Crypto

More than a year after its SPAC plan to go public crumbled, Circle has filed for an IPO. Get your engines ready, it’s S-1 time!

It’s a delightful run through Very Recent History, with a helpful tracker of the number of submissions that happened and the price of Bitcoin. Of course, we all know how the story ends.

“I kind of don’t understand the trade here?” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine writes of the hack of the SEC’s Twitter account yesterday, in which a fake approval of Bitcoin ETFs was briefly posted.

The Elon Musk-owned platform quietly removed the option for Premium subscribers to use NFTs as their profile pictures, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. X also scrubbed all mention of NFT profile pictures from its support page.

Do you even need deepfakes? The Guardian reports that while “Steven Reece Lewis” helped pull in millions of dollars as CEO of “Hyperverse,” a collapsed crypto / pyramid scheme, their investigation has been unable to turn up any evidence he exists.

It seems like Bitcoin ETFs may be a new trend for the financiers among us:

The Wall Street Journal writes that federal prosecutors won’t pursue the five leftover charges that District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan previously split off to avoid delaying the trial that resulted in a guilty verdict for Bankman-Fried last month.

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon is still in Montenegro waiting to be extradited, but the SEC’s case against him will proceed, with a January 29th scheduled start date.

CoinDesk points out Binance’s year-end wrapup, noting that despite the guilty plea and $4 billion in fines for engaging in “Anti-Money Laundering, Unlicensed Money Transmitting, and Sanctions Violations,” its new CEO says the user base has grown by 30 percent to 170 million.

That’s what NYU student and Bitcoin mine owner Jerry Yu is learning. His company BitRush (also known as BytesRush) allegedly failed to pay some contractors who worked on his Bitcoin mine in Channing, Texas.

X (formerly Twitter) will let you replace the username in a post’s URL with... really, whatever you want, and it will still go to the original post. It’s been that way since at least 2019.

Tiffany Fong, who’s been heavily involved with the FTX storyline, interviewed FTX creditor Louis D’Origny about the FTX bankruptcy plan. If you want to look at the Chapter 11 plan for yourself, it’s here.

The New York Times published an investigative piece on the slave labor behind some of those innocuous-seeming crypto scam texts and calls.

Crypto wallet company Ledger’s Connect Kit software was compromised to insert a wallet drainer. Ledger’s CEO blamed a phishing attack on an ex-employee without explaining how their account still had access.

The Sam Altman-backed crypto project announced the rollout of World ID 2.0, which can apparently use your eyeball scan to verify your identity when signing into an account or applying for online verification status. Worldcoin says the update should make it “easier to distinguish between bots and verified humans online.”

David Mills, the Stanford Law prof who also defended ‘80s bond villain Michael Milken, flew to the Bahamas in his own jet when Bankman-Fried was first jailed. His friendship with Bankman-Fried’s parents may not survive the case.

A judge ruled on Thursday that Zhao — who resides in the United Arab Emirates — must stay in the US ahead of his February 2024 trial, citing his “enormous wealth and property abroad” as well as a lack of ties to the US.

Anatoly Legkodymov, aka Anatolii Legkodymov, Gandalf, and Tolik, was arrested in Miami earlier this year. The feds said his crypto exchange advertised its lack of ID requirements for users and processed more than $700 million over the years for ransomware gangs and other criminals as a counterparty for Hydra Market, a Russian dark web site they shut down last year.

Netflix has released a trailer for its new crypto documentary, Bitconned, about the rise and fall of Centra Tech, a scam that was part of the wave of initial coin offerings in 2017. The blowback from the scheme caught DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather, who had promoted it — they were fined by the SEC. Ray Trapani, one of the co-founders, appears to be a key narrator of the Netflix documentary.

Here’s a fun profile of Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, with a lot of details on his approach to enforcement (“Though you might think otherwise, I don’t spend the majority of my time on crypto,” he says). Don’t worry, there’s even an explanation of his genuinely weird social media antics.

CoinDesk and TechCrunch report U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) action against Sinbad.io, calling it a money laundering tool used by the “Lazarus” state-sponsored hackers used to move a “significant” portion of the $620 million in crypto stolen from Axie Infinity last year.

Last week, Changpeng Zhao agreed to step down as CEO of the massive cryptocurrency exchange Binance — part of a plea deal with the DOJ for breaking anti-money-laundering laws.

What if we really have already found every criminal who runs a cryptocurrency exchange?

But now the question is: to where? Kwon faces charges in both the US and South Korea in connection with the collapse of the Terra stablecoin and its sister token Luna.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Genesis alleges Gemini, a crypto exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, made “significant withdrawals” before Genesis filed for bankruptcy, contributing to a “run on the bank.”

Another one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges joins Coinbase and Binance in facing charges of operating as an unregistered securities exchange, as well as accusations (PDF) of commingling customers’ crypto assets and cash with its own and even allegedly paying expenses directly from bank accounts that held customer cash.

Following a jury’s conviction of former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried on fraud charges, the Wall Street Journal reports that several former FTX employees, including former general counsel Can Sun, are involved in launching a new cryptocurrency exchange based on Dubai.

With this stage of Sam Bankman-Fried’s big crypto fraud trial over after the jury found the former FTX boss guilty, The Verge reporter Elizabeth Lopatto joined the Crypto Critics’ Corner podcast to discuss everything that went on in the courtroom.

“We are currently investigating the Poloniex hack incident,” confirmed infamous hype man Justin Sun in a tweet. As we reported last year, Sun purchased “Polo” because of its gray-area approach to know-your-customer rules. Somewhat ironically, he is now offering a “white hat bounty” to the hacker.

Seriously, you’ll have to guess; this press release is completely inscrutable.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has concluded its investigation into what caused at least 15 convention attendees to suffer eye pain, vision problems, and sunburnt skin during ApeFest 2023, determining that UV-A emitting lights were likely behind the injuries.