Can someone familiar with FTX help me explain this?

[JeromeTash]

Today I deposited some USDT to buy some assets on FTX whose orders successfully filled. I used up all the USDT in my account but to my surprise, I am seeing some negative USDT balance in my account. I have never seen such a thing before.

It appears as though I borrowed some USDT around the same time I bought an asset, which I don't remember borrowing except opening my trades  >

Here are the screenshots



Can someone help me understand what could have happened?

How do I stop this? I don't want anything to do with borrowing.

[1715499660]

1715499660

[teosanru]

Was it a leveraged trade? I think this is the funding fees that the exchange is charging from you for holding the position, or I think that you have accidentally borrowed some USDT for a trade clearly for which now you are being charged an interest, which obviously is quite exhorbitant. I think you should sell whatever position you are holding using this borrowed fund and return them as soon as possible otherwise the exchange will continue to charge a high interest from you on this.

[Sterbens]

Yep, you have made a loan, without realizing it or not, I think you have pressed some features wrong. As far as I'm concerned it has happened to me but on another exchange. But the chronology is almost the same where I agreed to a loan that actually made me have to pay. Even though from the start I was confused when I saw the history of some balances in exchange for borrowing costs that I never traded.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

The best will be to contact their support and get a clear understanding. This could be a leverage trade which you picked up mistakenly like teosanru is suspecting, or you have taken loan or this could be a system miscalculation.

Only their customer support assist you in this.

[Oilacris]

The best will be to contact their support and get a clear understanding. This could be a leverage trade which you picked up mistakenly like teosanru is suspecting, or you have taken loan or this could be a system miscalculation.

Only their customer support assist you in this.

If this one is made on spot then its impossible which means that the best thing to be done is to contact their support and ask out on whats happening but we cant really cross out the probabilities that

this might be in talks about possible leverage which would really be resulting to that but if not then asking to the company or team itself would be the best idea to be done

since they are the only ones who could really make out such clarification.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

this might be in talks about possible leverage which would really be resulting to that but if not then asking to the company or team itself would be the best idea to be done

As far as i know most of the exchanges ask for KYC before you are able to have leverage trading feature and in this case I would say there is little chance that OP is a victim of mistakenly picking up leverage section. I assume OP was new to the system and not using it for long so he did not do the KYC (if required).

This could be a system error if you ask me to assume more wisely.

[JeromeTash]

Was it a leveraged trade? I think this is the funding fees that the exchange is charging from you for holding the position, or I think that you have accidentally borrowed some USDT for a trade clearly for which now you are being charged an interest, which obviously is quite exhorbitant. I think you should sell whatever position you are holding using this borrowed fund and return them as soon as possible otherwise the exchange will continue to charge a high interest from you on this.

It was not a leveraged trade. It was purely spot trade. Hell, I don't even see any open leveraged position except for the filled order of the coins I bought, so I don't even know how to close it  

Only their customer support assist you in this.

I already have an open ticket which support. I will update this thread in case if any solution.

[crwth]

Thanks for sharing this; I didn't know that that kind of thing would happen. I have been trading the spot market in FTX for a year now, and I haven't encountered something like this. I would've understood that if it was smaller, maybe less than $1, but a negative ~$13 is a lot without you knowing about it. Perhaps it's an automatic thing with the mobile application or something. An automatic borrow might be if the balance is less than intended when buying an asset.

Do you have subaccounts there? And please update us on what's going to happen and why that happened.

[JeromeTash]

Do you have subaccounts there?

No

And please update us on what's going to happen and why that happened.

It turns out spot margin trading was enabled for my account. I think it's enabled by default. I have disabled it and closed the position as advised by the support



I think at one point while trying to buy the asset I wanted. I borrowed an extra amount without knowing 

This was their response

Hello,

Negative balances mean that you are borrowing this amount.

To pay back a borrow in our spot margin system you will need to add more of the specific asset that you are currently borrowing. So if you see a negative ETH balance on your wallet page then you will need to sell another asset that you have for ETH, until your ETH balance reaches 0 again.

You may also market close the position at https://ftx.com/spot-margin/borrows or buy back the exact amount using the spot market. Please make sure you have the MARGIN flag selected and enter the exact amount you wish to clear.

After you have paid back any borrows if you would like to disable spot margin you can do so in your settings: https://ftx.com/profile

Please note that due to the minimum tick size of an asset sometimes you may need to end up with a slightly positive balance, it won't be possible to get back to exactly 0.

Feel free to reach out if you have any further queries.

Thanks,
FTX

[crwth]

It turns out spot margin trading was enabled for my account. I think it's enabled by default. I have disabled it and closed the position as advised by the support

Thank you for the update. That's definitely tricky knowing that if you have fat fingered a larger buy amount of a certain asset, you will automatically borrow. But that's not really a big issue if this happens. The borrowed amount will still be in your balance immediately and you can just sell it and pay the borrowed amount.

Have you paid it already?