More from Crypto collapse: FTX’s fall is one piece of a long, cold, contagious crypto winter
The SEC complaint against Binance is coming in hot, ladies, gentlemen and dirtbags! That’s the chief compliance officer, in 2018.
Here’s a free writing tip: say “fucking” or do not say “fucking” but don’t do “fking” or “f*cking.” Have the courage of your fucking convictions!
“One appeal of generative A.I. is that it offers something for every would-be entrepreneur.” Yes, it is nice to see the hype machine in full effect, isn’t it? Here’s a sentence we should revisit in a year: “And unlike crypto, especially now, A.I. is a more credible field to be in for mainstream techies.” Anyway, every single one of these children would have gone to work on Wall Street before the year of our lord 2008.
[The New York Times Magazine]
Now the volume for its crypto on-ramp business has fallen by about 70 percent, its chief operating officer has left, and the chief technology officer left, too. The bagholders include Tiger Global Management and Coatue. Unclear what this all means for the celebs who bought in because of the NFT concierge service!
Right, okay, the guys who were insider trading at Coinbase are settling SEC charges that “they engaged in insider trading through a scheme to trade ahead of multiple announcements regarding at least nine crypto asset securities” — wait, hang on. Securities?
Ahead of those announcements, which usually resulted in an increase in the assets’ prices, Nikhil Wahi and Ramani allegedly purchased at least 25 crypto assets, at least nine of which were securities, and then typically sold them shortly after the announcements for a profit.
Huh, this feels like a teaser for something!
Fun inside baseball tip: Pay attention when a company hires Charles Harder and has him speaking on the record. Anyway, Gemini!
The SEC is suing Gemini as regulators crack down on the industry. The exchange’s market share has shrunk versus rivals even as crypto prices have rebounded. A banking partner wants to break up. And now this month, a crucial due date on a loan — that, if repaid by its bankrupt lending partner’s parent company, could help hundreds of thousands of Gemini customers recoup some of the $900 million worth of crypto deposits trapped in its defunct Earn product — has come and gone as negotiations on a resolution drag on.
Kudos to The Block for spotting this hilarious thing on the website of Paradigm, a venture firm:
A line that said “we believe crypto will define the next few decades” was removed from the home page, which now makes no mention of web3 or blockchains.
Apparently the change occurred on May 3.
Just in time for Bitcoin 2023, the WSJ took a look at the state of play of crypto in Miami. Here’s what it found:
An NFT conference had fewer participants, relocated to smaller space. “Most of crypto was a pyramid scheme.” The residences that marketed themselves as accepting crypto no longer accept crypto after the fall of FTX. MiamiCoin is in the shitter. Miami’s venture fundraising is about 25 percent of what it was in last year’s first quarter. “This is not a free-flowing funding environment as it was before.”
The venture capital firm was known for hyping its portfolio. But in the era of tech skepticism and rising interest rates, is it still ahead of the curve?
When presented with a $100 million sponsorship deal for FTX, Swift was apparently one of the only celebrities who questioned whether it was selling unregistered securities.
That’s according to an interview The Block did with Adam Moskowitz, a lawyer who’s suing over a dozen celebrities, including Larry David and Tom Brady, for promoting the fallen exchange. He says Swift never ended up going through with the deal.
Bittrex, one of the exchanges to allow trading in Dennis Rodman’s Potcoin crypto, has been charged by the SEC with operating an unregistered national securities exchange.
Why does the SEC think Bittrex was knowingly trading securities? According to the complaint (PDF), former CEO William Shihara said so to other co-founders in a 2017 message:
the problem is that its going to be seen by the SEC as a security. im meeting with these guys face to face to get specifics on how much they want to raise, who they are raising it from, and what they expect the after market to be. its a big enough opportunity that we might want to roll the dice on the sec investigation
It also alleges Bittrex spent the last few years trying to erase old social media messages about token ownership, price predictions, and interest.
Fans don’t seem interested, but that isn’t stopping some notable brands.
David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.
It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.
[The Verge]
Crypto exchange Gemini has failed to raise money, so the twin sea gods who founded the exchange have dipped into their store of shipwreck treasure to loan the company $100 million.
[Bloomberg.com]
Signature, Bank, closed by regulators almost a month ago, was an important ramp for controversial stablecoin firm Tether, Bloomberg reports. Its Signet payments platform was part of how Tether’s clientele could send dollars to Capital Union Bank.
The CTO of Tether said that the stablecoin “doesn’t have any exposure” to Signature, but the setup was still in place when Signature was shuttered.
[Bloomberg.com]
Last week, Elon Musk’s lawyers asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that claims he’s “engaged in a Crypto Pyramid Scheme” around Dogecoin, citing his tweets as evidence, according to Reuters. Today, Twitter’s bird logo was swapped out for a doge one on the web.
This is absolutely going to end up in a court document, right?
There’s a new licensing framework there, and the US appears to be less crypto-friendly in 2023 than it was in 2021 or 2022.
There are still questions — how much registration will cost, among other things — but it sure seems like a lot of the crypto world is up for grabs right now.
Even worse than last year, writes Fais Khan. One thing that was boosting Coinbase’s returns? Luna, which oopsies doopsie, failed.
But surely Coinbase is more transparent now? Ahahaha, nope: “Coinbase didn’t like me poking around, so they stopped blogging about new coins... Their asset pages, which used to note if CV was involved, no longer appear to show any disclosure.” Stay safu out there!
[startupsandecon.substack.com]
After the rapid collapse of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, the crypto world has needed to find new bankers. Regional bankers such as Fifth Third and Customers Bancorp are stepping up. Big banks like JP Morgan Chase can afford to be choosy:
Banks willing to service crypto firms have been inundated with applications during the past two weeks, crypto executives and bankers said. After the collapse of Signature, one crypto banker said he enabled his phone’s “do not disturb” mode to get some sleep. He received so many texts in rapid succession that the phone overrode the setting.