Haseeb ＞|＜@hosseeb
With all respect to Star, this story is candidly ridiculous.
Star is trying to claim that the root cause of 10/10 was Binance creating an Ethena yield campaign, causing USDe to get overleveraged from traders looping it on Binance, which eventually unwound because of a small price move.
The problems with this story:
1) The timing of this story doesn't line up. BTC bottomed a full 30 minutes before USDe price was affected on Binance. So USDe clearly can't have *caused* the liquidation cascade. This is clearly misplacing cause and effect.
2) USDe price diverged ONLY on Binance, it did not diverge on other venues. But the liquidation spiral was happening everywhere. So if the USDe "depeg" did not propagate across the market, it can't explain how *every single exchange* saw huge wipeouts. This is very much unlike Terra, which depegged everywhere and caused the same damage across every venue.
So maybe you could hedge Star's argument by saying "OK, maybe Ethena didn't *cause* 10/10, but it amplified it." But even as an amplifier, USDe fails the test because it didn't propagate cross-exchange. We know what a good explanation of a crash looks like—Terra, 3AC, FTX, all had global balance sheet effects that were felt everywhere. USDe did not do that, it was a Binance order book isolated event.
3) This begs the question: why is Star "revealing" this now, months later? Star does not produce any new evidence for this theory that people didn't already know and analyze to death. All of the order book data has been public for 4+ months and suddenly he claims this? This feels more like Star is picking a fight with CZ and using this simple story as a pretext to make it sound like CZ was in on it, or caused 10/10 through his own irresponsibility.
Look, the reality is, there's no simple story explaining 10/10 that survives scrutiny. I don't have one either. If there was a simple story that could explain 10/10, there would already be widespread agreement about what caused it, like the agreement around the 3AC or FTX crashes.
The best story to explain 10/10 is, to my mind:
* Trump spooked markets with tariff threats on a Friday evening
* This caused markets to sell off dramatically because crypto was the only thing to trade
* Flurry of activity caused Binance APIs to go down, causing huge price dislocations and preventing market makers from balancing inventory across exchanges. This caused huge liquidations that could not get filled, but liquidation engines keep firing regardless, and all this got amplified by ADLs initiating everywhere and breaking hedges and risk management
* This caused MMs to get wiped out, and they were unable to pick up the pieces—MMs need APIs to rebalance inventory, and without MMs, there were no buyers of last resort for many alts. Retail was not going to step in on a chaotic Friday evening to buy stuff
* Crypto liquidation mechanisms are not designed to be self-stabilizing the way that TradFi mechanisms are (circuit breakers, etc.), crypto liquidations are designed purely to minimize insolvency risk
* Altcoin prices are extremely path dependent, and we ended up in a bad path
That's my story. It's not a very satisfying one, but neither is this "Binance + Ethena did it" story. A better root cause explanation is "APIs went down at the worst possible time," but that doesn't really sound so dastardly.
Where simple stories do not suffice, unfortunately you have to choose a complicated one. And I think this complicated story is the best one for what actually happened on 10/10. Thankfully, the history of crypto is a long series of these "bad things happened, and later the market recovered."
In the long run, I'm not worried that 10/10 permanently broke the market. Just that prices are path-dependent, retail + MMs got hurt bad on 10/10, and will need time to recover.
