I’ve fallen behind on crypto news, mainly because I’ve had this job writing about cash and ATMs for the last seven months. But now I’m trying to get back into it, so here’s a rundown on the news of the week that stuck out. 

On top of the list, lawyers for QuadrigaCX creditors want to exhume Gerald Cotten’s body. They’ve dashed off a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seeking a post-mortem autopsy of the body as well “to confirm both its identity and the cause of death.” That sounds horribly gruesome, particularly since, he was buried a year ago. 

He was apparently not cremated. After his death in India on Dec. 9, 2018, his body was embalmed, flown to Canada and buried. No formal autopsy was done, however, so foul play has not been ruled out. Lawyers would like the body pulled from the ground before spring for obvious reasons.

Cotten’s widow said she was “heartbroken to learn of this request.”  

(Read my Quadriga timeline to get up to speed on the details of the now defunct Canadian crypto exchange.)

In other news, the legal standoff between the New York Attorney General’s Office and iFinex, the parent company of Tether and Bitfinex, continues.

In late 2018, the NYAG demanded iFinex hand over documents related to an ongoing investigation of its activities, and iFinex has been trying to avoid doing so ever since.

In August, the court ruled iFinex needed to cooperate. iFinex appealed, and recently, the NYAG filed its lengthy response. The response contains a lot of what we already know, but it’s a good refresher if you want to catch up on the entire saga. You can also read Tether’s response to the NYAG’s response filed on Friday. 

You recall Cryptopia, the New Zealand crypto exchange that collapsed after a $16 million hack in January? Liquidator Grant Thornton released a second report on Wednesday detailing its progress in recovering the funds. So far, it’s recovered NZ$10.9 million ($7.2 million) but reconciling the over 900,000 active customers on the exchange at the time it went belly up in May is proving a gargantuan task. Likely creditors won’t recoup any of their money anytime soon, and let’s not even talk about the legal fees.

In a podcast interview with Eric Weinstein, managing director at Thiel Capital, published Wednesday, Vitalik Buterin casually mentioned how he managed to convince the Ethereum Foundation to sell 70,000 ETH when the coin peaked in late 2017, resulting in $100 million liquidity. ETH would have been valued at around $1,400 at the time — 10x what it’s worth today. It’s good to know the Ethereum Foundation isn’t starving. 

Canadian bitcoin ATM operator Instacoin announced it’s adding support for seven stablecoins  —  including tether. You can buy and sell up to C$10,000 worth of crypto in a day on these street corner exchanges without having to present any form of identification. Can you imagine if Western Union operated in this fashion?

On Tuesday, U.S. prosecutors arrested four men men for allegedly running a $722 million crypto ponzi scheme. From April 2014 through December 2019, BitClub Network solicited money from investors all over the world in exchange for shares of crypto mining pools. In private conversations, the operators called their clients  “dumb” and “sheep” and “idiots.” What do you call people who get caught running these types of scams? 

Shopin founder Eran Eyal pled guilty Thursday to defrauding investors of millions of dollars through three investment schemes, including a $42.5 million ICO. After conducting an unregistered securities offering by selling Shopin tokens in 2017, he never created a functional platform. (Here’s the PR and complaint.)

In a tweet, crypto lawyer Stephen Palley said: “The SEC’s ICO enforcement work has quickly become indistinguishable from other types of enforcement litigation. Crypto’s novelty receives no special treatment. Like any other securities offering — you have to register, you can’t make misstatements, and you can’t misuse funds.”

Singapore-based VeChain Foundation’s buyback wallet was hacked on Friday. According to a report in CoinDesk, VeChain said it is working with cybersecurity firm Hacken to track the movement of VET tokens should the criminals try to cash out. The hacked funds represent a little over 1% outstanding VET, which has a fixed supply of 86.7 billion. VeChain is calling the mistake “human error,” because we’re all only human.

Bottle Pay, a service that once allowed users to send tiny amounts of bitcoin via social media, is shutting down due to new AML regulations in the E.U.  The Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive goes into effect in January and expands existing legislation to include the crypto space imposing strict KYC and AML practices. Users have until the end of the month to withdraw their funds. 

Lawrence Lewitinn, former editor-in-chief of Modern Consensus, is now managing editor of markets for CoinDesk. He wrote his first piece about Bitmain’s Texas Hedge. A Texas hedge is a high reward, high risk venture that’s generally a recipe for disaster. Lewitinn does a good job explaining. 

In an article written for The Block, Palley claims that Bitcoin-linked investment scheme known as HEX is not a ponzi, but it’s obviously an unregistered security offering.  

@Cryptodeleted and @Cryptodeleted2 — the twitter accounts that archived deleted tweets — were shut down by Bitcoin maximalists. 

# # #

When you openly defy the U.S. government and travel to North Korea — one of the U.S.’s foremost enemies — to teach crypto and blockchain tech at a conference, you can’t really expect things to go well. I mean, can you?

It’s hard to know then, if Virgil Griffith, head of special projects for the Ethereum Foundation, knew what was about to happen or if he was completely caught off guard on Thanksgiving Day — a day when everyone else in the U.S. was stuffing themselves with turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy — when the DOJ arrested him at LAX.

According to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, he is charged with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from exporting goods, services or technology to North Korea without approval from the Treasury Department. The maximum sentence is 20 years.

In April, Griffith traveled to North Korea — or more formally, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — to allegedly deliver a presentation and technical advice on using crypto and blockchain tech to evade sanctions at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.

That’s a big no-no. In September 2017, the U.S. issued a travel ban to North Korea. U.S. citizens are not allowed to go there without a special validation.

According to the unsealed complaint, Griffith knew full well that it was illegal to travel to the DPRK. He sought permission from the Department of State and his request was denied. Still — and this is the mind boggling bit — he went anyway.

In his presentation at the conference titled “Blockchain and Peace,” Griffith allegedly discussed how a blockchain and a smart contract could be used to benefit the DPRK.

The complaint states:

“At the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, GRIFFITH and other attendees discussed how blockchain and cryptocurrency technology could be used by the DPRK to launder money and evade sanctions, and how the DPRK could use these technologies to achieve independence from the global banking system.”

In an interview that took place with the FBI in November, Griffith said the presentation amounted to a “non-zero transfer of technical knowledge” and that the information included “basic concepts accessible on the Internet,” the complaint said. So did he actually “export” any new information to the DPRK? I’m not so sure.

Griffith’s flouting of U.S. laws did not stop there, however. He also allegedly communicated about violating sanctions with a financial transaction.

“After the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, GRIFFITH began formulating plans to facilitate the exchange of cryptocurrency between the DPRK and South Korea, despite knowing that assisting with such an exchange would violate sanctions against the DPRK.”

Griffith is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Still, he is in deep water and will need a really good lawyer to dig him out of this mess.

Who is Virgil Griffith?

Labeled an “internet man of mystery” by The New York Times in November 2008, Griffith, 36, has a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in computations and neural systems and a B.A. in computer and cognitive science from the University of Alabama. He is a U.S. citizen who lives in Singapore.

He is also the founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, which makes it possible to figure out which organization made which edits to a Wikipedia entry by cross-referencing IP addresses with a database of IP address owners.

The NY Times article described him as a “troublemaker” and a “twerp” and said Griffith’s problems with authority emerged early on. He spent several school days in detention. Also, according to the article:

“In his public school, he worried about gangs; his mother pulled him out and briefly homeschooled him. Eventually, he graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science, even though he once threatened to sue the school — for a proposed policy of mandatory drug testing — and skipped his final exams to travel in Greece.”

Griffith joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2015. In an interview, he told developer Makoto Inoue that met Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin pre-Ethereum, which would likely have been sometime in 2014, after Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo and started traveling the world to learn more about crypto.

“While I was a graduate student Vitalik slept in my closet for about two months,” Griffith told the interviewer. 

‘But danger is my fetish’

What could Griffith have possibly been thinking to do something so incredibly stupid? He once tweeted, “But danger is my fetish,” so maybe that was the thrill.

For many, Griffith’s actions are a flashback to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road, now serving a life sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. On Thanksgivings, Ross’ mother puts a plate piled high with food in front of an empty chair at the table. One can’t help wonder if Griffith’s family faces a similar future.

Like Ulbricht, Griffith’s actions appear that of a narcissist thinking he was too special, too clever to get caught. So confident was he that he openly flaunted his trip to North Korea. For instance, on Aug. 13, he literally tweeted a picture of his visa to go there. In another tweet, he referred to the journey as a “Trip of a lifetime.”

I recommend reading Ben Munster’s September story in Decrypt on the upcoming 2020 “Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.” In it, Munster describes the government-sponsored event as offering an “exclusive environment of confidentiality and contacts with the highest government officials and engineers.”

Munster spoke with an attendee of the 2019 conference, who told him that “the main things (the North Koreans) were interested in were using Bitcoin to get around sanctions, and using Ethereum for U.N.-less courts.”  The source went on to describe how North Korea has trouble enforcing agreements outside of its own borders:

“‘Generally they load up Chinese people with millions of dollars in cash [and send them across the border], but half the time, these people just disappear with the money. There’s not much they can do about it.’ As such, North Koreans ‘desperately want a way to have agreements that work outside their own borders,’ he explained. ‘I told them about smart contracts. They were very excited about that.’”

The cryptosphere reacts

A few of the folks in cryptoland appear to be downplaying the seriousness of Griffith’s behavior — some calling the government’s case “misdirected” and portraying Griffith as a sweet guy with the best of intentions.

“Hoping that this concludes quickly, and teaches a valuable lesson to all, but with a minimum of wasted time and effort for Virgil, who is a valuable technical contributor,” tweeted Emin Gün Sirer, a Cornell professor working on his own blockchain protocol.

Crypto lawyer Stephen Palley retorted: “I mean, it’s the Southern District of New York — they are not really in the teaching lessons business.”

One Ethereum developer wondered aloud on twitter if Griffith was trying to teach North Korean citizens with the hope he was “setting them free” from the regime — a humanitarian mission, if you will.

As for the Ethereum Foundation, it issued a formal statement to Vice, saying it was not represented in any capacity at the events outlined in the Justice Department’s filing, and it “neither approved nor supported any such travel, which was a personal matter.”