Conversation

1) What sort of leveraged played a part in the crash?

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2) NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. TRADE RESPONSIBLY.

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3) The obvious answer is "100x". But I don't think it's the correct one.

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4) See: with 100x leverage,: a) you can only put on tiny positions b) you get liquidated almost immediately so if what you observe is "BTC goes down 1% and $1m got liquidated", that might be 100x leverage positions.

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5) But that wasn't the fact pattern; instead, BTC went down 40%, and $20B got liquidated. So anyone who was 2.5x or more leveraged was at risk, and they added up to $20B. This was mostly users with 3x-20x leverage who contributed.

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6) What can you do about this? Well, there's a limit to how much it makes sense to do. Crypto was bullish on crypto, so it got long crypto. But one thing you can do is make sure your margin requirements are reasonable.

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7) If you let people put on 20x leveraged positions for $100m each, that'll add up FAST. Those are very likely to get liquidated, and for large size. FTX always has small liquidates relative to the field; even on the biggest days we don't usually get above ~$300m.

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8) Partially, this is because we don't encourage massive risk taking. But partially it's because of our margin system.

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9) (a) We scale up margin requirements for bigger positions; help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/artic. (b) we cross-collateralize everything. This means that all of your assets can be used as collateral, and can help prevent liquidations.

Collateral Management

Collateral on FTX is calculated in USD value terms. We follow a multi-currency cross-margining methodology and thereby accept a variety of non-USD assets as collateral for derivatives and spot marg...

1:13 PM · May 24, 2021Twitter Web App

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10) At some point, if you allow leverage, users might get liquidated, and you can't stop that. But you can at least do what you can to give them room, so that they don't start immediately snowballing.

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cross-collateralize everything may mean lose everything

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but doesnt cross-collateral mean if in case you do get liquidated, then everything you have is gone?

Babydogecoin_to_moon

@Aakashy78549221

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Please bless me ftx tokens Ftx address:- 0x95b4a5175fb37a778082d986fe83e924da782aca

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bull and bear tokens arent collateral.

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9b) Pff, that's a double standard way of seeing things. Cross-collateralizeation also imposes a greater risk of getting whole acc rekt.

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Losing Money 101

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At times of high volatility and thin books is it possible to get liquidated by having the collateralized asset run close to 0 for a moment? For ex. if something similar happened to someone collateralizing REN when it got pushed to $0.01 on binance, would that cause liquidation?