Crypto

Recently, the comedian behind Adam Ruins Everything made a promotional video for World that he’s since taken down. Now, he’s addressing blowback he received by calling his ad for the eyeball-scanning crypto company “one of the dumbest things I have ever done” and saying what he “honestly” thinks about the company.

37-year-old John Woeltz was arrested Friday after a man escaped a Manhattan townhome and told authorities that Woeltz and another man had kidnapped him and were “beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks” after he refused to give them his Bitcoin password, reports The New York Times.

That was a message Akasha Song, aka Joseph Clements, shared with customers in April 2022 on the closed dark web profile pages for his DMT storefront, Shimshai, as the feds were closing in on his operation.

New Hampshire just passed a law establishing its own “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” paving the way for the state to start investing in digital assets such as Bitcoin. It’s the first state in the country to do so, beating several other states to the punch.

Of the roughly 2 million crypto wallets that have bought Trump’s meme coin, a very lucky 58 of them have managed to make more than $10 million a piece off it. Everyone else hasn’t been as fortunate. In fact, 764,000 wallets have lost money on the coin.

This New York Times caper is super revealing, both about how crypto-hacker crime rings work, and how investigators traced a quarter-billion-dollar heist. (There’s a Netflix movie in here somewhere, for sure.) But also, PSA: doing a 90-minute livestream that includes every imaginable bit of incriminating evidence is probably not going to help you get away with something.

Attorney General Dan Rayfield alleges Coinbase “sold high risk investments without them being properly vetted to protect consumers.” Rayfield says it’s now up to states to fill the “enforcement vacuum being left by federal regulators who are abandoning these cases,” as the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase in February.

Less than three months after the BitMEX crypto exchange was hit with a $100 million fine for money laundering – and hours after he pardoned ex-Nikola CEO Trevor Milton for defrauding investors in his EV company – Trump issued pardons to Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Dalo and Samuel Reed, CNBC reported Friday. The three men had previously pled guilty to several felony charges related to money laundering and failure to police the exchange.

The agency will no longer fight the 2023 ruling that was mostly a victory for Ripple Labs, as it determined it didn’t break the law by listing its XRP token on public exchanges. XRP is one of the tokens that will be included in the government’s crypto stockpile.

It’s not surprising that the government’s crypto reserve involves Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the other three coins seem kind of random — Cardano (have you heard of it???), XRP, and Solana.

A 60-day stay request made by Justin Sun and the SEC on Wednesday to “allow the Parties to explore a potential resolution” has been approved by a federal judge. The SEC lawsuit filed in 2023 accused Sun and three of his companies of illegally distributing crypto assets, market manipulation, and concealing payments to celebrity spokespersons.

Javier Milei, president of Argentina who appeared with Elon Musk at CPAC, will be investigated for his involvement with $Libra, which collapsed just hours after its launch. His sister appears to be involved — the token co-creator says he bought the president’s endorsement through her. The US’s putative president, Donald Trump, has meme coins of his own.