Crypto

Friedberg and others facilitated the routing of billions of dollars in purported profits of the FTX Group to the FTX Insiders, and their families, friends, and other acquaintances through purported personal ‘loans,’ bonuses, ‘investments,’ and all other means of transfer, including real estate purchases and hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable and political contributions.

One of the people with direct knowledge about the teams said that Crypto.com executives gave other, external trading houses “absolutely dramatic sworn statements that Crypto.com was in no way involved in trading”, while another said that employees were asked to “say there is no internal market maker type operation.”

In response to questions from the Financial Times, Crypto.com said that employees had not been asked to lie to other market participants.

According to the proposed agreement, Binance.US will take steps to make sure that no officials from Binance Holdings, the global exchange, have access to private keys for wallets or hardware wallets, or root access to Binance.US’s Amazon Web Services tools. The U.S.-based crypto trading platform will share detailed information about its business expenses, including estimated costs, in the coming weeks.

Legal executives at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote that “absent a suitable self-custodial exception, the proposed Rule would effectively ban RIAs from holding and transacting in crypto assets for clients,” while Paradigm wrote that the rule could result in an effective “shadow ban” of crypto.

Tether has nothing to hide and we hold utmost confidence in the accuracy of our financial figures. While the sensitivity that we had to a government agency releasing confidential data—at least as it pertains to Tether’s reserves—is lower now than it was in 2021, we remain vigilant about customer data. While we cannot count on fair coverage from CoinDesk, which often misrepresented Tether’s position in the market in favour of its main competitor, we call upon them to set their bias aside and to not publicly share any past or current customer names and not to thereby put anyone in the community at physical or digital risk.

“As written, the language remains vague as to whether ETH is a security. If you want to make an affirmative statement that it is not a security, the language could be stronger (i.e., just say it). If you don’t want to take an affirmative stance, we suggest using language similar to what you used for Bitcoin re. the disclosure regime to make it more consistent,” wrote former SEC Director of Trading and Markets Brett Redfearn on June 12, 2018.

Redfearn left comments in a proposed draft of the speech further emphasizing that point, saying parts of it “appear likely to create more confusion about the status of ETH.”

She also expressed skepticism about the S.E.C.’s use of its enforcement powers to regulate the crypto world, calling it “inefficient and cumbersome.”

The founders created the Ooki DAO with an evasive purpose, and with the explicit goal of operating an illegal trading platform without legal accountability.

This decision should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who believes they can circumvent the law by adopting a DAO structure, intending to insulate themselves from law enforcement and ultimately putting the public at risk.

“A decent rule of thumb,” I wrote in March, “is that all cryptocurrency exchanges are doing crimes, and if you’re lucky your exchange is doing only process crimes.”

SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL,ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI

From September 2019 through February 2023, Binance offered and sold BUSD to U.S. investors as part of a profit-earning scheme within the Binance ecosystem, touting returns for investors from simply buying BUSD or deploying it in Binance profit-generating programs.

Since its inception, BUSD has been offered and sold as an investment contract and, therefore, as a security.

Sigma Chain also engaged in wash trading on or around the time when BAM Trading made at least 65 new crypto assets, including crypto asset securities, available for trading on the Binance.US Platform. Between January 1, 2022 and June 23, 2022 alone, Sigma Chain accounts engaged in wash trading in 48 of 51 newly listed crypto assets.

Much of this wash trading occurred through numerous accounts affiliated with Sigma Chain, anentity owned and controlled by Zhao and operated by Binance employees at Zhao’s direction.

. On June 23, 2020, for example, in discussing a drop in trading volume from market makers on the Binance.US Platform, BAM CEO A asked the BAM Trading’s Sales Director to “pull [Sigma Chain’s] data to hold them accountable too . . . they should be consistent too – we can ask for more volume but they’ve been up to 50% for us before.”

Wash trading between Sigma Chain’s accounts occurred from the launch of the Binance.US Platform in 2019 through at least June 23, 2022. This wash trading activity corrupted the Binance.US Platform’s reported trading volume in a strategic pattern that coincided with at least three critical periods for crypto asset investors and the Equity Investors: (1) the Binance.US Platform’s launch in September 2019; (2) BAM Trading’s making available certain new crypto asset securities for trading on the Binance.US Platform; and (3) the months leading up to BAM Trading’s seed funding round starting in September 2021.

On January 6, 2021, the Sales Director messaged BAM CEO A and other BAM Trading employees “fyi these are ALL sigma chain,” and then listed 20 account numbers. Another BAM Trading employee responded, “whoa.”

From May 2020 to February 2022, Alameda Research, the trading firm associated with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was often the OTC Desk’s only counterparty vis-à-vis BAM Trading customers.

BAM CEO B tried to implement plans to migrate those functions and control ofthe crypto assets from Binance to BAM Trading and into the United States, but Zhao quickly overruled him, causing BAM CEO B to resign approximately three months into his tenure.

As BAM CEO A explained to the Binance CFO shortly after the article was released, BAM Trading employees “lost a lot of trust with the article” and “the entire team feels like they’ve been duped into being a puppet.”

For example, by 2021, at least $145 million was transferred from BAM Trading to a Sigma Chain account, and another $45 million of funds were transferred from BAM Trading’s Trust Company B account to the Sigma Chain account. From this account,Sigma Chain spent $11 million to purchase a yacht.

“To the extent that these two liquidity providers were significant sources of liquidity, meaning that our customers couldn’t, you know, clear orders without the presence of those makers on our platform, I thought that was a real problem. It suggested that the company was, in fact, heavily dependent on CZ, not just as a control person but also as an economic counterparty and that is problematic, so I thought we needed to look into deplatforming them.”