Nishad Singh, FTX’s head of engineering and owner of a 7.8 percent stake in the company, has pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges. He wrote the software that let Alameda exempt itself from being auto-liquidated, Reuters previously reported.
Also of note: Singh gave $8 million to Democratic campaigns and PACs in 2022, according to Open Secrets.
The founders of Forsage, a alleged Ponzi purporting to be a DeFi protocol have been indicted for fraud. That’s not the funny part.
This is:
Analysis of the computer code underlying Forsage’s smart contracts allegedly revealed that, consistent with a Ponzi scheme, as soon as an investor invested in Forsage by purchasing a “slot” in a Forsage smart contract, the smart contract automatically diverted the investor’s funds to other Forsage investors, such that earlier investors were paid with funds from later investors.
Caroline Ellison, the head of Alameda Research, also worked there. It’s a hotbed for the effective altruism world:
“The sorts of people who are into effective altruism are not the sort of people who would flourish” in investment banking, William MacAskill, a British philosopher who is considered a leader of the movement, said in an April interview with The New York Times. “But Jane Street has this very nerdy, intellectual culture, so it’s a better fit.”
[The New York Times]
Binance.US’s executives were concerned by the outflows because the transfers were taking place without their knowledge, according to messages reviewed by Reuters. The CEO of Binance.US at the time, Catherine Coley, wrote to a Binance finance executive in late 2020 asking for an explanation for the transfers, calling them “unexpected” and saying “no one mentioned them.”
Fine and normal, we haven’t had any recent cryptocurrency issues with secret transfers, have we?
Gary Wang, cofounder of FTX, isn’t as famous as Sam Bankman-Fried — but he might be the most important part of the government’s case against SBF. The two met in math camp, and this Bloomberg report traces their history together until SBF got a note explaining a witness was cooperating against him:
Reading the cable from the US, Bankman-Fried realized who CC-1 was: Gary Wang.
The former FTX crypto tycoon is living with his parents in California instead of sitting in jail, thanks to a $250 million bail secured by his parent’s home as well as two people who had been kept anonymous.
Today, after news organizations argued for the information to be released, the court revealed Stanford research scientist Andreas Paepcke put up $200,000 and former Stanford Law School dean Larry Kramer put up $500,000. SBF’s parents teach law at Stanford.
Remember when I told you Binance has a target on its back? It might not be in the US, but its partner on a stablecoin sure is. And if regulators can’t hit Binance, they can hit its partners.
Paxos not only has to stop issuing BUSD, its Binance-affiliated stablecoin, the SEC may take action against it: a Wells Notice suggests the agency thinks BUSD is an unregistered security.
Oh, and Ansbacher’s parent company is FTX-affiliated Deltec. Cool! Also:
The stablecoin has never publicly disclosed its relationships with Capital Union, Ansbacher or Cantor Fitzgerald. The full breakdown of Tether reserves and their distribution to banking partners remains unknown.
