In some horribly twisted way, it might make sense?
If BUSD is a “safe” stable coin backed by real, liquid, currency in a binance bank account (lots of IFs), it might make more sense as accounting than storing it as USDC stored in another company’s bank account, in that other company’s country. If that company makes bad decisions, it could impact binances customers. Especially after FTX and prior stablecoin fiascos, storing customers funds in your own bank seems prudent.
If binance can soft-real-time mint USDC during bank hours, then any conversion can be done by a regular-banking wire transfer. All they need is some pre-minted reserves for off-hours.
Orrrrrrr they’re playing games with customers funds and hiding it in their own coffers. In which case BUSD is backed by a lie. FTX is familiar.
They automatically convert most stablecoins (though very notably not Tether) into BUSD upon depositing. Then if you withdraw some USDP/TUSD/USDC/maybe some others I'm not remembering, they'll subtract it from your BUSD balance.
FTX did something similar, though they just auto-converted them to and from fiat USD (again, notably, not applying this policy to Tether).
~ Same thing as USDC but issued by Binance. They use them interchangeably in some cases since they themselves can also convert them 1:1 (both are worth 1$) just not immediately- e.g. if you have 100 busd you can straight cash that out as usdc and that might temporarily make it so they have less usdc than needed.
People post when Binance have generic delays to withdraws for years in other forums and it's a non-story. I imagine it only made it on the front page because people think it means more than it does.
I think what is interesting here is that they clearly don't have 1:1 USDC reserves. And as their compliance has been questioned by many in the past might be that they might not be able to convert large amounts of BUSD to USDC, not at least cheaply.
Probably not dollars, but some kind of low-risk assets like USD bonds? In that case you also can't just withdraw dollars, you have to sell the bonds - if they have to convert large amount like hundreds of millions, the spread on those bonds might get larger.
Also even though it were just dollars in a regular bank account, when the amounts go large enough, the bank might have liquidity issues of their own.
What would be the biggest issue is the compliance. As rumours are circulating that Binance might be getting some kind of charges, the banks and other institutions might just stop doing business with them because that would increase their risk a lot.
IIRC BUSD is whitelabeled from Paxos so it would probably be fine in the case of Binance troubles.
100MM isn't nothing, but it's very much moveable. Bond markets trade absolutely massive size. Even hen you could tell people "hey, you can't get your USDC, but we're trading out of positions over the next two weeks". Sucks but drastically different than an FTX situation.
> It is important to understand the distinction between BUSD and Binance-Peg BUSD. These are two different products.
Binance USD (BUSD) is a regulated, fiat-backed stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The Paxos-issued BUSD stablecoin, as well as its reserves, are subject to strict regulatory oversight by the New York Department of Financial Services. BUSD is backed by reserves held in either or both (i) fiat cash in dedicated omnibus accounts at insured U.S. banks and/or (ii) U.S. Treasury bills (including through repurchase agreements and/or money-market funds invested in U.S. Treasury bills).
> Binance-Peg BUSD, which is not issued by Paxos and is not regulated by NYDFS, is a separate product. Binance independently mints Binance-Peg BUSD on other blockchains (e.g., BNB Chain, Polygon and Avalanche) and pegs the tokens to BUSD on a one-to-one basis. This allows holders of both tokens to swap tokens between Ethereum and other blockchains.
Binance replacing USDC with BUSD is not having USDC reserves. If Binance had USDC reserves they would not need to burn BUSD, mint USDC or require banks to be open. Because Binance already would hold the USDC.
Likewise if something happened to the value of BUSD, it should be fine, because you hold USDC. Except you don't because Binance replaced the coins they were supposedly holding in custody for you.
1. It was said that Binance treats BUSD and USDC as the same currency
2. It was said that there is a high number of USDC withdrawals
If Binance had USDC reserves they would not need to burn BUSD
Well, if they didn't provide the service of treating the currencies as the same, they would have been able to fully cover. However, they do, so it is expected that they need to convert. All in all, it seems perfectly natural what they do.
The other two, which conveniently both have ties back to Binance.
It feels a bit like saying "Unfortunately, converting Facebook Dollars to Apple Dollars is currently not possible due to minor technical difficulties. However, you can still easily convert to Oculus Dollars or Instagram Dollars..."
What's so weird about these stable coins is that there's no money to be made with them (for the end user). They're 'stable' so have no upside but they're non-redeemable when things aren't working and have a real probability of going straight to zero at any given moment.
I'd get it for some volatile coin where the risk is potentially worth it but holding these for more than a few days for clearing (?) doesn't make sense to me.
If you follow the money it makes perfect sense. After all, after converting to your 'internal stable coin' you can claim you have the reserves and you're free to spend the original coins in the real world. Right up to the moment that everybody wants their money back and it turns out that your stable coin was worthless.
Problem lies here that dodgy institutions without goverment supervision are issuing stable coins so you never know when some crypto guy is going to do rug pull. But first government backed stable coin which you can buy and sell fast will be huge.
As if government institutions are any more dutiful. The British banknotes still say “I promise to pay the bearer on demand…” as a big FU to all the holders.
...signed by the Governor of the Bank Of England, the oldest central bank in the world, which has never yet reneged on that promise to exchange paper for hard currency.
That's an interesting way of spinning the pound falling out of the ERM (which wasn't the same as the Deutschmark). From the perspective here, getting out of the ERM was a blessing, not a "failure".
And at no point did a paper pound cease to be exchangeable with hard currency. So I stand by my earlier remark.
Not sure if that’s sarcasm, but the promise is to exchange it for gold, not “hard currency”. Barely 100 years since the establishment of the Bank of England has passed before the convertibility was annulled for 20 years because of wars and, as a consequence, gold shortage.
There's no mention of "gold". It says on this here piece of paper: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds".
The implication that this £20 note is not actually £20. But ten £2 coins is coin-of-the-realm, and coin is what you can expect the Governor to hand over when you go to cash-in the promise.
The government institutions are definitely more dutiful than Binance. Even if they weren't though, a USD will have more value after a major Fed screw up than the equivalent stablecoin after their crypto backers make a major screw up.
>The other two, which conveniently both have ties back to Binance.
So what? USDT is currently worth marginally more than USDC. Buy some Oculus dollars and trade with someone else for your Apple dollars if you want Apple dollars so badly.
Because I can't edit the above comment anymore: Sorry, my bad. I mixed up Binance and Bitfinex there. So please disregard what I said about a connection between Binance and Tether.
Didn't want to introduce another conspiracy theory here...
If their PAX/BUSD -> USDC conversion only works during the opening hours of that New York bank, wouldn't this be well-known to everyone who tried to convert to USDC in the past?
As in, what "situation" are they talking about? Going only from their tweet, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening at all...
The idea would be that in the past their buffer of liquidity has been enough that they cover up without having to go to the bank between opening hours, and that recent surge in withdrawals (this would be the "situation") has now dried up that buffer.
Not speaking to how that reflects actual events, it's all consistent.
In theory, this is related to their recent automated BUSD <-> USDC conversion program. They started treating the two as fungible, and so have split reserves between the two (likely BUSD for the most part). If your reserves of USDC get drained faster than you can replenish, then you can't withdraw more USDC (even though it's backed since you have a BUSD waiting to convert).
Such a system runs along just fine, until suddenly there's huge USDC withdrawal pressure over the weekend, you can't get dollars from the bank BUSD uses to the bank USDC uses, and the USDC reserve goes empty. Wait for banks to get back into business and everything is super fine.
From the outside the above situation and a true insolvency look quite similar. It should be possible to inspect their BUSD balances on chain though?
They likely have a reserve of say $100M in USDC to fulfil withdrawals, and only when withdrawals exceed that amount before they can do the bank transfers to top it up will they have to suspend withdrawals
The first crypto business that hires a PR person to take over all tweeting will rule the space. I can’t watch people destroy so much value solo tweeting anymore. The same goes for almost any business or celebrity I can think of.
Ah yes, truly the peak of cryptocurrency "Sorry, we can't process that highly decentralized censorship proof freedom coin, we're waiting for our bankers in New York to wake up".
Nobody with basic knowledge in this area would think of USDC as "highly decentralized censorship proof freedom coin". It is centralised and pegged to USD so obviously it must be intentionally interlinked with the banking system.
This is the fiction of Crypto though - we're all here in this space because we want decentralized censorship-proof, public recorded transactions, and we then proceed to immediately abandon all of those principles to trade dollar denominated assets on a central exchange that operates out of a shady jurisdiction.
Yes, we all know what the point of crypto was. Yes we all know what is actually happening, the only question left is why the hell are we still doing it?
> Yes we all know what is actually happening, the only question left is why the hell are we still doing it?
One of the most difficult things to do is explain to a cult member that they're a cult member. Similar to participants in the great crypto ponzi scheme.
> we're all here in this space because we want decentralized censorship-proof, public recorded transactions
dude what. no. the majority of people are "here" just wanting the numbers go up in the closed-source centralized database that their trusted banker runs.
there are small group of people that actually care about decentralization and open source access to money, that number is maybe 0,01% of the total "crypto" users.
People need to manage risk, buy food and pay rent regardless of their conviction in those principles. However, the traditional financial system is broken or malicious and not serving crypto users properly. It is too difficult and slow to cash out to bank accounts. I know some people in developing countries for whom it is simply not an option to withdraw to their bank account, and their nationality precludes them from most offshore options. It can be essentially the same situation in developed countries. It's not a clear question whether it's best to take the risk of a stablecoin collapsing or take the risk of the price volatility of more decentralised coins, but they don't have many other options.
> we then proceed to immediately abandon all of those principles to trade dollar denominated assets on a central exchange that operates out of a shady jurisdiction.
Speak for yourself. I don't touch that stuff with a 10-foot pole.
I'm making a guess here, but suspect that you are not one of the "we" who are "still doing it". The glorious thing about decentralized censorship-proof systems is they die when the 2nd to last person stops using them, and not when people declare them dead.
Frankly, the government isn't a very respectable institution and it is quite a remarkable era that now, after millennia of thugs taking people's stuff, there is suddenly an asset class that can't just be seized. That comes with a long laundry list of problems. It also comes with uncertain consequences.
> ...public recorded transactions...
Don't have to do this if you don't want to. So-called privacycoins exist.
The quotes around "temporarily" are editorialising, IMO. They should be removed.
No fan of Binance but it's a reasonable explanation and submitter has given no reason to think it is not, indeed, a temporary situation, as has happened many times in the past without particular note.
Nobody is prepared for a bank run, that would be idiotic. It would mean storing strictly only liquid assets.
> USDC on the exchange are not backed by real USDC. Therefor they need to market buy them.
That's pure speculation on your side... Withdrawal pauses have happened many times in the past, it's not really alarming. Only when something bad happens afterward do people remember there was a withdrawal pause before, but there has been countless pauses before with no problem afterward.
> Binance and Binance related coins such as BNB, BUSD and Tether.
Banks are, up to whatever the legally guaranteed deposit insurance is, prepared for bank runs. And I never heard of actual banks limiting or even pausing withdrawls, non-cash, ever. And those cases where they do, e.g. Libanon, are a dead give away the economy is fucked. So, drawing from that parallel, the crypto economy might very well be fucked.
>And I never heard of actual banks limiting or even pausing withdrawls
Most banks pause withdrawals every night. They are only open during the day. You can't just show up at 2 am and be able to withdraw 10 million dollars.
I can withdraw 1k at 2AM in any ATM in the world. The only reason why you can't withdraw 10 million at that time is purely for KYC purposes. Withdrawals aren't paused because the bank doesn't have the money, merely because there's noone physically present to handle it (partly because, even with 10 millions, you're not worth the time of an employee, and because nobody _needs_ to withdraw 10 million suddenly in the middle of the night)
You could, following regulatory and bank internal processes, trabsfer those ten million in one go to any bank account in the world so. Assuming you have internet and a phone.
It is not like Binace is limiting cash withdrawls, they a halting wire trabsfers. For me that's a dead sign the money isn't there anymore.
No. When I can't withdraw, it's because my bank teller is sleeping.
Binance has a bank teller, but he's telling you "uh hold on we need to buy your money from another teller that's sleeping because we don't actually have it. Do you want to get our monopoly money instead?"
Depending on jurisdiction, and your net worth in cash deposits, well you very well are. In the EU each single account is guaranteed up to 100k Euro cash, anything above that is quite often subject to bank specifoc guarabtees and insurances. Also, banks are, since 2008, undergoing regular stress tests. They always have published audited balance sheets, have rules and regulations around the use of customer deposits, which again are controlled. Heck, even during the Wirecard collapse nobody lost deposited money as far as I am aware.
As soon as a bank fails to provide audited balance sheets, authoroties can step in and halt operations. Mainly to make sure customers deposits are still there and can be withdrawn by the legal owners. It is almost hilarious how Crypto is relearning, at a redicioulous pace, all the lessons tradotional finance and banks learned over the last 100 odd years. And still fails to see that all the answers are already there. In a sense, it is almost peak start-up cliche disruption. Can almost be a good thing so.
If I have someobe holding my crypto currency, that is as close to a crypto bank as it gets. Otherwise crypto woupdn't be money but some form of security. In which case, one has to ask, it is not regulated as such.
And show me one broker that refused, regardless of transaction fees or other contractual stuff, customer wothdraels of funds. Other than those brokers that actually "lost" customer funds. Which is, by the way, also fraud.
> If I have someobe holding my crypto currency, that is as close to a crypto bank as it gets.
You don't get to define what is a bank, and "anyone holding my money" is definitely far from the definition of a bank.
USDC is _not_ USD. When you deposit 100 USDC to Binance and ask to withdraw USD, you are effectively making an FX swap between two currencies, even if these currencies are 1:1 pegged.
Again, there is simply no broker on the planet that will do that instantaneously. USD is 1 day settlement, you just won't get any better than that, unless the broker accepts to take the counterparty risk of paying you upfront. No existing broker will do that for any substantial amount.
Ok but there is a big problem with your argument. If that is the case why did the Binance CEO have to make an announcement on Twitter if the business terms already include that USDC to USD settlement takes a business day? The banks being "late" is not unusual, it would happen every single day.
> Now I challenge you to find any broker on the planet that can promise instant FX swap settlement on the same day for a cash account.
Don't compare apples and bananas.
If I deposit Shmollars to a regulated brokerage they will hold my Shmollars in Shmollar denominated account and upon request will instantly (subject to technicalities of the transfer) transfer those Shmollars back. No FX swap needed.
Now if they convert those Shmollars to anything else without my explicit request then they are no longer a brokerage and more comparable to an unregulated bank. Which is what Binance apparently did.
Crypto exchanges need sophisticated hot/cold wallet management for security. Hot storage is their equivalent to cash on hand. Hot storage can be quickly depleted.
If a crypto exchange just disables withdrawals of one asset, users technically still can sell it for BTC, ETH or another stablecoin and withdraw that.
Sometimes my banking website is down for maintenance.
It's an exchange. Your money should be 100% liquid. Everyone should be prepared for a bank run. Unless they're just as dodgy as FTX and using everyone else's money for shenanigans.
I don't know why people are defending this as if it is a good thing.
No single broker on the planet is instantly liquid. At the very best daily liquid.
Most currency settlements are between 1 and 3 days for DM. Your "feeling" of instantaneous transfers is just front office display, the real back office takes days.
If your exchange is taking your deposits and market selling them before you have them on the market then they are front-runners and they cheated you.
I don't know how else to say it, your buying power is not their buying power just because they have it on deposit and you trusted them.
That's the thing we trusted them not to do, and that's how exchanges like FTX lose the trust of their customers. If you think this is just the cost of doing business, you're a fool.
Crypto currencies do not take days to move from point a to point b. That is old world baggage.
Brokers use conventional bank accounts for your dollar or euro account balances. The eurozone has instant SEPA now. That is as fast as it gets. Faster than most cryptocurrencies.
> Nobody is prepared for a bank run, that would be idiotic. It would mean storing strictly only liquid assets.
Binance is a broker, not a bank. A bank run on a broker simply shouldn't be possible. A broker is supposed to hold whatever the customers want to hold on their behalf (in so-called segregated accounts, so that the assets belong to the users, even if the broker should go bankrupt). If the users want to withdraw, you just give them whatever you were holding on their behalf.
A broker is not supposed to invest users' funds into something else. If you're acting honestly as a broker, there can't be a mismatch between users' deposits and their assets. Don't fall for this nonsense touted by SBF, the problem is that they are acting dishonestly (and cluelessly, it seems), not that there was any sort of unfortunate liquidity crisis or whatever.
Sure, but they are solvent enough, aren't they? Curious, if banks screw up and ruin customers nobody is out there defending traditional banking. Still, there are people defending SBF, FTX and Binance. Not sure how Binance will do, but it doesn't look good, does it?
> Holding does not mean holding _now immediately liquid assets_
What do you mean by liquid? USDC is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. 'Holding' it means having the private key to a wallet that has been credited with a positive balance in the smart contract. Transferring it is as easy as calling the transfer(address to, uint amount) function from that wallet - you'll have to charge the user for the transaction fee, but that's fair game. According to CZ's tweet, they don't actually hold USDC on behalf of the users, but they try to buy them on the market when users request withdrawals, which is simply not how a broker is supposed to act, and a recipe for disaster. Stop defending this practice.
> no single broker has ever been instantaneously liquid.
Really? If Vanguard had to transfer all of my cash and all of my ETF holdings to directly and everyone elses too I would expect that to be zero hassle for them bar the likely collapse of their future business.
Every legitimate exchange is prepared for a “bank run”. because they don’t behave like banks since they’re exchanges.
Being exchanges, they have your money in exactly the form that shows up in your account.
Binance (and FTX before that) apparently doesnt, because it’s behaving like a bank and lending out your money despite claiming to be an exchange and not a bank.
Nobody is prepared for a bank run, that would be idiotic. It would mean storing strictly only liquid assets.
No bank is prepared for a bank run. It's not supposed to be a bank. Banks make money by using customer deposits to generate revenue through loans. Exchanges make money through fees and aren't supposed to be using customer deposits at all.
> USDC on the exchange are not backed by real USDC. Therefor they need to market buy them.
Likely, USDC balances are backed by dollars in the bank account mentioned in the tweet. To convert that to USDC, they don't need to market buy it - they can wire it to Circle to get fresh USDC minted. In contrast with having all USDC always on hand (like they probably should), this lets Binance earn interest from the bank for their customer deposits.
Or they could be insolvent, sure. There's really no way to reliably tell.
I agree it is editorialising, at the same time this has been a set pattern so far: first temporarily halt withdrawals, then come back with some bs excuse that the money is gone (blame the hacker, bad investments, loans, whatever) and go into bankruptcy.
FTX said something very similar just days before going belly up:
"Stablecoins: processing. Banks are closed for the weekend, though; USD <> stablecoin creations/redemptions might be slower until wires clear tomorrow, especially for some coins/chains."
I mean, I feel like we can call it something else, but people did a bank run on grocery stores for toilet paper in 2020. It's a term people use to convey what's happening even if it's not technically the correct term to use.
I wish for large international ponzi schemes to cease to be, preventing further influx from people who don't know better. For those already in the ponzi scheme there's little that can be done to convince them they're in a ponzi scheme, or cult.
People lose their money on many things, hard earned or otherwise, regardless wishing that avenues which are designed to facilitate such losses cease to exist is not mean spirited.
What we do know is that binance hasn't ever done a proper audit, considering that, I can call Binance a scam with a high degree confidence and the only way for me to stop saying it is by them doing a full audit by a reputable company.
Which they are not going to do since they are scam.
People will lose a lot of their hard earned money if that happens.
As crypto emerges from early adopter status, the "crypto-bro/normal person" ratio of the victims decreases over time, therefore the earlier it crashes the larger a portion of the victims are people who deserve it and should've known better. It should burn down as soon as possible to protect the innocent.
What I fear is that U.S. Government is meddling with the only exchange that works properly in Venezuela and Argentina, especifically for the P2P trade.
I know this tweet is not about P2P, but let me explain.
In Venezuela and Argentina, the parallel markets are the true king of the economy. You have to exchange money using P2P exchanges if you want to barely have decent personal finances, you know, to access good currency exchange rates.
It's true that other P2P exchanges exist, like Airtm and Reserve. They just do not have the capacity nor good exchange rates to appropriately cover market needs. They just can't, they are not as resourceful as Binance.
If the U.S. Government starts meddling with Binance and Binance has to close, reduce functionality or kill the P2P feature on the grounds of AML, it's going to send Venezuela and Argentina to the dark ages again.
The government isn't 'meddling' with Binance, Binance is under the spotlight because it appears that keeping reserves is a bit of a weak point with all of these new finance companies. If anything you should be grateful that there (finally) is some oversight, but I fear it is too little and too late.
That oversight in theory is good. In practice it turns out to be: "The OFAC and FATF hate your people as a whole. We cannot service you anymore. Kthxbai."
I will trust regulators when regulators do not exclude people where systems would be most useful. It all boils down to: if you're not credit worthy, you must be a terrorist, capomafia or at best, a tax evader.
See what happened to Uphold[0], which is unfortunate.
There are plenty of ways to transact money if you’re not creditworthy. What’s “missing” is a non-fraudulent way to get credit if you’re not creditworthy, and that has nothing to do with US enforcement of fraud and everything to do with the fact that only fraudulent lenders will lend to non-creditworthy people.
> everything to do with the fact that only fraudulent lenders will lend to non-creditworthy people.
Exactly, another thing that happens is that the ways money is exchanged for black markets[0] is also the way terrorists and tax evaders would use. So, we share the same "highway" and get classified as such.
But we aren't terrorists or tax evaders, we just need to make our lives less expensive.
You aren't but you can bet that plenty of people even if they were not terrorists definitely were evading taxes by using these services, or at a minimum worsening the strength of the local currency. If enough people do that then the effect can be so strong that you end up leaving yourself no alternative. Obviously, a stable currency requires all parties to believe in it, and this is the first problem that any competent government would have to address.
'your people' has nothing to do with oversight of Binance. But I agree that oversight could be more precise in its goals and execution, however, and this is a big issue, it requires a well functioning, non-corrupt government in all countries participating backed by a non-corrupt police force and local financial authorities.
This is a problem in a large part of the world, and even in countries where these factors are present the size of the workforce available for regulatory oversight is usually only a small fraction of the size of the workforce available for the industry itself. That's why something like WireCard could happen in Germany. And even if the demise of WireCard also hit a lot of non-players that still doesn't mean that it isn't a good thing that they are gone.
> it requires a well functioning, non-corrupt government in all countries participating backed by a non-corrupt police force and local financial authorities.
In the current times, that's nothing realistically accessible to Argentinian and Venezuelan people.
Too much "ideal" conditions need to happen at the same time. What we need are practical solutions.
My Argentinian friends tend to view everything that happens in Argentina as part of either some nefarious plot by the US government, or the glorious struggle of the brave Argentinian people against the US government. They would certainly view anything that happens with Binance, or even FTX/SBF as the US government trying to screw them over.
I try not to be like that, but sometimes it appears like so.
Most of the time it's truly hard to see any alternative explanation, and I invest a lot to have the most nurtured worldview possible, with all the points of view considered. And even then, it's really hard to think in plausible alternative explanations that do not feel like pulling hair out of the head.
It's like duck typing: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has duck legs. It must be a duck.
The US Department of Justice suspects Binance of processing over $10 billion in illicit funds during 2022 alone. Whatever goes on in Argentinian P2P markets is an insignificant blip against this background.
It sounds like you have a bit of a persecution complex going on. It's unfortunate if the effects on your corner of the world are negative, but it's really not even on the Americans' map most of the time.
How about creating a local solution for your local needs instead of relying on a company like Binance whose operating principles are: "We are not headquartered anywhere, our auditor says they don't know what our parent company is named, but we'll happily transmit money to Iran"? That always seemed like it might catch up with them...
Because such a company would need to be regulated. I'm not against regulation, the problem is that once you get regulation you also accept to use the legal currency exchange rate, which is expensive for most use cases.
Let me provide accurate, real-world examples:
- 1 USD = 171.276 ARS (according to XE's website, this is the official exchange rate).
- 1 USD = 311.25 ARS (according to Binance's P2P exchange, this is the parallel/black market rate).
In Argentina, most stuff is valued in USD, even if the legal tender is ARS. If you were to buy a $2500 ARS burger with Binance money, that burger costs you $8.03 USD. If you were to buy that same exact burger with a licensed properly regulated exchange, that burger costs you $14.59 USD, almost the double.
This might seem like a trivial example, and a few dollars don't seem to make much of a difference. Try the same example with your weekly grocery store basket, rental apartments, payments of a car, etc. It all adds up and most people here don't earn more than $300 USD monthly (valued in black market exchange rate, of course).
The legal currency exchange rate in Argentina is a local problem, not an international one. This is not rare in countries with weak local currencies but it is a bit strange to blame the issuer of the currency that you chose to use privately for your troubles. In the former SovBloc countries the USD and the DM were the currencies of choice for the black market, and the official exchange rate was something ludicrous (you were even forced to exhange a certain amount per day at those rates as a tourist), but on the black market prices were entirely different showing the true value of the local currency (something slightly above the value of the paper it was printed on). That wasn't the fault of either the USA or Germany, that was entirely the fault of the party in charge at the time.
One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
Well, I was just pointing out that if Binance were to fall down (and by extension, its P2P functionality), it'd make it harder for the people to access exchange rates that have made their lives easier, the easiest they have been.
> One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
I'd not say foreign actors like the U.S. Government are meddling with Argentinian or Venezuelan economy, but I'd say that if the U.S. Government were to kill Binance, that has negative impact on this side of the world (which is my original comment).
The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
(please don't interpret my comment as defeatist, it's only there's so much a single person can do).
> Well, I was just pointing out that if Binance were to fall down (and by extension, its P2P functionality), it'd make it harder for the people to access exchange rates that have made their lives easier, the easiest they have been.
I get that, but that's not necessarily the fault of the regulators in other countries, much more the fault of the local government not being able to provide their citizens with a stable local currency.
> The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
I very much sympathize with you, especially in light of the US's past willingness to interfere in those local affairs when it suited their business interests. Even so, the only real solution for this problem can come from inside. Argentina has tremendous potential, natural resources and a whole bunch of other things going for it, I sincerely hope that you and your fellow countrymen will be able to somehow turn this around and make it work.
The solution to that particular problem is simple, but it won't be found outside of Argentina. Think of it this way: if the fate of a country depends on a company that is not even physically present in that country then your problems are of an entirely different nature. Obviously other countries are not going to hold back on regulatory oversight of financial institutions because of some kind of persecution complex elsewhere, if anything Argentinians will benefit from this because there are fewer ways in which they can lose their money.
The typical order in which you address problems like these (looking at it historically) is to first fix your government, then to fix your economy and finally to reap the benefits from that. Argentina looked to me like it was heading in the right direction, this love affair with crypto is at best a distraction.
No, Argentina is not heading in the right direction in that sense.
The economic situation has worsened for the commoner, everything gets more expensive gradually. People have started making concessions on what to buy or not.
The government is not fixable at this point, because of the populist agenda (same as Venezuela, but less deadly).
> if anything Argentinians will benefit from this because there are fewer ways in which they can lose their money.
It turns out the easiest way to lose the money is to keep it sitting at an Argentinian bank. The devaluation is just too violent. If you want to track how to country is doing, please track the black market exchange rate (which is why I claim in my original comment as the true king of the market). Tracking the official exchange rate as you're probably are doing, is not an effective measure as it's seldom used for transactions.
Well, housing Nazis tends to put you on, at the very least, a "tread with caution" international list, not to mention on the very infamous Mossad's "blacklist". Argentina and Switzerland are their black sheep for housing Nazis and stealing the Jewish gold.
That happened 70 years and many governments ago and has absolutely no bearing on international dealings with either Switzerland or Argentina today any more than that dealings with Germany do and has nothing at all to do with Binance.
Don't forget to tell that to Mossad who not even a few years ago hunted down a 90 years old Hungarian dude who was nothing more than a simple guard at one of the concentration camps, forget which one.
The Mossad's relentless focus and unlimited budget to go after these assholes is commendable. But that is a very long way from seeing the present day Argentina as directly influenced by the Nazis.
Laszlo Csatary is probably who you are thinking of. We're rapidly approaching the end of the hunt though, simply because there are fewer and fewer of the escapees still alive.
Which is my point exactly. Relentless focus and unlimited budget and you only get to see the tip of the iceberg in the news. Can you imagine that Mossad is like "we only hunt old Nazis but the countries benefited from their gold we leave them alone and don't meddle in their politics"? Because I don't.
While the US importing Nazi scientists is ethically very questionable, it's not really the same. Many of those scientists were guilty of benefiting from the work of forced labor and such, though typically weren't involved in enslaving people themselves, while the Nazis given refuge in Argentina were directly responsible for not only that but the abuse and murder of millions of innocent civilians.
The motives were fairly closely aligned though, both the US and Argentina at the time hoped that bringing these Nazi operatives into their respective countries would give them an edge military wise.
Also, let's not belittle the involvement of the German scientists that went to the US in the Nazi campaign, they knew very well what they were doing and each and every rocket launched against London had the signature of Werner von Braun on it. See also: Tom Lehrer.
A use case indeed for crypto, Especially if your friends and customers are from Argentina, Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine and Iran who's currencies have been totally de-vauled and close to worthless.
One can use that to send USDC worldwide, instantly, cheaply and can exchange that to their local fiat currency. USDC doesn't require an exchange at all, only if you are exchanging it to fiat.
Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto vocals are going to have to concede on their extremities and eventually settle with crypto sitting around for a very long time in a regulated setting.
You're mixing so many things up that I don't know where to start.
But if your customers are in Venezuela, Russia or Iran and you use stablecoins to work around US or international sanctions, you're facing pretty serious legal troubles.
If ending up in jail is a valid use case for you, sure.
> But if your customers are in Venezuela, Russia or Iran and you use stablecoins to work around US or international sanctions, you're facing pretty serious legal troubles.
Not if one gets a license to operate in those sanctioned countries.
> If ending up in jail is a valid use case for you, sure.
Sigh.
So NGOs with licences to operate in sanctioned countries should be put in jail for aiding people without access to money to pay for food due to blanket sanctions then?
It appears that HNers here are just too privileged to not see the global money transfer use-case, especially with countries who's currency has lost 90% of their value.
Destroying value and market price are unrelated concepts.
The eternal cognitohazard of discussing crypto online is that you are dealing with deeply invested people without any guarantee that they understand finance in general.
I honestly expected more from the HN crowd. The comments here are disturbingly inaccurate and fear mongering. For those of you that don't want to sift through the BS and just get the gist (from someone deep in this space):
- Binance suspended USDC withdrawals. You can still withdraw in other stablecoins, fiat, or crypto. You can withdraw BUSD and swap to USDC on another exchange (dex). So really, this is not a big deal.
- The reason why this happened is - a while ago, Binance started automatically converting user USDC to BUSD upon deposits. Since then, we've then seen large amounts of USDC being sent to Circle from Binance, supposedly for redemption purposes.
- This now (likely) means that Binance has a lot of cash on hand, but not enough USDC to process the current withdrawal frenzy. So they have to go to their redemption bridge and convert their cash back to USDC. As such, the explanation given by CZ is very plausible.
- Withdrawal suspensions are not an uncommon occurrence on Binance, or any other exchange for that matter. You are only noticing this now because the market participants suffer from PTSD from other exchanges going under and the effect of the news is amplified.
- The fear seems to be largely coming from people associating the withdrawal suspension with the recent FTX fiasco. However, and especially without understanding the context of those suspensions, its important to remember - correlation does not mean causation.
- It also comes from people expecting Binance to have USDC at 1:1 ratio liquid, but thats not the case due to the auto conversion mentioned, and explained, by Binance.
- Its also worth noting that BUSD is not a Binance product. Its managed by Paxos, which is a separate entity.
Ultimately, the r/r here is clear: it takes little effort to withdraw and stay safe, but the downside is huge if Binance goes under. So its natural for people to decide to withdraw even when chances of it blowing up are slim.
Withdraw your coins if you are worried, preferably via fiat to a bank. But, please, don't go around spreading panic about things you don't understand or lack the context to judge.
"Stablecoins: processing. Banks are closed for the weekend, though; USD <> stablecoin creations/redemptions might be slower until wires clear tomorrow, especially for some coins/chains."
- USDC on Binance is not 1:1 backed by USDC, but by another stable coin such as BUSD or perhaps even USDT. Both of them are much harder to convert into real dollars!
- Binance is obviously not prepared for a bank run, this is happening on a Monday/Tuesday, not even a weekend, and the withdrawals issued started yesterday while the banks where open! As of this post, USDC withdrawals have been suspended for at least 14 hours!
> - USDC on Binance is not 1:1 backed by USDC, but by another stable coin such as BUSD or perhaps even USDT. Both of them are much harder to convert into real dollars!
This is not true in any way. First, you do not hold USDC on Binance, you hold BUSD. Your USDC deposits are automatically converted to BUSD. Neither USDT nor BUSD is "hard" to convert to real dollars. Swap them to USDC on Uniswap and do whatever you please with them.
> - Binance is obviously not prepared for a bank run, this is happening on a Monday/Tuesday, not even a weekend, and the withdrawals issued started yesterday while the banks where open! As of this post, USDC withdrawals have been suspended for at least 14 hours!
As I said, you can withdraw in other stablecoins. If you go to a bank, and you cannot withdraw USD at that moment, but you can withdraw EUR - does that mean the bank is insolvent?
> Your USDC deposits are automatically converted to BUSD
Guess this is not new, but it seems like an obviously horrible idea!! The minute people lose confidence, the value of BUSD go do down and people will withdraw in not-BUSD. Meaning they will have to make more BUSD to cover the difference, devaluing the BUSD more, causing a spiral.
Not sure I follow. Why would they mint BUSD if people are withdrawing other coins?
BUSD is just USD denominated in tokens on chain, each token represents 1 usd at their bank so they cannot (or rather, should not) mint more than they have in custody.
Yeah, but what happens if it's not worth 1 $ anymore?
My understanding is limited, but naively:
- I give them 10 USDC
- They convert it to 10 BUSD
- Price of BUSD falls to 0.5$
- I want my 10 USDC back
- They have to sell 20 BUSD to get 10 USDC
- They have to generate 10 BUSD ??
I'm sure this is not how it actually works, but you get my point.
Also, one could argue that if the BUSD price drops against the dollar they should have more BUSD ? Or how does that work? :)
Although, in practice, I don't think they would buy USDC via BUSD, but use their cash reserves for that. The cash reserves correspond (allegedly) 1:1 to BUSD so they would need to burn equivalent amount of BUSD as well. This all means that Binance would always value BUSD at 1 USD. I don't see a scenario where BUSD falls to 0.5usd if there are no shenanigans happening with the cash reserves.
The point is that custody services should hold coins 1:1. Binance should already have the USDC on hand. They do not, because they swapped the currency their customers were holding.
Saying BUSD is the same as USDC is akin to saying UST is the same as USDC. They are not the same, they are backed by different entities with different behaviour and different reputations.
They are not a custody service, they are an exchange. They are not obliged to hold USDC, if all customers have their assets in BUSD due to the conversions that happened. Are you expecting Binance to have 1:1 BUSD on hand, in addition to holding the same amount in USDC as well (so 2x the amount of funds deposited by the customers)?
Nobody said BUSD == USDC. But comparing it to UST (an algorithmic stablecoin nonetheless) is, at best, misleading.
Sorry I typed too quickly. People can and do expect Binance to be /custodians/.
> Conversions were announced timely.
Yes. Without consent of customers, or even any confirmation from customers that they'd read of and were aware of their coins being swapped for a different currency backed by a different organisation.
> Its the logical conclusion of people expecting Binance to hold full USDC deposit amounts
No. The logical conclusion of people expecting Binance to hold full USDC deposit amounts is a 1:1 USDC holding, not to have a second BUSD copy of every coin. This is a bizarre straw man.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then. If customers didn't want their USDC deposits converted, they shouldn't have used Binance. Its not a public service company. Same goes for your expectations of custody, they never claimed to be one.
Conversions are even announced when you go to deposit USDC:
I don't see how your point holds, besides "customer expected X, but got Y" - but this is because customer is misinformed, not because Binance has an obligation to store USDC 1:1 (in this case).
As an observer, the schadenfreude around crypto is unreal. If you want to see crypto fail, and jump on opportunities to spread FUD, to eventually prove your position and briefly smugly walk around saying "I told you so", then that's disgraceful.
Don’t spend your time in this world bringing people down to prevent them from climbing higher than you. Lift them up. You’ll know you’ve got it right when they reach back down and give you a hand up.
Either you don't understand your own words, or you don't understand who's truly getting rich from cryptocurrency speculation, or maybe both. Either way I had a good laugh, thanks.
193 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAt least we'll know soon...
- USDC withdrawals will be restored when the banks open.
Expect, means in best case, they have no idea what the problem is, worst case it's all coming tumbling down
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/binance-usd/
If BUSD is a “safe” stable coin backed by real, liquid, currency in a binance bank account (lots of IFs), it might make more sense as accounting than storing it as USDC stored in another company’s bank account, in that other company’s country. If that company makes bad decisions, it could impact binances customers. Especially after FTX and prior stablecoin fiascos, storing customers funds in your own bank seems prudent.
If binance can soft-real-time mint USDC during bank hours, then any conversion can be done by a regular-banking wire transfer. All they need is some pre-minted reserves for off-hours.
Orrrrrrr they’re playing games with customers funds and hiding it in their own coffers. In which case BUSD is backed by a lie. FTX is familiar.
Or they have spent it or given it out in bad loans.
FTX did something similar, though they just auto-converted them to and from fiat USD (again, notably, not applying this policy to Tether).
People post when Binance have generic delays to withdraws for years in other forums and it's a non-story. I imagine it only made it on the front page because people think it means more than it does.
1. Burn 1 BUSD
2. Withdraw that 1 dollar
3. Deposit it with the USDC account
4. Mint one USDC
However, that requires that banks are open.
Also even though it were just dollars in a regular bank account, when the amounts go large enough, the bank might have liquidity issues of their own.
What would be the biggest issue is the compliance. As rumours are circulating that Binance might be getting some kind of charges, the banks and other institutions might just stop doing business with them because that would increase their risk a lot.
100MM isn't nothing, but it's very much moveable. Bond markets trade absolutely massive size. Even hen you could tell people "hey, you can't get your USDC, but we're trading out of positions over the next two weeks". Sucks but drastically different than an FTX situation.
https://paxos.com/busd/
> It is important to understand the distinction between BUSD and Binance-Peg BUSD. These are two different products. Binance USD (BUSD) is a regulated, fiat-backed stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The Paxos-issued BUSD stablecoin, as well as its reserves, are subject to strict regulatory oversight by the New York Department of Financial Services. BUSD is backed by reserves held in either or both (i) fiat cash in dedicated omnibus accounts at insured U.S. banks and/or (ii) U.S. Treasury bills (including through repurchase agreements and/or money-market funds invested in U.S. Treasury bills).
> Binance-Peg BUSD, which is not issued by Paxos and is not regulated by NYDFS, is a separate product. Binance independently mints Binance-Peg BUSD on other blockchains (e.g., BNB Chain, Polygon and Avalanche) and pegs the tokens to BUSD on a one-to-one basis. This allows holders of both tokens to swap tokens between Ethereum and other blockchains.
Likewise if something happened to the value of BUSD, it should be fine, because you hold USDC. Except you don't because Binance replaced the coins they were supposedly holding in custody for you.
Yes, that is a mistake, trust in Circle is not the same as trust in binance
> service of treating the currencies as the same
Replacing customer’s investments is not a service, particularly if it makes it more difficult to withdraw the currency.
That’s alarming. People purchased a coin backed by Circle and got a coin backed by an unrelated company.
What they're saying is that you can't withdraw USDC, but you can withdraw any of the other two.
It feels a bit like saying "Unfortunately, converting Facebook Dollars to Apple Dollars is currently not possible due to minor technical difficulties. However, you can still easily convert to Oculus Dollars or Instagram Dollars..."
I'd get it for some volatile coin where the risk is potentially worth it but holding these for more than a few days for clearing (?) doesn't make sense to me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/1...
That's an interesting way of spinning the pound falling out of the ERM (which wasn't the same as the Deutschmark). From the perspective here, getting out of the ERM was a blessing, not a "failure".
And at no point did a paper pound cease to be exchangeable with hard currency. So I stand by my earlier remark.
The implication that this £20 note is not actually £20. But ten £2 coins is coin-of-the-realm, and coin is what you can expect the Governor to hand over when you go to cash-in the promise.
> What's so weird about these stable coins is that there's no money to be made with them (for the end user).
Doesn't tell the whole story - it is possible to seek returns from owning stable coins.
So what? USDT is currently worth marginally more than USDC. Buy some Oculus dollars and trade with someone else for your Apple dollars if you want Apple dollars so badly.
Didn't want to introduce another conspiracy theory here...
As in, what "situation" are they talking about? Going only from their tweet, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening at all...
Not speaking to how that reflects actual events, it's all consistent.
Such a system runs along just fine, until suddenly there's huge USDC withdrawal pressure over the weekend, you can't get dollars from the bank BUSD uses to the bank USDC uses, and the USDC reserve goes empty. Wait for banks to get back into business and everything is super fine.
From the outside the above situation and a true insolvency look quite similar. It should be possible to inspect their BUSD balances on chain though?
Yes, we all know what the point of crypto was. Yes we all know what is actually happening, the only question left is why the hell are we still doing it?
One of the most difficult things to do is explain to a cult member that they're a cult member. Similar to participants in the great crypto ponzi scheme.
dude what. no. the majority of people are "here" just wanting the numbers go up in the closed-source centralized database that their trusted banker runs.
there are small group of people that actually care about decentralization and open source access to money, that number is maybe 0,01% of the total "crypto" users.
If liquidity was available without ridiculous yields promised to lenders, we wouldn't need those centralized exchanges.
The sole reason people are trading on Binance is because of the 3bps transaction fee, versus 30bps on decentralized exchanges.
Speak for yourself. I don't touch that stuff with a 10-foot pole.
Frankly, the government isn't a very respectable institution and it is quite a remarkable era that now, after millennia of thugs taking people's stuff, there is suddenly an asset class that can't just be seized. That comes with a long laundry list of problems. It also comes with uncertain consequences.
> ...public recorded transactions...
Don't have to do this if you don't want to. So-called privacycoins exist.
But movements of USDC need no interaction with the banking system, so there should be no need to pause them.
No fan of Binance but it's a reasonable explanation and submitter has given no reason to think it is not, indeed, a temporary situation, as has happened many times in the past without particular note.
1. They are not prepared at all for a "bank run"
2. USDC on the exchange are not backed by real USDC. Therefor they need to market buy them.
3. CZ is telling people to withdraw using BUSD and USDT, both more or less Binance controlled stables that are much harder to convert into real USD.
It would be extremely wise to exit Binance and Binance related coins such as BNB, BUSD and Tether.
Indeed, but the great ponzi scheme rolls on none the less :/
Nobody is prepared for a bank run, that would be idiotic. It would mean storing strictly only liquid assets.
> USDC on the exchange are not backed by real USDC. Therefor they need to market buy them.
That's pure speculation on your side... Withdrawal pauses have happened many times in the past, it's not really alarming. Only when something bad happens afterward do people remember there was a withdrawal pause before, but there has been countless pauses before with no problem afterward.
> Binance and Binance related coins such as BNB, BUSD and Tether.
What...
Most banks pause withdrawals every night. They are only open during the day. You can't just show up at 2 am and be able to withdraw 10 million dollars.
It is not like Binace is limiting cash withdrawls, they a halting wire trabsfers. For me that's a dead sign the money isn't there anymore.
Which is what is happening to Binance.
Binance has a bank teller, but he's telling you "uh hold on we need to buy your money from another teller that's sleeping because we don't actually have it. Do you want to get our monopoly money instead?"
Binance is about to pull the rug.
Disclaimer: not defending Binance, not into crypto, just a note.
As soon as a bank fails to provide audited balance sheets, authoroties can step in and halt operations. Mainly to make sure customers deposits are still there and can be withdrawn by the legal owners. It is almost hilarious how Crypto is relearning, at a redicioulous pace, all the lessons tradotional finance and banks learned over the last 100 odd years. And still fails to see that all the answers are already there. In a sense, it is almost peak start-up cliche disruption. Can almost be a good thing so.
Now I challenge you to find any broker on the planet that can promise instant FX swap settlement on the same day for a cash account.
Don't compare apples and bananas.
And show me one broker that refused, regardless of transaction fees or other contractual stuff, customer wothdraels of funds. Other than those brokers that actually "lost" customer funds. Which is, by the way, also fraud.
You don't get to define what is a bank, and "anyone holding my money" is definitely far from the definition of a bank.
USDC is _not_ USD. When you deposit 100 USDC to Binance and ask to withdraw USD, you are effectively making an FX swap between two currencies, even if these currencies are 1:1 pegged.
Again, there is simply no broker on the planet that will do that instantaneously. USD is 1 day settlement, you just won't get any better than that, unless the broker accepts to take the counterparty risk of paying you upfront. No existing broker will do that for any substantial amount.
Don't compare apples and bananas.
If I deposit Shmollars to a regulated brokerage they will hold my Shmollars in Shmollar denominated account and upon request will instantly (subject to technicalities of the transfer) transfer those Shmollars back. No FX swap needed.
Now if they convert those Shmollars to anything else without my explicit request then they are no longer a brokerage and more comparable to an unregulated bank. Which is what Binance apparently did.
ATMs at my bank in Germany were down because of a strike.
If a crypto exchange just disables withdrawals of one asset, users technically still can sell it for BTC, ETH or another stablecoin and withdraw that.
Sometimes my banking website is down for maintenance.
It's an exchange. Your money should be 100% liquid. Everyone should be prepared for a bank run. Unless they're just as dodgy as FTX and using everyone else's money for shenanigans.
I don't know why people are defending this as if it is a good thing.
No single broker on the planet is instantly liquid. At the very best daily liquid.
Most currency settlements are between 1 and 3 days for DM. Your "feeling" of instantaneous transfers is just front office display, the real back office takes days.
I don't know how else to say it, your buying power is not their buying power just because they have it on deposit and you trusted them.
That's the thing we trusted them not to do, and that's how exchanges like FTX lose the trust of their customers. If you think this is just the cost of doing business, you're a fool.
Crypto currencies do not take days to move from point a to point b. That is old world baggage.
Binance is a broker, not a bank. A bank run on a broker simply shouldn't be possible. A broker is supposed to hold whatever the customers want to hold on their behalf (in so-called segregated accounts, so that the assets belong to the users, even if the broker should go bankrupt). If the users want to withdraw, you just give them whatever you were holding on their behalf.
A broker is not supposed to invest users' funds into something else. If you're acting honestly as a broker, there can't be a mismatch between users' deposits and their assets. Don't fall for this nonsense touted by SBF, the problem is that they are acting dishonestly (and cluelessly, it seems), not that there was any sort of unfortunate liquidity crisis or whatever.
What do you mean by liquid? USDC is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. 'Holding' it means having the private key to a wallet that has been credited with a positive balance in the smart contract. Transferring it is as easy as calling the transfer(address to, uint amount) function from that wallet - you'll have to charge the user for the transaction fee, but that's fair game. According to CZ's tweet, they don't actually hold USDC on behalf of the users, but they try to buy them on the market when users request withdrawals, which is simply not how a broker is supposed to act, and a recipe for disaster. Stop defending this practice.
Really? If Vanguard had to transfer all of my cash and all of my ETF holdings to directly and everyone elses too I would expect that to be zero hassle for them bar the likely collapse of their future business.
Every legitimate exchange is prepared for a “bank run”. because they don’t behave like banks since they’re exchanges.
Being exchanges, they have your money in exactly the form that shows up in your account.
Binance (and FTX before that) apparently doesnt, because it’s behaving like a bank and lending out your money despite claiming to be an exchange and not a bank.
No bank is prepared for a bank run. It's not supposed to be a bank. Banks make money by using customer deposits to generate revenue through loans. Exchanges make money through fees and aren't supposed to be using customer deposits at all.
Likely, USDC balances are backed by dollars in the bank account mentioned in the tweet. To convert that to USDC, they don't need to market buy it - they can wire it to Circle to get fresh USDC minted. In contrast with having all USDC always on hand (like they probably should), this lets Binance earn interest from the bank for their customer deposits.
Or they could be insolvent, sure. There's really no way to reliably tell.
"Stablecoins: processing. Banks are closed for the weekend, though; USD <> stablecoin creations/redemptions might be slower until wires clear tomorrow, especially for some coins/chains."
https://twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1589510763328450561
Coming to a court room soon :)
If the entire thing collapses we won't even be able to take credit since it was put in motion by CZ himself.
This post seems like a fair summation to me -- far too kind, actually, if we want to be frank.
Sometimes people's empathy doesn't travel past their own personal horizon which seems to be the case with your comment.
People lose their money on many things, hard earned or otherwise, regardless wishing that avenues which are designed to facilitate such losses cease to exist is not mean spirited.
And I would hope binance is not a scam, so people don't lose their money.
I make no mention of Binance as a scam. The entire industry is a ponzi scheme, Binanace are a large player in the game.
It is well understood that the cryptocurrencies you purchase can crash to almost nothing. Nobody's complaining about that.
The issue here is the possibility of Binance stealing user's assets, like FTX did. Which is obviously illegal.
To explain it in "crypto hater" terms, it's like someone stealing people's beanie babies.
I am aware of this, and hope they fail along with the rest of the ponzi scheme.
> The issue here is the possibility of Binance stealing user's assets, like FTX did. Which is obviously illegal.
This is one of the issues, and while important it's not the only issue.
Which they are not going to do since they are scam.
Nobody forced them to gamble their hard earned money.
As crypto emerges from early adopter status, the "crypto-bro/normal person" ratio of the victims decreases over time, therefore the earlier it crashes the larger a portion of the victims are people who deserve it and should've known better. It should burn down as soon as possible to protect the innocent.
I know this tweet is not about P2P, but let me explain.
In Venezuela and Argentina, the parallel markets are the true king of the economy. You have to exchange money using P2P exchanges if you want to barely have decent personal finances, you know, to access good currency exchange rates.
It's true that other P2P exchanges exist, like Airtm and Reserve. They just do not have the capacity nor good exchange rates to appropriately cover market needs. They just can't, they are not as resourceful as Binance.
If the U.S. Government starts meddling with Binance and Binance has to close, reduce functionality or kill the P2P feature on the grounds of AML, it's going to send Venezuela and Argentina to the dark ages again.
EDIT: Egregious typos.
That oversight in theory is good. In practice it turns out to be: "The OFAC and FATF hate your people as a whole. We cannot service you anymore. Kthxbai."
I will trust regulators when regulators do not exclude people where systems would be most useful. It all boils down to: if you're not credit worthy, you must be a terrorist, capomafia or at best, a tax evader.
See what happened to Uphold[0], which is unfortunate.
--
[0]: https://support.uphold.com/hc/en-us/articles/6782239879451-W...
Exactly, another thing that happens is that the ways money is exchanged for black markets[0] is also the way terrorists and tax evaders would use. So, we share the same "highway" and get classified as such.
But we aren't terrorists or tax evaders, we just need to make our lives less expensive.
--
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33967480
You aren't but you can bet that plenty of people even if they were not terrorists definitely were evading taxes by using these services, or at a minimum worsening the strength of the local currency. If enough people do that then the effect can be so strong that you end up leaving yourself no alternative. Obviously, a stable currency requires all parties to believe in it, and this is the first problem that any competent government would have to address.
I'm not condoning tax evasion, but in South America if you are on tax evasion and you're not wealthy then you evade taxes by ideological reasons.
As a South American citizen, you'd evade taxes for:
1) Choking the government, one cent at a time.
2) If you know the Treasury Dept. of the Local Govt. is going to be looted anyway by corrupt politicians, then why pay taxes? (the most common one).
It's very easy to loot the government, just bribe the Purchases Manager of any Govt. institution and pave your way to the local top elite.
This is a problem in a large part of the world, and even in countries where these factors are present the size of the workforce available for regulatory oversight is usually only a small fraction of the size of the workforce available for the industry itself. That's why something like WireCard could happen in Germany. And even if the demise of WireCard also hit a lot of non-players that still doesn't mean that it isn't a good thing that they are gone.
In the current times, that's nothing realistically accessible to Argentinian and Venezuelan people.
Too much "ideal" conditions need to happen at the same time. What we need are practical solutions.
Most of the time it's truly hard to see any alternative explanation, and I invest a lot to have the most nurtured worldview possible, with all the points of view considered. And even then, it's really hard to think in plausible alternative explanations that do not feel like pulling hair out of the head.
It's like duck typing: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has duck legs. It must be a duck.
It sounds like you have a bit of a persecution complex going on. It's unfortunate if the effects on your corner of the world are negative, but it's really not even on the Americans' map most of the time.
How about creating a local solution for your local needs instead of relying on a company like Binance whose operating principles are: "We are not headquartered anywhere, our auditor says they don't know what our parent company is named, but we'll happily transmit money to Iran"? That always seemed like it might catch up with them...
Let me provide accurate, real-world examples:
- 1 USD = 171.276 ARS (according to XE's website, this is the official exchange rate).
- 1 USD = 311.25 ARS (according to Binance's P2P exchange, this is the parallel/black market rate).
In Argentina, most stuff is valued in USD, even if the legal tender is ARS. If you were to buy a $2500 ARS burger with Binance money, that burger costs you $8.03 USD. If you were to buy that same exact burger with a licensed properly regulated exchange, that burger costs you $14.59 USD, almost the double.
This might seem like a trivial example, and a few dollars don't seem to make much of a difference. Try the same example with your weekly grocery store basket, rental apartments, payments of a car, etc. It all adds up and most people here don't earn more than $300 USD monthly (valued in black market exchange rate, of course).
Plus, Argentina and Venezuela are heavily taxed.
EDIT: Formatting of the example.
One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
> One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
I'd not say foreign actors like the U.S. Government are meddling with Argentinian or Venezuelan economy, but I'd say that if the U.S. Government were to kill Binance, that has negative impact on this side of the world (which is my original comment).
The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
(please don't interpret my comment as defeatist, it's only there's so much a single person can do).
I get that, but that's not necessarily the fault of the regulators in other countries, much more the fault of the local government not being able to provide their citizens with a stable local currency.
> The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
I very much sympathize with you, especially in light of the US's past willingness to interfere in those local affairs when it suited their business interests. Even so, the only real solution for this problem can come from inside. Argentina has tremendous potential, natural resources and a whole bunch of other things going for it, I sincerely hope that you and your fellow countrymen will be able to somehow turn this around and make it work.
Thanks for holding up in this debate! (and thanks for the good wishes, of course).
The typical order in which you address problems like these (looking at it historically) is to first fix your government, then to fix your economy and finally to reap the benefits from that. Argentina looked to me like it was heading in the right direction, this love affair with crypto is at best a distraction.
The economic situation has worsened for the commoner, everything gets more expensive gradually. People have started making concessions on what to buy or not.
The government is not fixable at this point, because of the populist agenda (same as Venezuela, but less deadly).
> if anything Argentinians will benefit from this because there are fewer ways in which they can lose their money.
It turns out the easiest way to lose the money is to keep it sitting at an Argentinian bank. The devaluation is just too violent. If you want to track how to country is doing, please track the black market exchange rate (which is why I claim in my original comment as the true king of the market). Tracking the official exchange rate as you're probably are doing, is not an effective measure as it's seldom used for transactions.
For a practical example, see [0].
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[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33967480
Laszlo Csatary is probably who you are thinking of. We're rapidly approaching the end of the hunt though, simply because there are fewer and fewer of the escapees still alive.
Also, let's not belittle the involvement of the German scientists that went to the US in the Nazi campaign, they knew very well what they were doing and each and every rocket launched against London had the signature of Werner von Braun on it. See also: Tom Lehrer.
They could grow very rapidly if the customer base were to show up and demand it.
I bet within a week they could 10x - at least for basic functions of deposit, exchange, withdraw.
I elaborate more on this at[0].
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[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966948
One can use that to send USDC worldwide, instantly, cheaply and can exchange that to their local fiat currency. USDC doesn't require an exchange at all, only if you are exchanging it to fiat.
Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto vocals are going to have to concede on their extremities and eventually settle with crypto sitting around for a very long time in a regulated setting.
But if your customers are in Venezuela, Russia or Iran and you use stablecoins to work around US or international sanctions, you're facing pretty serious legal troubles.
If ending up in jail is a valid use case for you, sure.
Not if one gets a license to operate in those sanctioned countries.
> If ending up in jail is a valid use case for you, sure.
Sigh.
So NGOs with licences to operate in sanctioned countries should be put in jail for aiding people without access to money to pay for food due to blanket sanctions then?
It appears that HNers here are just too privileged to not see the global money transfer use-case, especially with countries who's currency has lost 90% of their value.
Destroyed over $2tn in value and is frauds all over the place.
Any hate boner HN may have for crypto pales in comparison to what the crypto people have for it.
The eternal cognitohazard of discussing crypto online is that you are dealing with deeply invested people without any guarantee that they understand finance in general.
- Binance suspended USDC withdrawals. You can still withdraw in other stablecoins, fiat, or crypto. You can withdraw BUSD and swap to USDC on another exchange (dex). So really, this is not a big deal.
- The reason why this happened is - a while ago, Binance started automatically converting user USDC to BUSD upon deposits. Since then, we've then seen large amounts of USDC being sent to Circle from Binance, supposedly for redemption purposes.
- This now (likely) means that Binance has a lot of cash on hand, but not enough USDC to process the current withdrawal frenzy. So they have to go to their redemption bridge and convert their cash back to USDC. As such, the explanation given by CZ is very plausible.
- Withdrawal suspensions are not an uncommon occurrence on Binance, or any other exchange for that matter. You are only noticing this now because the market participants suffer from PTSD from other exchanges going under and the effect of the news is amplified.
- The fear seems to be largely coming from people associating the withdrawal suspension with the recent FTX fiasco. However, and especially without understanding the context of those suspensions, its important to remember - correlation does not mean causation.
- It also comes from people expecting Binance to have USDC at 1:1 ratio liquid, but thats not the case due to the auto conversion mentioned, and explained, by Binance.
- Its also worth noting that BUSD is not a Binance product. Its managed by Paxos, which is a separate entity.
Ultimately, the r/r here is clear: it takes little effort to withdraw and stay safe, but the downside is huge if Binance goes under. So its natural for people to decide to withdraw even when chances of it blowing up are slim.
Withdraw your coins if you are worried, preferably via fiat to a bank. But, please, don't go around spreading panic about things you don't understand or lack the context to judge.
"Stablecoins: processing. Banks are closed for the weekend, though; USD <> stablecoin creations/redemptions might be slower until wires clear tomorrow, especially for some coins/chains."
https://twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1589510763328450561
I also I would like to add that:
- USDC on Binance is not 1:1 backed by USDC, but by another stable coin such as BUSD or perhaps even USDT. Both of them are much harder to convert into real dollars!
- Binance is obviously not prepared for a bank run, this is happening on a Monday/Tuesday, not even a weekend, and the withdrawals issued started yesterday while the banks where open! As of this post, USDC withdrawals have been suspended for at least 14 hours!
Source: https://twitter.com/Cryptolicious9/status/160241155175102464...
This is not true in any way. First, you do not hold USDC on Binance, you hold BUSD. Your USDC deposits are automatically converted to BUSD. Neither USDT nor BUSD is "hard" to convert to real dollars. Swap them to USDC on Uniswap and do whatever you please with them.
> - Binance is obviously not prepared for a bank run, this is happening on a Monday/Tuesday, not even a weekend, and the withdrawals issued started yesterday while the banks where open! As of this post, USDC withdrawals have been suspended for at least 14 hours!
As I said, you can withdraw in other stablecoins. If you go to a bank, and you cannot withdraw USD at that moment, but you can withdraw EUR - does that mean the bank is insolvent?
What kind of bank would this happen at? A bank in the EU where you're trying to withdraw USD?
Guess this is not new, but it seems like an obviously horrible idea!! The minute people lose confidence, the value of BUSD go do down and people will withdraw in not-BUSD. Meaning they will have to make more BUSD to cover the difference, devaluing the BUSD more, causing a spiral.
What am I missing here? Hmm..
BUSD is just USD denominated in tokens on chain, each token represents 1 usd at their bank so they cannot (or rather, should not) mint more than they have in custody.
My understanding is limited, but naively:
I'm sure this is not how it actually works, but you get my point.Also, one could argue that if the BUSD price drops against the dollar they should have more BUSD ? Or how does that work? :)
Although, in practice, I don't think they would buy USDC via BUSD, but use their cash reserves for that. The cash reserves correspond (allegedly) 1:1 to BUSD so they would need to burn equivalent amount of BUSD as well. This all means that Binance would always value BUSD at 1 USD. I don't see a scenario where BUSD falls to 0.5usd if there are no shenanigans happening with the cash reserves.
Saying BUSD is the same as USDC is akin to saying UST is the same as USDC. They are not the same, they are backed by different entities with different behaviour and different reputations.
Nobody said BUSD == USDC. But comparing it to UST (an algorithmic stablecoin nonetheless) is, at best, misleading.
Interesting. Because a lot of people think they're a custody service and use Binance as such.
> They are not obliged to hold USDC, if all customers have their assets in BUSD due to the conversions that happened.
What? Someone trusted Binance to store USDC. The conversions should not have happened.
> Are you expecting Binance to have 1:1 BUSD on hand, in addition to holding the same amount in USDC as well
No. Nobody is expecting that. You're the only person that mentioned it.
...that's what I said?
> What? Someone trusted Binance to store USDC. The conversions should not have happened.
Conversions were announced timely. See https://www.binance.com/en/support/faq/what-is-busd-auto-con...
> No. Nobody is expecting that. You're the only person that mentioned it.
Its the logical conclusion of people expecting Binance to hold full USDC deposit amounts, even when most/all USDC was converted to BUSD.
> Conversions were announced timely.
Yes. Without consent of customers, or even any confirmation from customers that they'd read of and were aware of their coins being swapped for a different currency backed by a different organisation.
> Its the logical conclusion of people expecting Binance to hold full USDC deposit amounts
No. The logical conclusion of people expecting Binance to hold full USDC deposit amounts is a 1:1 USDC holding, not to have a second BUSD copy of every coin. This is a bizarre straw man.
Conversions are even announced when you go to deposit USDC:
"Please note that your USDC Deposit will be auto-converted to BUSD at a 1:1 Ratio. Please refer to announcement details. https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/e62f703604a9..."
I don't see how your point holds, besides "customer expected X, but got Y" - but this is because customer is misinformed, not because Binance has an obligation to store USDC 1:1 (in this case).
> never claimed to be one.
Binance say they are a custodian on their own website.
> customer expected X, but got Y
Yes. Misleading people for financial gain is fraud.
> this is because customer is misinformed
No customer holding USDC in Binance knew their funds would be replaced before Binance replaced their funds.
Has been happening for a few weeks now starting from a tweet from Brian.
Going be interesting to see if they actually manage to depeg tether.
Your character is yours alone to write.