No, we are not an outlier. Nearly all fintechs that work in traditional finance must have these controls in place, because otherwise nobody else will do business with them. E.g. you've got to have SOC 2 or ISO27001 compliance (or some other standard) for counterparties to even pick up the phone to do business with you.

I don't mean to be rude, but you seem very unaware what standards are in this space. (Or rather, I should say the financial space, as everything seems to be a shitshow in crypto). You seem to be conflating what, say, some social media platform or todo app startup needs to do for compliance vs. a financial company.

FTX was in the business of handling other people's money, and they can't even say where billions of dollars have gone. If you think this is just normal "startup chaos", please, please, please don't ever work in a financial startup.

Without naming names, there are specific well known fintechs who were not SOC or ISO compliant when they were 2 years old. Plenty of people did business with them because their customers were small businesses (mostly startups) who didn't think about such matters.

> While the accounting situation at FTX appears to have been a disaster, it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary for a 2 year old company

FTX is 3.5 years old, and Alameda is 5 years old.

> What does negative $8 billion mean in the context of double entry?

"We're supposed to have $8 billion in this account but we don't."

Combining various sources of information and reading between the lines, the most likely explanation is that this is the Alameda account that FTX customers were depositing money into, which then got gambled away by Alameda instead of transferred to FTX.

I've never worked at a startup but I strongly question the idea that "Whoops we had customers send $8 billion to the wrong company and gambled it away instead of collecting it" is not out of the ordinary.

What startup deliberately builds back doors to siphon away customer funds with the knowledge of only the founders, and deliberately misleads internal finance folks.

Who "lends" customer funds without any documentation to let founders buy multi million dollar property in their own personal names

This isn't messy, move fast break things of a startup, it's fraud

It seems so, yes.

But the bankruptcy ceo claims the lack of controls is unprecedented. It isn't. Even good guys building good companies have a lack of controls in place in the early days.