I knew Ping was an obvious fade this week because what happened on Binance was going to have repercussions in the following days to weeks.
If you had paid attention, Wintermute was openly stating that Binance fucked them with aggressive ADL at prices that didn’t make sense & WM couldn’t have been the only MM that was screwed over.
Market makers hold spot long & go short perps so no matter what way a coin moves they do not lose or make money. Instead they make money by routing trades, arbitraging across CEXs, & taking a small cut every time you buy or sell, similar to MEV.
If an exchange starts aggressively closing short positions at much higher prices, like what WM claimed, while prices rapidly nuke & they can’t re-short fast enough than they are sitting on huge losses. They then have a tough decision to make…sit on the loss & hope prices go back up or dump your bags ASAP, stop providing liquidity, & gtfo until people figure out what the hell is happening. No matter what decision the MM makes, it’s going to result in thin ass books.
WM said in the interview they did that they were still waiting to find out if they’d be compensated for the losses they took. Likely means other MM’s are waiting too because a client as big as WM would be your priority as a business. And Binance, like any business would have to sort through how much they’d be willing to compensate MM’s, ensure claims are legit, & route things through legal. It’s gonna take a while to sort out the mess, WM isn’t the only MM that operates on Binance. There are a lot of them.
People who thought last week wasn’t a big deal, you’re wrong. It was a huge deal. Some assets went to literal zero. We don’t know how much MM’s lost. MM’s taking on big losses means thinner books & thinner books in a market that already struggles with liquidity while the President of the United States is in a trade war with China is not a recipe for Wonderful Wednesdays. And to that fact that the crypto participants who are left are down and & poor now. Many got liquidated in the chaos. There are less buyers now than there were. The wealth effect is now gone. Crypto natives have been reduced to Haitians.
I agree with WM that what happened impacts shitcoins far worse than it does BTC & majors. Binance has lost a ton of trust and deserves your scorn. I don’t know if it was on purpose or just a big mistake, but the point remains they cannot be trusted.
Sorry Ping. At least you put your nuts on the table.