Could someone who listens to this, or who knows, explain wtf people's beef w/ Swan is?
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Odell and Marty Bent are fairly prominent bitcoiners. I tend to think they are high signal and put stock in their opinions.
I think the current drama with swan is regarding their press release stating 200m in rev and 150m in capital deployed where it’s well known how accurate these figures are.
Previous drama with swan has been with their with prime trust going bust and other issues with fortress trust.
Imo River is a better option than swan for a btc only exchange due to the superior tech infrastructure. Swan is kinda a marketing company with a glued together white label exchange
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EDIT: I wasn't willing to listen to 2 hours hoping to encounter the Swan content, but they've helpfully added timestamps at the link. Now I've listened to it, and it's interesting. Worth listening to. Here's the relevant bit:
6:16 - Calling out Swan
(original post)
Previous drama with swan has been with their with prime trust going bust and other issues with fortress trust.
Yeah, that stuff sucks for sure. Cory has talked about the rationale for not doing custody in-house before that I found pretty compelling, but my understanding is that they're biting the bullet in 2024 and building their own thing, in partnership with somebody or other.
Imo River is a better option than swan for a btc only exchange due to the superior tech infrastructure.
That's my impression, too, from a purely "btc exchange" pov. However, I think "btc-only exchange" is too narrow a lens with which to evaluate Swan -- their presence in the ecosystem is massively valuable in a way that River isn't.
Their playbook isn't what I would do myself, but I feel confident that they've minted more bitcoiners through their efforts than just about anyone besides Coinbase. At this stage of the game, a marketing company going full multi-media blitzkrieg in service of btc adoption is desperately needed.
Assuming all this is more or less right, the amount of shit they get seems vastly out of proportion to the "crimes" discussed here.
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Agreed swan has some good content. Equally it would not be good for bitcoin if a BTC only exchange had any problems (liquidity / fraud / otherwise). I think it’s good the industry polices itself and there is discourse when numbers / red flags potentially emerge
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