Reserves" says:  By itself, this doesn't prove anything at all. It's just an unsupported statement of what the company calls "ass...

Friday was quite a day. The crypto lender BlockFi provisionally agreed a bailout deal with FTX . The hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), already in compulsory liquidation in its home territory the British Virgin Islands, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in the United States. And the crypto broker Voyager suspended trading and withdrawals .  Voyager's press release revealed a massive hole in its balance sheet. Some 58% of its loan book consists of loans to 3AC: And its loan book is nearly 50% of total assets: So approximately 28% of Voyager's assets are in default. And since 3AC now has creditor protection, Voyager must wait for bankruptcy courts to decide how much, if anything, can be recovered. That will take months.  But the balance sheet hole doesn't explain why Voyager has suspended US dollar withdrawals. Despite its apparently healthy "cash held for customers" balance, it seems to be dreadfully short of cash. There is something else going on he...

" USD-backed stablecoin is 10x better than your savings account ," runs the headline on an unsolicited press release in my inbox yesterday. And it goes on to explain: The average interest rate for savings accounts in the US currently stands at 0.09%, with some German banks even charging negative interest rates. Universal Protocol, a coalition of leading blockchain organizations, including Uphold, Cred, Blockchain at Berkeley, and Bittrex Global, has recently introduced interest rates of 10% p.a. for its USD-backed stablecoin UPUSD.  Ok, so they are issuing an altcoin at high interest rates. Why are they comparing this with FDIC-insured savings accounts? The UPUSD is a fully-transparent digital asset that is collateralized 1-to-1 with US dollars and held at US-domiciled, FDIC-insured banks.  FDIC-insured banks don't hold digital assets. They hold US dollars. So this should read "collateralized 1-to-1 with US dollars held at US-domiciled, FDIC-insured banks...

The Fed's interventions in the repo market are attracting considerable comment. A lot of people seem to think the Fed has embarked on another QE program without Congressional approval. And the usual suspects are complaining that the Fed is pumping up stock prices and debasing the dollar.  Stocks are indeed heading for the moon - though so is the dollar, which rather undermines those who think it is being debauched. But the Fed's interventions in the repo markets have nothing to do with stock prices. They are all about banks. Last September, sudden spikes in the Fed Funds Rate (FFR) and its repo market equivalent, the Secured Overnight Funding Rate (SOFR), caught the Fed off guard. It  acted quickly, injecting copious quantities of reserves to bring the rates down. But this was by any standards a seat-of-the-pants operation. The Fed simply hadn't expected banks to run out of reserves. After all, despite the Fed's balance sheet reduction, total reserves were still fa...

Ever since the secured overnight repo rate (SOFR) spiked to 10% in September, there have been dire warnings that these exceptional movements show the financial system is fundamentally broken. The story goes that the post-crisis financial system is so dysfunctional that it is unable to operate without continual injections of money from central banks. The Fed's attempt to reduce the $4.2tn of reserves it added to the financial system in three rounds of QE has dangerously destabilised the financial system, so it has now had to re-start asset purchases to restore the lost reserves and refloat tottering banks. It's fair to say that much has changed since the financial crisis. Prior to 2008, banks maintained far lower levels of reserves than they do now, typically at or just above their reserve requirement. They borrowed reserves from each other in the unsecured interbank market to settle customer deposit withdrawals and securities transactions. The Federal Reserve intervened ...

The geeks to whom my post on probability was addressed responded exactly as I expected. "You don't understand the tech", they said. And they went on about network routing protocols and Dijkstra's algorithm . Someone even sent me a spec for an onion routing protocol for the Lightning network. I read it and sighed. They had completely missed the point. To be sure, I had made an incorrect assumption about Lightning. I assumed that Lightning devs respected property rights. It turns out that they don't even know what property rights are, let alone respect them. They see Lightning's pathfinding problem as entirely a technical matter. If it were, then solving it would simply involve developing algorithms to oversee the network and find the most efficient payment paths. I did mention this possibility in my post, in relation to recursive payment paths (emphasis not in original) : Payment routes could become very long and very complex without anyone knowing. Th...

Global trade is awful. Really, it is. For the last five years, trade volumes have been growing at their slowest sustained rate since the early 1980s. Here's a horrible chart from the World Trade Organisation's latest forecast: And in the last year, things have got worse: Import demand of developing economies fell 3.2% in Q1 before staging a partial recovery of 1.5% in Q2.  Meanwhile, developed economies recorded positive import growth of 0.8% in Q1 and negative growth of -0.8% in Q2.  Overall, world imports stagnated in the first half of 2016, falling 1.0% in Q1 and rising 0.2% in Q2.  This translated into weak demand for exports of both developed and developing economies.  For the year-to-date, world trade has been essentially flat, with the average of exports and imports in Q1 and Q2 declining 0.3% relative to last year. Oh great. The WTO's chart shows that flat trade eventually translates into flat growth. And as this chart from the World Bank shows, gro...