was FTX a Ponzi

2022 was a tough year for crypto, and November was especially hard on investors and traders alike.  While it was incredibly painful for many, FTX’s blowup and the ensuing contagion that threatens to pull other centralized crypto exchanges down with it could be positive over the long run. Allow me to explain. What people learned, albeit in the hardest way possible, is that exchanges were running fractional reserve-like banks to fund their own speculative, leveraged investments in exchange for providing users with a “guaranteed” yield. Somewhere across the crypto Twitterverse, the phrase “If you don’t know where the yield comes from, you are the yield!” is floating around. This was true for decentralized finance (DeFi), and it’s proven true for centralized crypto exchanges and platforms...