What's going on with FTX?
Happy Sunday!
Welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Quantumics Weekly Roundup. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and exploring Amazon’s new robot, Sparrow. We’ll also explore the latest news and information in data and AI, business and tech.
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?? The collapse of FTX
A rollercoaster week for the world of crypto, as tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried and the company he founded, FTX, spectacularly imploded, causing him to lose 94% of his net worth and his title as CEO, and resulting in his crypto empire filing for bankruptcy.?
It all started when CoinDesk?released a report?that called into question the stability of Bankman-Fried's empire really was.?
The report found that even though Alameda Research and FTX are two separate companies, Alameda's assets were mostly tied up in FTT, a coin that FTX had invented themselves. Technically, there’s nothing wrong about this, but how stable could this be how liquid was FTX really?
Just days later, things got worse when Changpeng "CZ" Zhao,?the CEO of Binance —?arguably FTX's chief rival — decided to liquidate roughly $530 million-worth of FTT. Customers also raced to pull out, and FTX saw an estimated?$6 billion in withdrawals?over the course of 72 hours, which it struggled to fulfill.?
The value of FTT?plunged 32%, but rallied once again with Bankman-Fried's surprise announcement on Tuesday, Nov. 8, that Binance would buy FTX, effectively bailing it out.?
But things stopped getting better quickly, as shortly after the inital announcement of the takeover, Binance announced it was walking away from the deal, citing findings during due diligence, as well as reports of mishandled customer funds and?the possibility of a federal investigation.
The news sent FTT plunging even further — Bankman-Fried saw?94% of his net worth wiped out?in a single day.?
In?a series of tweets, SBF apologised and shifted the blame of the FTX's implosion to a combination of high customer withdrawals and his own incorrect estimates of how much debt FTX had taken on.?
But a Reuters report suggested that there may be other factors at play. The news service, citing unnamed sources, said that earlier this year, Bankman-Fried transferred customer funds from FTX to Alameda without telling anyone, after Alameda was hit with a series of losses.
Still confused? Here’s a deeper dive:
?? Sparrow stealing jobs?
Amazon has developed a robot capable of identifying and handling individual items, a milestone in the shopping giant’s efforts to reduce its reliance on the human order pickers who currently play a key role in getting products from warehouse shelves to customers’ doorsteps.?
The robotic arm, tipped by a set of what appear to be retractable suction cup-like devices, is called Sparrow. The machine can be seen autonomously grabbing items of different sizes and textures from a plastic tote and placing them in other receptacles. Amazon said the bot is capable of handling millions of different products.?
Automating such tasks may look simple but has stunned Amazon’s roboticists for years. Machines at the company’s facilities have long lifted pallets, arranged tightly packed shelves and shuttled packages on conveyor belts. But Amazon also employs hundreds of thousands of workers, whose dexterity and intuition currently let them pick and pack items more quickly and more reliably than existing machines.
News Bites ??
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That’s everything for now, catch you next week!