Cryptocurrency Archive

The Wall Street Journal writes that federal prosecutors won’t pursue the five leftover charges that District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan previously split off to avoid delaying the trial that resulted in a guilty verdict for Bankman-Fried last month.

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon is still in Montenegro waiting to be extradited, but the SEC’s case against him will proceed, with a January 29th scheduled start date.

CoinDesk points out Binance’s year-end wrapup, noting that despite the guilty plea and $4 billion in fines for engaging in “Anti-Money Laundering, Unlicensed Money Transmitting, and Sanctions Violations,” its new CEO says the user base has grown by 30 percent to 170 million.

That’s what NYU student and Bitcoin mine owner Jerry Yu is learning. His company BitRush (also known as BytesRush) allegedly failed to pay some contractors who worked on his Bitcoin mine in Channing, Texas.

X (formerly Twitter) will let you replace the username in a post’s URL with... really, whatever you want, and it will still go to the original post. It’s been that way since at least 2019.

Tiffany Fong, who’s been heavily involved with the FTX storyline, interviewed FTX creditor Louis D’Origny about the FTX bankruptcy plan. If you want to look at the Chapter 11 plan for yourself, it’s here.

The New York Times published an investigative piece on the slave labor behind some of those innocuous-seeming crypto scam texts and calls.

Crypto wallet company Ledger’s Connect Kit software was compromised to insert a wallet drainer. Ledger’s CEO blamed a phishing attack on an ex-employee without explaining how their account still had access.

The Sam Altman-backed crypto project announced the rollout of World ID 2.0, which can apparently use your eyeball scan to verify your identity when signing into an account or applying for online verification status. Worldcoin says the update should make it “easier to distinguish between bots and verified humans online.”

David Mills, the Stanford Law prof who also defended ‘80s bond villain Michael Milken, flew to the Bahamas in his own jet when Bankman-Fried was first jailed. His friendship with Bankman-Fried’s parents may not survive the case.

A judge ruled on Thursday that Zhao — who resides in the United Arab Emirates — must stay in the US ahead of his February 2024 trial, citing his “enormous wealth and property abroad” as well as a lack of ties to the US.

Anatoly Legkodymov, aka Anatolii Legkodymov, Gandalf, and Tolik, was arrested in Miami earlier this year. The feds said his crypto exchange advertised its lack of ID requirements for users and processed more than $700 million over the years for ransomware gangs and other criminals as a counterparty for Hydra Market, a Russian dark web site they shut down last year.

Netflix has released a trailer for its new crypto documentary, Bitconned, about the rise and fall of Centra Tech, a scam that was part of the wave of initial coin offerings in 2017. The blowback from the scheme caught DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather, who had promoted it — they were fined by the SEC. Ray Trapani, one of the co-founders, appears to be a key narrator of the Netflix documentary.

Here’s a fun profile of Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, with a lot of details on his approach to enforcement (“Though you might think otherwise, I don’t spend the majority of my time on crypto,” he says). Don’t worry, there’s even an explanation of his genuinely weird social media antics.