Will FTX lose money? If so, how much will it lose?

Whenever something goes wrong, rumors start to spread, not to mention the conspiracy behind the sky-high fine. Everyone is amazed that Binance consumes hundreds of ETH to collect a wallet. It seems a bit "outrageous", but it is not difficult to understand if we consider it based on the business logic of the exchange. Let me briefly talk about my opinion.

The exchange manages a large number of EOA Deposit recharge addresses. Every time a user recharges coins, the assets are transferred to these fragmented small addresses. The funds in these addresses are usually "collected" by the exchange to facilitate unified asset management.

There are usually two options for exchange address aggregation services:

1) As long as the user charges coins, the program will immediately transfer the corresponding assets to the hot wallet address . However, the problem is that a user's charge demand may be divided into multiple times. For example, big guys usually transfer a small amount first and then transfer it in one by one for safety reasons. Obviously, this solution is likely to produce more TXS. If the exchange adopts this collection solution, it will have to execute it under the high GAS fee when the GAS fee happens to be high, and the handling fee will also be very high. However, the advantage is that its entire collection process is decentralized, and the user end will not be aware of it. For the exchange, it is just a normal business loss need.

2) After the user charges the currency, the scattered small EOA addresses remain unchanged for a period of time. When the user withdraws the currency, he withdraws the currency directly from the large hot wallet, and then collects the addresses once a fixed period of time . In this way, the accounts can be checked to facilitate the unified management of assets. Secondly, a time period with relatively low Gas can be selected to carry out transfer operations uniformly. However, there is a difficulty in doing this. A large number of operations in a short period of time can easily increase Gas, and once the media is focused on it, it is easy to induce public relations events. Because it is difficult to explain to the public why the exchange needs to centrally collect assets, the key is that so much Gas is burned.

Obviously, Binance has adopted the second address collection scheme. From the perspective of the exchange’s business logic, no matter which scheme is chosen, there will be a large amount of business capital loss, and the asset management strategies of each company may be different.

For ease of understanding, I found two addresses, Binance14 and OKX3. Binance14 adopted the second solution, while OKX should have adopted the first solution. However, due to the huge difference in the asset size and transaction volume of the two addresses, the data is for reference only.

As shown in Figure 1, the total asset size of Binance14 address is nearly 110,000 ETH. As a receiving address, it has consumed 10,000 ETH in total. On September 13, the largest collection consumed 388 ETH in a single day. The highest consumption in history was 871 ETH. Therefore, it is normal business loss to consume millions of ETH in address collection. Don’t let the students in charge of collection lose their jobs because of people’s misunderstanding.

As shown in Figure 2, the OKX3 address manages a relatively small amount of assets, but as a receiving address, it has consumed 1,530 ETH in history. As can be seen from the figure, OKX's daily average consumption is relatively balanced, with a peak of 15 ETH per day, which shows that the first collection plan is to spend it on normal days.

As for which of the two options is better, the exchange will definitely calculate a set of options that suits itself and is the most optimized. No company will not do cost optimization. Although Binance is a rich cousin, it will not fail to optimize.

Note: The above data observations are only for general knowledge. What I said about exchange business may not be completely accurate and is for reference only.