Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom), Author: Brother Xiao Mao, published with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

, Author: Brother Xiao Mao, published with authorization.The waves are magnificent and the day travels thousands of miles. The encryption world develops and changes extremely fast, and the journey to embark on the wave of the encryption world is full of unknowns, and the transition from "what everyone expects" to "what everyone criticizes" is often only one step away.As the tide of decentralized finance (DeFi) hits, the market maker Alameda Research led by legendary trader Sam Bankman-Fried and the centralized exchange FTX are in the center of the vortex of DeFi focus events, leading this wave and cannot be ignored the power of.

Sam Bankman-Fried (hereinafter referred to as "SBF")'s recent actions are dazzling. He led FTX to acquire Blockfolio, an encrypted asset management tool, for US$150 million (this is the sixth largest M&A transaction in the cryptocurrency industry so far), and he also promoted a team to build a new decentralized trading platform Serum DEX based on the Solana public chain , and personally took over the control of SushiSwap, a liquidity mining project that fell into a crisis of trust in the founders. His every move has attracted the attention of the entire encryption world. Even photos of him taking a nap on a cot in the office after days of sleepless overtime have been widely circulated, and the crypto community loves to talk about it.

Lianwen once appeared in "

Encrypted world gangster, find out

"The article wrote, "There are many outstanding talents entering the encryption world every day, who have the potential to become superstars in this emerging field, and may even build the next Coinbase."

With the influx of more professionals into the encryption industry, the pattern of the encryption world is also quietly changing. If we jokingly refer to groups and affiliated companies with huge influence in the encryption world as "gangsters", is it possible for affiliated companies such as FTX Exchange, Serum, a decentralized trading platform, and Alameda Research, a professional market maker behind them, to become the main "trading" business? A core business, a sudden emergence of "encryption gangs"?

• It's worth looking into.

• What kind of grand "trading map" is SBF creating?

First, let's sort out the core business and timeline of FTX and its affiliated companies.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the co-founder of FTX and Alameda Research, and now he has a new title of "Serum co-founder", but all the stories start from his "old line" as a trader, And the business line at the core of the entire territory also revolves around "transactions". The two most directly related and core companies to SBF include:

FTX, an exchange focusing on derivatives trading: The exchange was officially launched on May 1, 2019, providing OTC, futures, index and spot transactions. The exchange is famous for its innovative trading products such as altcoin indices and leveraged tokens ;

Alameda Research: A self-operated quantitative trading company originally positioned on FTX, providing liquidity for the encrypted market, and also the launching team behind the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the Serum decentralized exchange.

But since the beginning of this year, with the launch of the decentralized exchange Serum, we found that Alameda Research is not only positioned as a self-operated quantitative trading company, but also participates in investing in many blockchain projects and start-up companies. The entire Alameda Research/FTX Group The territory is constantly expanding.In terms of business development of a compliant centralized trading platform, in early May this year, FTX launched an encrypted asset spot exchange "FTX.US" in the United States. The exchange is registered with the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) as a Money Services Business (MSB) and has obtained most of the U.S. state-level Money Transmitter Licenses (MTL).In late August, FTX announced the acquisition of Blockfolio, a cryptocurrency asset management tool, for $150 million. This is the sixth largest merger and acquisition transaction in the cryptocurrency industry so far, and it also shows the determination of the exchange to try to accelerate growth in the retail market. Following the acquisition, Blockfolio has said it will launch trading tools.

In terms of decentralized trading platforms, the actions of Alameda Research and FTX are even more dazzling.

First of all, Serum, a decentralized exchange launched by Sam Bankman-Fried based on the high-performance blockchain platform Solana, has been officially launched. Lianwen once appeared in "

• The legendary trader SBF wants to build a DeFi ecological Serum on Solana after making FTX bigger. What kind of game is this?

• "The article introduces Serum in detail. The DEX is built on the new public chain Solana. It not only realizes the interoperability of Ethereum, proposes a Bitcoin cross-chain solution to open up interoperability at the asset level, but also supports cross-chain swaps and other functions to achieve all-round decentralization. Trading infrastructure.

• Recently, Sam Bankman-Fried temporarily took over the AMM trading protocol SushiSwap from the anonymous team, and proposed to create a SushiSwap branch in Serum. If the proposal is realized, it will also bring new opportunities to the Serum ecology.

• The following is the possible future map of Sam Bankman-Fried and its affiliates around "transactions" compiled by Lianwen:

Centralized exchange: FTX + US compliance division FTX.US

Decentralized exchange: Serum + AMM trading agreement SushiSwap (community project, non-direct holding, but SBF has considerable influence in this project)

Quantitative trading and investment institutions: Alameda Research

Blockfolio: Cryptocurrency asset management tool acquired by FTX for $150 million. So far, Blockfolio's mobile downloads have exceeded 6 million, with hundreds of thousands of daily active users, and users from more than 90 countries and regions around the world

It is also worth mentioning that Wall Street high-frequency trading company Jump Trading, under the impetus of Sam Bankman-Fried, announced its investment in the decentralized exchange Serum earlier this month and will provide liquidity for the DEX. This is a milestone event for traditional Wall Street trading giants to enter the field of decentralized finance. American high-frequency trading company Jump Trading was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Chicago. The company was responsible for providing liquidity for the well-known trading software Robinhood in 2018.

Demystifying Alameda Research

Many people noticed that Alameda Research may have started with a news in February this year. According to the previous data of the Bitfinex leaderboard, around February 24 this year, the account certified as FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had a floating loss of US$13.12 million on Bitfinex.

The FTX exchange then published an article in its official announcement in response to answering "hedging and arbitrage trading". And short the same amount on BitMEX and other exchanges with higher funding rates for perpetual contracts) to achieve hedging and arbitrage transactions. From the follow-up official announcement, we learned that although FTX is an exchange, its founder Sam Bankman-Fried is also the founder of Alameda Research, a self-operated trading market maker, which also shows that Alameda Research has a strong presence in the cryptocurrency market. Realize arbitrage through some professional strategies such as quantification or hedging.

There is not much information about Alameda Research in the market at present. From the limited information, it can be learned that Alameda Research’s initial main business was as a self-operated quantitative trading company and a market maker providing liquidity, but since this year, more and more blockchain projects have been publicly invested by Alameda Research The information shows that the institution has developed a rapidly expanding investment business, and its sales speed and coverage may already be on the list of the most active crypto venture capital.

We guess that Alameda Research plays a role similar to a "think tank" in the entire ecosystem, and its business lines are trading business (quantitative trading + market maker), OTC business, research and analysis business, and investment business.

Alameda Research enters the DeFi investment landscape

According to the published information, Lianwen has collected Alameda Research's investment landscape so far:

Trading Ecosystem Solution UpBots

The trading ecosystem solution UpBots aims to combine DEX and CEX to form a trading system, integrate various DeFi protocols that support mortgage and lending, and support seamless switching between robot trading and manual trading. The project completed a $1.1 million token sale financing at the end of August, and other investors include institutions such as CMS and Taureon. UpBots also revealed that the project is seeking to be listed on the decentralized exchange Serum.

DeFi Derivatives Protocol Perpetual Protocol

The DeFi derivatives protocol Perpetual Protocol comes from Taiwan and claims to have introduced an automatic market maker mechanism called "vAMM" (virtualized AMM). vAMM uses the same constant product formula as Uniswap, but it does not store the real asset pool itself, which is stored in the smart contract. The project, formerly known as “Strike Protocol,” previously raised $1.8 million in financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Three Arrows Capital, CMS Holdings, and Alameda Research. Binance is also an investor in the project.

DeFi mobile app Frontier

The DeFi mobile application Frontier aims to provide integrated services for mobile access to multiple DeFi applications. In August, the project announced the completion of $1.85 million in private financing, including Alameda Research, FTX, Woodstock Fund, Mechanism Capital, NGC Ventures, CoinGecko, Spark Digital Capital, Black Edge Capital, AU21, TRG Capital, Bidesk and Matic Network co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also participated. The FRONT token is planned to be listed on Serum, a decentralized derivatives exchange built on the Solana public chain, and the Frontier application suite will also add support for the Solana token SRM.

Decentralized options trading protocol Hedget

Hedget is a decentralized options trading protocol launched by the blockchain project Chromia, which allows investors to create and trade different option products on the chain, and can hedge against price fluctuations and risks brought about by mortgage positions. Additionally, the protocol has added support for Layer 2 networks using the Chromia blockchain to make transactions faster and cheaper. Alameda Research announced in August that it had made a strategic investment of US$500,000 in the decentralized options trading protocol Hedget (HGET) in exchange for 100,000 HGET tokens. Currently, Hedget has become the latest IEO project of FTX.

Cross-chain liquidity solution RAMP

RAMP DEFI provides a cross-chain liquidity unlocking solution, allowing non-ERC-20 token holders to mortgage digital assets and make effective use of them. Specifically, it allows users to generate a stablecoin rUSD based on collateral assets, and then use the stablecoin to borrow, lend and trade another ERC-20 token eUSD, thus providing asset owners with staking on each chain Unlock liquidity. The project announced in August that it completed an oversubscription of more than $1 million in private placements. Private placement investors include Alameda Research, ParaFi Capital, XRP Capital, IOST, Signum Capital, Ruby Capital, and Blockwater VC. .

Stablecoin Aggregation Protocol mStable

mStable is a stablecoin aggregation protocol based on Ethereum. This is a smart contract system that can cast stablecoins (such as mUSD) in the mStable protocol by injecting other stablecoins (such as DAI, USDT, USDC), and users can also destroy them. mUSD to redeem other stablecoins and pay a portion of the redemption fee. F TX has launched mStable's token Meta (MTA) spot, quarterly and perpetual contracts at the end of July.

Paradigm, an institutional-grade trading communication platform

Paradigm aims to be an institutional-grade trading communication platform for cryptocurrencies, which allows users to customize the trading layout, provides a modular interactive interface, and multiple tools are traded side by side. The project is based on protocol-based transactions, provides front-end interfaces and order matching engines, allows exchanges and traders to enter a single global liquidity pool, and abstracts proprietary liquidity models. At the same time, Paradigm provides developers with a platform and financial tools to realize settlement logic, supports spot, derivatives transactions and loans, etc., has offline order relay for on-chain settlement, and distributes fees proportional to contract usage to developers.

Encrypted Quantitative Trading Company Folkvang

Folkvang is a new quantitative trading and liquidity provider headquartered in Hong Kong. The company is an encrypted quantitative trading company with Alameda Research, focusing on computer and algorithmic trading strategies. Alameda Research made a more than $1 million investment in the competitor in March. Folkvang said at the time that restrictions would be placed on Alameda to prevent the latter from gaining any unfair trading advantage.

Ontology-based DeFi project OIN Finance

OIN Finance is an Ontology-based DeFi project, which aims to build a DeFi ecosystem centered on the Ethereum blockchain. According to the white paper of the project, OIN's cross-chain technology can support decentralized cross-chain asset exchange, and its cross-chain architecture aims to promote the integration of OIN's DeFi ecology and other public chain DeFi ecology.

Synthetic Asset Protocol Linear Finance

Linear Finance is a DeFi synthetic asset protocol, similar to Synthetix. The project announced this month that it has received $1.8 million in private equity financing. Participating institutions include NGC Ventures, Alameda Research, Hashed, CMS Holdings, Genesis Block, Kenetic Capital and other institutions.

In summary, most of the projects that Alameda Research is currently involved in investing in are projects in the DeFi or trading fields. In addition, many newly invested projects will be listed and traded on FTX, or there are plans to list and trade on the decentralized exchange Serum.

In addition, regarding the above investment portfolio, the official attitude is also worthy of attention. Alameda Research told Lianwen that it does not want to focus on investment to promote its investment portfolio. They pointed out that because some of the projects Alameda Research only participated in a "very small amount" of investment, it also conveyed to the invested project parties that " Investment does not mean endorsement" philosophy. The Alameda Research team especially emphasized that they hope to remind investors "not to make irrational decisions just because certain projects are Alameda Research's investment portfolio."

Caroline Ellison

Meet the Traders Behind Alameda Research

• As we all know, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is also one of the founders of Alameda Research, but if you open the team information on the official website of Alameda Research, it is difficult to define the core team members with various so-called workplace titles. For example, if you open the LinkedIn pages of several key members of the Alameda Research website, you will find that they only hold the simple Trader (trader) position in Alameda Research. So, who are the "traders" behind Alameda Research?

• Caroline Ellison is a key core member in Alameda Research. She graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Stanford University in the United States. She and Sam Bankman-Fried both worked in Jane Street, a well-known Wall Street trading company, as a stock trader at that time. According to her description in the podcast, after a brief coffee shop meeting with Sam Bankman-Fried in 2018, she decided to quit her job on Wall Street to devote herself to the cryptocurrency industry and joined Alameda Research.

• image description

Sam Trabucco and Troy Tsui previously served as a bond trader and a fixed-income trader at the quantitative trading company SIG;

Sam Bankman-Fried

Ryan Salame, who is in charge of the OTC business, previously worked at Ernst & Young;

Nate Parke, formerly an engineer at UC Berkeley's RISE Lab, now leads engineering development at Alameda Research.

Also, it's worth reviewing the personal experience of Alameda Research's "most important trader," Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam Bankman-Fried graduated from the Department of Physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously worked as an ETF trader at Jane Street, a well-known Wall Street trading company, and designed the company's automatic OTC trading system.