Month: March 2021

Total Return Swaps and Archegos

Another example of the impact of the risks of synthetic trades on futures backfired spectacularly last week. A private hedge fund Archegos Capital Management (website currently down) defaulted on a series of Total Return Swap deals on ViacomCBS (among others) forcing a liquidation of shares and a subsequent couple of trading days. The scale of the default is still not known, but major financial institutions have issued loss warnings that are assumed is an outcome of the issue. As always: highly hedges give you profit if you’re good and major disasters if you don’t. For those old enough: Remember LTCM.

Update: A paywalled article from Wall Street Journal on the market impacts

How safe is NFT?

The latest bit coin (actually Ethereum)  craze to emerge is Non-fungible token or NFT’s, Simply put its’s an digital ledger containing digital assets, mostly art as digital: I.E. a ledger where the “rights” to the content is owned by you as a transferable asset. Several high value transactions are in the news such as Beeple and DJ3LAU recently, NFT’s are not as straight forwards as people think. An interesting article shows the ins and outs of buying and owning (or not) of FCC’s on Motherboard highlights some of the problems with this.

More fun with Exchange

As you may already know a series of 0-day bugs have been discovered recently and are actively used by hackers globally. First used by a Chinese hacking crew Hafnium it has evolved into a bigger problem. Paul Kerbs has a nice timeline on this. Microsoft has now launched a one-click solution for admins that have not implemented the already released patches:  CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, CVE-2021-27065,

MS ION: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)

Microsoft just made public the details on their DID implementation, ION, as their part of the drive towards decentralised Layre 2 authentication and control.

“We are excited to share that v1 of ION is complete and has been launched on Bitcoin mainnet. We have deployed an ION node to our production infrastructure and are working together with other companies and organizations to do so as well”