Crypto

One of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other companies, Worldcoin, is in hot water for giving people free crypto in exchange for scanning their eyeballs into the startup’s proprietary orb.

Michael Lewis, interviewed on his time with Sam Bankman-Fried, says:

Controversial stablecoin Tether is making loans to its customers. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine walks through why that’s kind of weird:

There’s another Twitter spat going on, this time between market-makers DWF Labs, GSR and Wintermute. Worth keeping an eye on, because at least once when there was this kind of Twitter trash-talking — between FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance’s Changpeng “CZ” Zhao — FTX melted down.

This Rolling Stone article sourcing some kind of report claiming 95 percent of NFTs are worthless almost feels like the sunshine of reality peeking into the world of crypto mania.

PayPal is rolling out the ability to buy PayPal USD, its US-dollar-backed stablecoin cryptocurrency, to “select users” today, with a full rollout coming later.

The head of legal and the chief risk officer at Binance.US are leaving, The Wall Street Journal reports. The CEO of Binance.US quit earlier this week.

How involved were SBF’s powerful parents?

FTX has said its holdings are worth $3.4 billion.

Sebastian Greenwood was the co-founder of a fraudulent cryptocurrency that pulled in $4 billion from investors between 2014 and 2016. Now U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos has sentenced him to 20 years in prison, and he was ordered to pay $300 million in forfeiture.

In this entertaining excerpt from Zeke Faux’s forthcoming book, we get a glimpse of the crypto Bahamas conference before Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall. Pretty fun stuff! Seems like Michael Lewis was all-in on SBF, among other nuggets here.

I was going to ask if companies like Prada really gain much by storing certificates of authenticity (a concept that far predates the blockchain!) on a distributed ledger system rather than some basic, un-sexy centralized database. Then I learned there’s a much funnier issue here: you can’t even check the database yourself!

Stake, an online cryptocurrency betting platform, allegedly lost about $40 million in unauthorized withdrawals from several of its hot wallets. Stake says that “user funds are safe,” which, you know. Hope so! It’d be terrible to lose your money to hackers before you had a chance to lose it by gambling with crypto.

In a letter to the judge, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers say they are unable to adequately prepare for trial because Bankman-Fried doesn’t have enough internet access. Also the battery life on his laptop isn’t good enough. His lawyers are asking that he be released to prepare for trial.

Regulatory actions and concerns about money laundering were among the reasons for the contract termination, which was effective as of yesterday.

On Monday, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment charging Bankman-Fried once again with violating campaign finance law.

CoinDesk, the publication that set off the chain of events that led to Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall, is cutting almost half its editorial staff to make itself more attractive to buyers. It’s a damn shame — those are fine journalists who deserve better than this unceremonious dumping.

The bankrupt exchange agreed to pay a fine of $24 million to settle the SEC’s charges that it operated as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.

Bloomberg reports Ryan Salame, who donated $24 million to Republican campaigns, is negotiating a guilty plea on charges of violating campaign finance laws.

According to a report from Semafor, US prosecutors believe charging Binance with fraud could result in mass withdrawals from the crypto exchange, which is something we saw with the collapse of FTX.