from Hacker News

Ask HN: How did FTX not fail technically first?

by kevinsimper on 11/4/23, 10:34 PM with 15 comments

A lot of articles mentions FTX development team consisting of 10-25 developers. In the Bloomberg documentary it says they all lived together. In court Gary Wang has also been showcased as one of the primary developers.

How did the FTX platform not fail technically? How were they able to build a trading platform that people were happy with and could support all the transactions?

In the court presentation screenshot of code from GitHub is shown. How has the source code not been leaked with such a small team?

The incentive to infiltrate a trading platform is enormous. Without dedicated security team and air tight deployment, I would have estimated that a technical failure would have been much higher than fraud.

There are examples like WhatsApp and Instagram where a small team made some big, but those were not integrating with money, which leaves a lot more room for error. A image or message not send or save, no big deal. A trade on a trading platform lost? Trust immediately lost and never recovered.

  • by noud on 11/5/23, 6:26 AM

    Of course I don't know. This is just pure speculation. But perhaps it's just not that hard to build a trading platform with just a couple of (very good) developers?

    Not having separated large teams also has its benefits. Keep everything as simple as possible reduces complexity, which could make it more safe as well.

  • by wmf on 11/4/23, 11:17 PM

    I don't see anything about FTX that exceeds what 25 good developers could do. We know they saved money by not having a compliance department.

    It's documented that FTX would occasionally eat financial losses and shift them to Alameda to get them off the balance sheet. FTX was also "very easy to steal from" according to the book.

  • by nuc1e0n on 11/8/23, 12:30 AM

    It's called professional integrity. Maybe the concept is foreign to you. Although what with the fraud maybe that doesn't apply in this case.

  • by fulafel on 11/5/23, 8:14 AM

    If anything it sounds largeish to do good work at a good clip for a focused product, depending on who you include (eg qa, management, etc people). What did they do that couldn't be done with ~5 devs?

  • by aborsy on 11/7/23, 8:27 PM

    The companies usually sign NDAs with employees. Why wouldn’t that work?

    Also, 20 developers lived together in the same building? Interesting!

  • by throwaway167 on 11/5/23, 3:50 AM

    Perhaps it was.

    But with SBF as the fall guy for those behind it, we will never know.