From the erratic ups and downs in bitcoin and ethereum value, to the explosion in initial coin offerings, and the unstoppable demand for mining-ready GPUs, cryptocurrency has become an inescapable story. It’s also become increasingly difficult to make sense of — as the industry expands, new currencies sprout up, and companies form overnight. Check here for the complete coverage of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, monero, Venezuela’s petro, cryptocurrencies at large, and the ways that ICOs and the underlying blockchain technology are helping shape a burgeoning industry and giving life to a new wave of startups and entrepreneurs.
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.
Just remembering the time that FTX’s legal and compliance team quit, no reason.
How involved were SBF’s powerful parents?
Legal filings suggest Bankman and Fried were crucial to their son’s transfiguration from schlubby startup nerd to hyperconnected crypto mogul. The couple profited tremendously from FTX, netting $26 million in cash and real estate in 2022 alone. They were regular fixtures at the company’s offices, offered words of encouragement to employees and were included in internal company communications. Their reputations and connections were essential to FTX’s success.
FTX has said its holdings are worth $3.4 billion.
FTX revealed earlier this week that it holds $1.16 billion of solana (SOL) – approximately 16% of the token’s outstanding supply – and about $560 million in bitcoin (BTC). The rest of its holdings consist of lesser known illiquid tokens.
Good luck out there, folks!
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.
Through the MLM structure, OneCoin members received commissions for recruiting others to purchase cryptocurrency packages. As the top MLM distributor of OneCoin, GREENWOOD earned 5% of monthly OneCoin sales from anywhere in the world, which totaled more than $200 million from the fourth quarter of 2014 through the fourth quarter of 2016 alone and exceeded approximately $300 million in total.
Meanwhile, his partner, Ruja Ignatova, aka the “Cryptoqueen” we wrote about last year when she was added to the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, remains at large, with a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest.
The price of Bitcoin dropped below $25,000, as people believe the FTX bankruptcy may sell off significant holdings of “altcoins” from the failed exchange. (CoinDesk)
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s Twitter / X account was hacked and sent out a malicious link that stole $691k in crypto.
And someone paid a $500,000 fee to send $1,865 worth of Bitcoin. (Web3 is Going just Great)
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.
[Intelligencer]
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!
After several rounds of questioning, Aura Consortium’s and Prada’s press teams said I couldn’t yet certify the bag myself, but Prada Group could access the information through an NFC chip inserted in the item.
Oh, and as usual, nobody seems to know what “owning” something through a blockchain legally means.
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.
[Web3 is Going Just Great]
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.
Binance was once Checkout.com’s largest client — with more than $2 billion in transactions in one month in 2021. Here’s an interesting tidbit about the relationship:
Shortly after the launch, Visa alerted Checkout.com to a flood of fraudulent transactions on Binance — approximately $10 million, according to two people familiar with the incident. (Checkout said this figure is “inflated and inaccurate.”) Binance’s refusal to deploy Checkout’s 3D-secure measures had left the platform vulnerable to credit card fraud, and a European organized crime syndicate had taken full advantage.
This Is Not Financial Advice and Easy Money attempt to explain the extremely online financial mania. Their very divergent takes show how difficult it is to fully understand.
On Monday, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment charging Bankman-Fried once again with violating campaign finance law.
In order to get the crypto boy wonder extradited from the Bahamas last year, US prosecutors revoked the charges that alleged Bankman Fried ran a straw donor scheme to defraud the Federal Election Commission.
Despite bringing back the overall charge of campaign finance misconduct, Monday’s indictment doesn’t mention straw donors and narrows the scope of Bankman-Fried’s misconduct, accusing him of wrongfully donating more than $100 million to campaigns.
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.
The SEC also alleged that Bittrex attempted to get rid of “problematic” public statements that suggested the exchange sold securities:
For years, Bittrex worked with token issuers to ‘scrub’ their online statements of any indicia that they were investment contracts — all in an effort to evade the federal securities laws. They failed.
Bloomberg reports Ryan Salame, who donated $24 million to Republican campaigns, is negotiating a guilty plea on charges of violating campaign finance laws.
Coincidentally, prosecutors recently confirmed (PDF) they’re still charging FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried for an illegal campaign finance scheme (as well as other alleged fraud and money laundering). He is due back in court on Friday (PDF) after a New York Times article published details from the diary of Caroline Ellison, who has already pleaded guilty and is cooperating in the case against him.
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.
Because of this, Semafor reports that the DOJ is looking into imposing fines and deferred or non-prosecution agreements instead. That still doesn’t mean Binance is off the hook — the exchange and its founder Changpeng Zhao are already facing charges from the SEC.
[www.semafor.com]
It’s removing the GameStop Wallet from the App Store and Chrome Web Store on November 1st, according to a notice posted on its NFT website. GameStop is blaming the “regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space.”
When the company laid off staff in December, Axios reported that the crypto wallet team was “heavily impacted.”
That’s the statement from Brian Armstrong to the Financial Times, about the company’s choices that led to a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
We really didn’t have a choice at that point, delisting every asset other than bitcoin, which by the way is not what the law says, would have essentially meant the end of the crypto industry in the US.
Armstrong claims the regulators asked Coinbase to delist basically all the over 200 tokens it trades, before the lawsuit was filed that points at 13 of them.
The company announced its fourth series of Collectible Avatars on Wednesday. Reddit is putting some limits on who can buy them for the first day of launch as part of an “initial access” period.
Reddit first released Collectible Avatars last year, and they could be a way for Reddit to bring in some money as it tries to make a profit.
Worldcoin, the OpenAI CEO’s “privacy-preserving” cryptocurrency, is starting its global rollout today. The initiative claims to provide a “reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online” by scanning people’s retinas with an orb-shaped biometric verification device to create a unique user ID for the currency’s World App crypto wallet.
The founders want to give it away for “free” in some regions, which has caused some prior controversy.
A lawsuit filed Thursday by FTX against its former leaders showed Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother messaging someone at the FTX Foundation charity about buying the Pacific island nation of Nauru, as reported by Bloomberg.
[it would be used] for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive” and to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there.” The memo further noted that “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too.”
This would be news to the nation’s roughly 12,000 existing inhabitants. Also, at 213 feet elevation, it’s vulnerable to rising seas, and damage from phosphate mining has rendered most of its land uninhabitable.
This Threads post about the NFT for Jack Dorsey’s first tweet isn’t quite right. There is a $3~ bid, but another one is nearly $2,000, and the owner, Sina Estavi, has claimed he might never sell anyway.
On the other hand... that was after Estavi was imprisoned for a bit under crypto scam allegations, he’s currently shilling a new crypto x AI token scheme, and he said he’d never sell the Dorsey NFT after attempting to do so and drawing a high bid of only $280.
Remember the “Crocodile of Wall Street,” aka Razzlekhan, aka Heather Morgan? She and her husband were arrested in 2022 on charges of trying to launder billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack of Bitfinex. She’s also a rapper, among many other things.
Now Reuters reports she and her husband have reached a plea deal with prosecutors and are set to have a hearing on August 3rd.
