Tag: Bored Apes

Artnet News: ‘The Creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club Want to Become the Amazon of the NFT Space. Can They Pull It Off?’

My latest story on the Bored Apes Yacht Club was published in Artnet News today. It’s paywalled but worth subscribing to Artnet News if you want to read it!

I spent a few weeks working on this nearly 2,000-word story, and Artnet News editor Julia Halperin really helped me pull it together. We had the story ready to go on Friday when suddenly, Yuga Labs announced they had just acquired the IP to CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. So of course, that meant lots of last-minute editing along with a new headline.

Usually, you make big announcements at the beginning or middle of the week, not when people are clearing off their desks and getting geared up for the weekend. 

But then the floor price of Bored Apes was dropping, slipping below $200,000 in ETH—and Yuga Labs needed to act quickly. 

Yuga Labs is giving Punk and Meebits owners the IP for their avatars, so they can create derivatives and hopefully further the branding and marketing of the project.

They’ll probably also get to attend yacht parties and warehouse concerts, and benefit from all of the other perks and freebies, like NFT airdrops.

Token projects have been promising real-world utility since the ICO era of 2017, and NFT projects are no different. The goal is to somehow justify the insane prices of these things. 

When NFTs became “the next big thing” in early 2021, many people started asking: “What good are these? All they do is point to a JPEG on the internet. I can copy and download that JPEG myself.”

In response to the criticism, many NFT projects now promise utility, and BAYC is no different. Owning a bored ape is a key to a club. It’s culture. It’s a digital identity, or whatever Yuga Labs can think of next.

Ultimately, it’s about marketing. High-value NFTs are illiquid. It’s very difficult to find a 1:1 buyer for a $200,000 bored ape, outside of celebrities. So the goal is to keep bored apes in the public eye and to keep bored ape holders from selling off their NFTs.

In the meantime, Yuga is working on a fungible token that will likely “democratize” their high-priced NFTs. All the better for a16z, if they proceed with reported plans to invest millions into the project.

The Silicon Valley VC firm could potentially get ERC20 tokens in return for their investment, and see quick returns if the coin lists on Coinbase. A16z has two directors sitting on the Coinbase board.

A fungible token combines the best of both worlds — the scarcity of a collectible NFT with the liquidy of an ERC20 token. But it’s complicated, you see. Too often these things resemble securities offerings.

Yuga Labs knows the big money is temporary. Until they work out the legalities of a fungible token, they need to do everything possible to keep the price of Bored Apes Yacht Club tokens up. 

So far, the plan is working. Soon after the announcement on Friday, the floor price of Bored Apes went up again. As of today, the cheapest bored ape NFT is $227,000 (90 ETH), according to CryptoSlam.

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: DoJ locates Bitfinex’s stolen BTC, BlockFi fined $100M, Forbes sells out to Binance

The DOJ found 119,754 bitcoins stolen from crypto exchange Bitfinex in a hack in 2016. Federal officials were able to seize 94,643.29 BTC ($3.6 billion). The rest is still out there. (Washington Post)

On Jan. 31, those funds were spotted moving out of the hacker’s wallet, but nobody realized at the time it was the feds moving the funds. Most people assumed it was the hackers themselves!

Heather Morgan, 31, and Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, were charged with trying to launder the bitcoins. They were arrested in NYC, where they live. (DoJ press release, Complaint, Statement of facts)

Lichtenstein is Russian-American. Morgan is a U.S. citizen, who grew up in California. We don’t know if the pair were behind the actual theft, but they probably were given the majority of the coins were in the same wallet as when they left Bitfinex.  

David Gerard describes the 2016 hack in Chapter 8 of his book “Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain,” as told to him by Phil Potter. He summarized it on Twitter. 

Morgan is a rapper with loads of embarrassing videos online. (Vice)

She had an active TikTok account featuring her rap moves.

@realrazzlekhan

How a #nyc $PACE Pımp starts their #holographic day in #manhattan 🧞‍♀️ #grwm #winterfit

♬ Island In The Sun – Weezer

Morgan was also a prolific Forbes contributor, which should surprise nobody. (Forbes)

And she gave a talk at NYC Salon on how to social engineer your way into anything. (Youtube)

The couple sat on those coins from August 2016 to January 2017, before trying to launder some of them. Almost all of the BTC they moved went through AlphaBay, which they used as a mixer. The feds were able to spot this because they seized AlphaBay in July 2017. 

This arrest underscores how difficult it is to actually launder bitcoin. All of the transactions are traceable. Even when you are sitting on piles of BTC, as these two allegedly were, it is really difficult to cash out.  

A judge ruled the pair could be released on bonds — $5 million for Lichtenstein; $3 million for Morgan. But the government, which originally asked for a $100 million bond, ordered a review of the detention order, saying the couple have the means to flee — $330 million in BTC have yet to be found. Also, Russia has no extradition treaty with the U.S. (Stay of release)

It’s not clear what will happen to the recovered funds at this point, but likely they will be held up by the U.S. government for a long time to come. (Decrypt)

Bitfinex is absolutely convinced it will receive the recovered funds. It wants to use 80% of them to “burn” one of its shitcoins — LEO. (Bitfinex blog)

Naturally, LEO saw a surge in value after the announcement. (Defiant)

Bitfinex is the sister company of Tether. The 2016 hack set off a string of calamities for the two firms. Rather than claim insolvency, Bitfinex gave its customers a 36% haircut, repaid them in BFX tokens, and then lost its banking. Thus began a prolific printing of tethers, telling lies and other nonsense that has continued to this day. Also, it was Bitfinex’s reliance on third-party payment processors after it lost its banking that led to all the problems with Crypto Capital, some missing $850 million in funds, and the NYAG telling Tether to take its business out of New York. I detail most of this in my timeline.

Bitfinex never really paid its customers back for the 36% haircut. Ultimately, all of those customers were paid back in tethers, so why should Bitfinex get that money?

BlockFi to pay $100M

Crypto lender BlockFi is paying $50 million to the SEC and $50 million to various state regulators to settle claims that it illegally offered high-yielding crypto lending products, say sources. (Bloomberg)

It’s clear as mud how BlockFi is able to offer the rates it does. “Executives at BlockFi have said they are able to pay such high yields to customers because institutional investors will pay them even more to borrow the deposits. But the companies don’t provide a detailed accounting of how the funds are used or in what circumstances investors could lose their cryptocurrency,” writes Bloomberg.

Crypto lending programs are obviously securities subject to SEC regulation. BlockFi was funding its crypto lending operations and proprietary trading through the sale of unregistered securities. The SEC similarly warned Coinbase against launching “Lend.” And the regulator is currently looking into Celsius, Voyager Digital, and Gemini Trust regarding crypto yield products.

I didn’t realize this earlier, but apparently BlockFi is one of the largest holders of GBTC, buying it for the premium. GBTC is now trading at -24% of NAV, according to Ycharts.

BlockFi says funds are SAFU. (Tweet)

Forbes is taking Binance money 

Forbes, the publication that featured alleged bitcoin money launderer Heather Morgan as a contributor, is now taking $200 million from Binance, the crypto exchange that has been thus far kicked out of every corner of the world for blatantly ignoring laws and regulations. ​​(CNBC)

The funds will help Forbes follow through on its plan to merge with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in the first quarter. Forbes is owned mainly by Chinese Firm Integrated Whale Media, which bought a controlling stake from the Forbes family in 2014.

This will make Binance one of the biggest owners of Forbes after its listing. Binance will also have two director positions on Forbes’ board of executives. Binance tried to sue Forbes in 2020 for defamation, but the suit was quietly dropped.

If you are looking for an unbiased crypto news source in the future, you probably want to look elsewhere. 

More ‘Bitcoin Widow’ Reviews

The Toronoto Star has a review of Jennifer Robertson’s “Bitcoin Widow.” This one is worth reading:

“Does she have regrets? I kept waiting to hear them and she comes closest in the final few pages (after chapters of what does seem like a Kafkaesque nightmare in both legal and emotional terms). ‘I regret every moment of every day of the terrible year that followed Gerry’s death,’ is what she confesses. A weaselly mea culpa that reminded me of when people, often on reality shows, apologize by saying, ‘I am sorry you feel that way.’”

The Sun also has a review of the book. It’s mostly just… a review of the book. Nice photos of Jen and Gerry though. 

If you missed my review earlier, it’s here. 

Another day, another blockchain bridge hack 

On Feb. 5, a loophole in the Meter Passport smart contract allowed an attacker to siphon 1,391 ETH ($4.2 million) and 2.74 wrapped Bitcoin ($83,000) from the Meter Passport blockchain bridge. 

Blockchain bridges allow you to conveniently spend crypto from one blockchain — such as ETH or, in this case, BTC — on another blockchain. 

@ishwinder explains the hack in layman’s terms. (Twitter)

This is one of three recent hacks on blockchain bridges lately! On Feb. 3, we had the Wormhole exploit, with $320 million in funds stolen. And on Jan. 17, Qubit was hacked for $80 million in crypto. 

What does this tell you about blockchain bridges? 

Meter urged its users not to trade any meterBNB, which are currently unbacked, and said that they were “working on compensating funds to all affected users.” (Twitter)

What’s new in crypto regulations?

The U.S. Department of Treasury released a report: “Study of the Facilitation of Money Laundering and Terror Finance Through the Trade in Works of Art.” The report was mandated by Congress in the AML Act of 2020. It specifically mentions NFTs. (Press release, Study, Blockchain Law Center)

According to the report, NFTs are vulnerable to money laundering because “NFT platforms range in structure, ownership, and operation, and no single platform operates the same way or has the same standards or due diligence protocols.”

The report specified that NFTs used for payment or investment may fall under the virtual asset definition, and some NFT platforms may qualify as virtual asset service providers (VASPs), depending on the characteristics of the NFTs that they offer.

The report makes it clear that the Treasury department is carefully monitoring digital art assets, including NFTs, and the online marketplaces where they are traded. (JDSupra)

Grayscale wants to turn its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into an exchange-traded fund. The SEC is seeking advice from the public about whether ETFs tied to Bitcoin’s spot price could be a vehicle for fraud. The SEC has denied six similar applications since November, including those from VanEck, WisdomTree and SkyBridge Capital. (SEC notice, Coindesk)

Only licensed banks should be allowed to issue stablecoins, according to Jean Nellie Liang, the under secretary for domestic finance at the Department of the Treasury. She appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services to reaffirm the PWG’s November report on stablecoins. (Liang’s written testimony, Bloomberg)

Time is running out for crypto firms to be approved for the UK’s anti-money laundering register before the end of March. Ninety-six applicants are still waiting for a decision on their application. Without approval before a March 31 deadline, the future of these crypto firms’ UK operations — including exchanges, wallets and other businesses — hangs on a limb. (The Block)

Crypto shilling at the Super Bowl, and other NFT news

It’s Super Bowl weekend. Expect to see a massive amount of marketing dollars go toward shilling crypto and NFTs. Crypto.com, FTX, and Binance are among the major advertisers. (Hollywood Reporter) (NYT)

Bored Apes are also rumored to appear at the Super Bowl, in some shape or form. (Bloomberg)

Twitter accounts that have been speaking out against NFTs are being reported by bots, their accounts suspended and/or locked. This happened to @NFTEthics and @interlunations. (Twitter)

Sotheby’s is planning to auction off a set of 104 CryptoPunks on Feb. 23. The set is expected to bring $20 million to $30 million in crypto. The original buyer was 0x650d, who scooped them all up in July 2021. Here is the Etherscan confirming his purchase. (Artnet News) 

He bought them for $7 million because he “chose wealth.” (Twitter)

Following the news of the Sotheby’s auction, the celebrity shilling begins. German-American model Heidi Klum just announced on Twitter she owns a Punk. (Tweet)

Who paid for her Punk? That’s not exactly clear. Mike Burgersburg (not his real name, obviously) has tracked down links between Bitclout investor Reade Seiff and Klum’s Punk. (Dirty Bubble)

Burgersburg also says whoever is funding Reese Witherspoon’s NFT purchases probably has a financial interest in promoting the WOW project. (Dirty Bubble)

In addition to proper FTC disclosure requirements, fans and retail buyers deserve more transparency about how these deals are made and who’s providing the money to pump up these assets. 

John Reed Stark was chief of the SEC office of internet enforcement for 11 years. He has a few things to say about NFTs: Market manipulation of NFTs appears not only rampant and tolerated, but also encouraged. Fraud not only rewarded, but also taught. (Linkedin)

The counterfeit NFT problem is getting worse. Bots are scraping artists’ online galleries, or even keyword searches on Google Images, and then creating collections with auto-generated texts. Those listings have proliferated on OpenSea. (Verge)

Sotheby’s made headlines last year when it sold Kevin McCoy’s Quantum NFT (2014) for $1.47 million. Now, that sale is in the headlines once more, this time for a lawsuit being filed against McCoy and the auction house by a holdings company whose owner claims he owns Quantum. (Artnews)

Indie game platform itch.io has come out strongly against NFTs: “NFTs are a scam. If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the we ask that [you] please reevaluate your life choices.”(Twitter, PC Gamer)

YouTube is launching new creator tools to expand monetization, including allowing creators to sell content as NFTs so fans can “own” videos. (NBC News)

The Alfa Romeo Tonale SUV is the “first car on the market” to come with an NFT digital certificate that the automaker says will increase the car’s residual value. How? Technical details are thin. (Verge)

A group supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange raised $50 million in ETH by selling an NFT of a clock to a DAO (called AssangeDAO) set up to support his legal bills. The NFT, titled “Clock,” is a joint creation by Assange and digital artist Pak. AssangeDAO contributors receive $JUSTICE. (Wired)

Other newsworthy bits

David Rosenthal’s talk at Stanford is a summary of everything that is wrong with crypto and blockchain technology. This is a great read. (DSHR blog)

Vice interviewed Dan Olsen, whose Youtube video on NFTs went viral. “I’ve been keeping my thumb on what’s going on in crypto. By and large, it’s been the story of the evolution of fraud.” (Vice)

The BBC published and then took unpublished a story about a “self-made crypto millionaire giving back” without mentioning his scam coin. (archive)(missing story)

“City Coins — free, magical money for your city! Maybe” (David Gerard)

Fais Khan’s part II of his work explaining how VCs cash out on tokens: “The Unstoppable Grift: How Coinbase and Binance Helped Turned Web3 into Venture3.” (Fais Khan)

The U.S. government’s system for spotting money laundering has received a surge of suspicious activity reports from a set of San Francisco financial companies that includes some of the world’s leading crypto exchanges. (FT, Dynamics Securities Analytics report)

Mark Zuckerberg is lying about the Metaverse. The CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world is shoving $10 billion into a concept he cannot describe. (Ed Zitron)

The Russian government will treat bitcoin and digital assets as currency. The proposal includes subjecting crypto transactions (not just within exchanges) to AML/KYC rules, which, being technically impossible to execute, should be equivalent to a ban…(Blockworks)

If you like my work, please consider supporting my writing by subscribing to my Patreon account for $5 or $20 (or even more!) a month. Every little bit helps.  

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

NEWS: Wormhole hit by exploit, BAYC and its tangled celebrity web, HitPiece’s dirty dealings 

Software is inherently unforgiving. Stupid mistakes render stupid consequences. Recently, this led to one of the largest thefts in a DeFi protocol.

Wormhole, a bridge for connecting Ethereum and Solana and other DeFi blockchains, was hit by a hacker, who stole $326 million in cryptocurrency.

An exploit in the code allowed the attacker to mint 120,000 wETH (wrapped ether) on the Solana blockchain out of thin air. The hacker then exchanged 93,750 wETH for ETH on Ethereum and the rest for SOL, the native token of Solana, and USDC. (Elliptic, Cointelegraph)

Cross-chain bridges allow you to stake crypto (generally, ETH) so you can spend it like the native crypto on another blockchain. In the case of Wormhole, wrapped ETH, an ERC-20 token that represents ETH one-to-one, serves as a sort of I.O.U. The hack resulted in Wormhole sitting on lots of unbacked wETH. 

Wormhole developers offered the hacker a $10 million bug bounty for the return of the funds. Why the hacker would want to relinquish $326 million for $10 million, I’m not sure.

Security researcher Sam Sun explained how the thief carried out the heist: “Wormhole didn’t properly validate all input accounts, which allowed the attacker to spoof guardian signatures and mint 120,000 ETH on Solana, of which they bridged 93,750 back to Ethereum.” (Twitter)

How did the hacker even know about this vulnerability? According to DedmundFitzgrld: “The fix was pushed to GitHub a couple weeks ago but not deployed. So the attacker found the exploit by scanning the commits to GitHub. The vulnerability was out there for all to see.” (Twitter)

Jump, a high-frequency trading group with crypto ambitions, stepped in to save the day. The Chicago-based firm somehow came up with the funds to replace all of the 120,000 ETH. Apparently, it had a spare $326 million sitting around? (Twitter, Fortune)

What do we know about Jump? Last August, it bought Certus One, which helped develop the Wormhole bridge. Jump also executes some crypto orders for Robinhood. 

Jump holds a heavy bag of Solano tokens. It can’t risk a lack of confidence in the market, so it likely borrowed a pile of ETH to fix the problem. Who did it borrow the funds from? One guess: Tether, who last year issued the firm $1.1 billion in USDT, according to one analysis. 

Qubit also hacked

Days before Wormhole was hacked, Qubit Finance was breached for $80 million in crypto. Similar to Wormhole, Qubit operates a bridge between Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain network.

In this case, the hacker was able to exploit a security flaw in Qubit’s smart contract code that let them send in a deposit of 0 ETH and withdraw almost $80 million in Binance Coin in return. (Verge)

Qubit has been trying to convince the bank robbers to return the money. They started by offering a bounty of $250,000, and eventually upped it to $2 million — still, a piddling amount compared to what the hackers stole.  

Now, they are resorting to threats:

“If you don’t come forward to claim the generous bounty and return the funds, you will face lasting consequences that vastly outweigh the benefits of holding onto funds that you can’t readily access,” Qubit said in a tweet.

Bored Ape founders revealed

Buzzfeed just identified the two main founders of BAYC — Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old originally from Florida. The pair don’t have any dark pasts, as far as anyone knows. (Buzzfeed)

“These 2 amazing partners of mine,” Guy Oseary tweeted with a pic of them at Apefest. Oseary is the music industry veteran who represents them. He also represents NFT project World of Women. And he is a buddy of Jimmy Fallon, so that explains a few things.

Oseary says the founders were “doxxed against their will,” which is a bizarre statement given you are talking about the founders of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.

As Buzzfeed puts it: “This reveals a unique problem with the idea of a billion-dollar company run by an unknown person: How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?”

A16z mulls buying a chunk of BAYC

Yuga Labs, the startup behind Bored Apes Yacht Club, is in talks with Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z), who is considering buying a major stake in the startup, which would value it at $5 billion. (FT) 

I’m losing count of all of the NFT projects a16z is funneling money into — over a dozen, for sure. The VC firm is a major force behind the frothy NFT market. 

Celebrities are shilling Bored Apes left and right to the point where it is downright nauseating and rumor has it the Bored Apes will make an appearance in the Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 13.

The problem with investing in high-value NFTs is they are not easy to dump on retail. You have to find that special buyer with loads of disposable ETH. Fungible tokens, on the other hand, are much more liquid — especially if you can get them listed on Coinbase. 

This is why DAOs (with their ERC-20 governance tokens) and fractionalized NFTs are becoming the thing. It’s like the 2017 initial coin offering craze all over again. Only now we’re talking about Web3 and “democratizing” companies and JPEGs.

Sometime soon, expect Yuga Labs to issue an ERC-20 token with a huge pre-mine for investors. The token will likely represent its NFTs in some way or else give holders special access to future Yuga Lab NFTs — something like that. Bored Apes have been heavily pumped, so at this point, it’s just a matter of creating a fungible token to lure in suckers at a much greater scale. At the end of the day, it is all about creating the illusion of exclusivity or having access to something special.

Yuga Labs has talked about issuing ERC-20 tokens in the past, saying the plan was to work with law firm Fenwick and West and Horizon Labs — issuers of the ZEN token, which is already listed on Coinbase. So this is nothing new. It’s been in the works all along.

What a tangled Web we weave

We’ve been wondering a lot about why celebs are hyping Bored Apes. Who is talking them into this? What’s the deal? 

Max Read did the smart thing — he followed the money trail, and mapped out the celebrity NFT complex. Jimmy Fallon (who was shilling his Bored Ape on National TV) is represented by talent and sports agency Creative Artists Agency. Lo and behold, CAA is an investor in OpenSea and recently signed a deal to represent the NFT collector 0xb1, who owns NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club and World of Women. There’s more. Lots more. Take a look at the map. (Substack)

Last week Justin Beiber bought a Bored Ape NFT for $1.3 million (500 ETH), as one of several purchases he made on OpenSea within a short period. As Dirty Bubble Media explains, all of the NFTs were gifted. They were bought by the InBetweeners project, a collection of NFTs owned by artist Gianpiero D’Alessandro, who has designed merchandise for Bieber, Snoop Dogg, and others. 

Bieber never disclosed any financial relationship between himself and the inBetweeners project. As Dirty Bubble points out, this is a big no-no, according to FTC rules. (Substack)

Gwyneth Paltrow also has a Bored Ape, thanks again to MoonPay Concierge. Every time someone buys a Bored Ape via MoonPay, they seemingly have to announce it on social media. (Twitter)

HitPiece and its shady founder

A new project called HitPiece appeared out of nowhere and started scraping Spotify and “staking” songs as NFTs — without the artists’ permission. 

Naturally, artists found out and started hurling obscenities at the project via social media. 

“Yo a bunch of industrial scene acts (including me) have NFTs for sale on the site hitpiece.com I did not put it online and I assume you probably didn’t either, fucked up,” Choke Chain tweeted.

“Each HitPiece NFT is a One of One NFT for each unique song recording. Members build their Hitlist of their favorite songs, get on leaderboards, and receive in real life value such as access and experiences with Artists,” Hitpiece said on its website. (NNE)

The brains — or lack of brains — behind HitPiece turns out to be music industry guy, Rory Felton, who has a history of shady dealings. (Twitter thread) 

Felton launched HitPiece in December along with music exec and former rapper Michael Barrin (aka “MC Serch”), and venture capitalists Ryan Singer and Blake Modersitzki. (Festival News)

Anyhow, Hitpiece.com has been taken down. If you go to the website, all you get now is a message that says, “We Started The Conversation And We’re Listening,” whatever that means. (archive)

Gamers hate NFTs!

Gamers want nothing to do with NFTs. They see NFTs as a cash grab and forcefully push back on any game company’s efforts to incorporate NFTs in anything.

Clueless to that trend, GameStop has teamed with Immutable X to launch an NFT marketplace. They’re also creating a $100 million fund for grants to build on the platforms. While Gamestonk investors might think this is great, it should thoroughly piss of GameStop customers. (Verge)

Team17, the outfit behind the many Worms games, pulled the plug on its MegaWorms NFT project (they wanted to create NFTs of all the Worms games characters) only 24 hours after announcing the project, due to extreme backlash from customers, fans, and teamsters. (IGN)

Notice the editor’s note on the IGN story: “The subject of NFTs is currently a very controversial topic in the gaming community. IGN urges community members to be respectful when engaging in conversation around this subject and does not endorse harassment of any kind.“

Electronic Arts, another game publisher, is also backtracking from earlier NFT enthusiasm. (Eurogamer) 

Other NFT news

Nike sues online sneaker reseller StockX for selling NFTs of Nike shoes. (Reuters) 

How did OpenSea take over the NFT trade and become a multibillion dollar company? (Hint: they got lots of help from a16z.) (Verge)

One of the founders of Larva Labs, the project behind CryptoPunks, sold all of his v1 Punks for 260 ETH. In response, Larva Labs released an official statement saying the v1 Punks are worthless, because the project re-released all the Punks in 2017 to fix a bug.

The NFT community feels differently. They are saying that v1 Punks are the originals! What’s on the blockchain, stays on the blockchain. (NFT evening)

Coachella is selling lifetime festival passes for the first time — but you have to buy an NFT to get one. The music festival launched an NFT marketplace built by FTX US, with three collections of NFTs going on sale on Feb. 4th. (Verge)

This is part of a trend, I mentioned before. NFTs are being used to give people special access to clubs, events, restaurants, breweries, and whatnot. Wanna be part of the exclusive group? Buy our NFTs.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady is retiring after 22 seasons with the NFL. His business ventures, including NFT platform Autograph, will keep him busy moving forward. (Fortune)

Last year, a16z-backed Meta4 Capital created a new fund to invest up to $100 million in NFTs. In a twitter thread, Meta4Capital justifies spending money on “historically significant” or “iconic” NFTs, as if any of this means anything. It doesn’t. At the end of the day, an NFT is just a number in a database.

A racist project called “Meta Slave” offered NFTs made from photographs of Black people (all algorithmically-generated). After a swift backlash, the project rebranded to also feature “white, Asian, etc.” NFTs. The project’s Twitter and Instagram accounts have been deactivated. The collection has also been removed from OpenSea where the NFTs were being auctioned. (Vice)

Artist bayneko airdropped NFTs of microscope pictures of SARS-COV-2 to all 96,186 users of NFT platform Hic et Nunc (HEN) who hold at least one NFT. The NFT description read: “Your wallet has been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19… in an act symbolic of the invasive and ubiquitous nature of the virus and its psychological effects.” (Twitter thread)

Elsewhere in cryptoland

Quote of the day: “So much dumb stuff happens in crypto, and if you are a smart intermediary that dumb stuff is your profit margin. Crypto markets are lightly regulated and brutally Darwinian, and every day the smart find exciting new ways to take money from the dumb. The returns to smart are very high.” ~ Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

On that note, another day, another rug pull. Realux promised to democratize real estate at a “very low cost in a very easy way” using a complex system of tokens backed by real estate investments. After collecting everyone’s money, the project shut down and its creators vanished. (Motherboard)

Riot Blockchain, a large crypto miner located just outside of Austin shut down ahead of a cold blast. Bitcoin miners have been drawn to Texas because of the state’s cheap electricity. They’ve been lobbying Governor Greg Abbott to make things even easier for them. (Bloomberg)

How Facebook’s Diem died. A post mortem. (Washington Post)

Jeremy Allaire’s Circle, the company behind USDC, is running ads in everything. (Twitter)

The IRS is coming for you. Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi warned that Americans who invested in crypto or NFTs, and actively traded equities on commission-free websites, could be dumbfounded when they learn how much they own in taxes because “they were in essence gambling with their money.” (Bloomberg)

In a podcast, Sohale Mortazavi talks about his piece for Jacobin that went viral: “Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme.” (Youtube)

The CEO of US-based crypto exchange Cryptsy, Paul Vernon, was indicted on 17 counts, including tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, computer fraud, tampering with records, documents, and other objects, and destruction of records in a federal investigation. (IRS) 

This has been a long time coming. Cryptsy shut down in 2016, after announcing 13,000 BTC and 30,000 LTC were stolen two years prior. It was later discovered that “Big Vern” stole the money.

According to the indictment: “Between May 2013 through May 2015, Vernon used his control over Cryptsy’s accounts, known as wallets, to steal over one million dollars from Cryptsy’s cryptocurrency wallets. Once Vernon stole his customers’ funds from Cryptsy’s wallets, he deposited the funds into a personal cryptocurrency wallet and then transferred the same funds into his personal bank account.”

Sam Bankman’s FTX got a $400 billion funding round, valuing the company at $32 billion, as investors, including Softbank and Canada’s Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, hog piled into the madness. (I mentioned earlier that the exchange’s US arm also got a $400 million round.) (Bloomberg)

Taylor Monohan’s MyCrypto joined the Metamask team. ConsenSys acquired MyCrypto for an undisclosed sum and plans to merge MyCrypto with the MetaMask wallet. (Taylor appeared in the QuadrigaCX documentary “Dead Man’s Switch” along with me and David Gerard.) (Coindesk)

On the subject of QuadrigaCX — my review of Jennifer Robertson’s “Bitcoin Widow” was reprinted and is getting lots of attention. (Saltwire)

Steven Kimber, the Halifax author who helped author “Bitcoin Widow,” was interviewed on CBC radio about the book. He spent 50 hours listening to Robertson, he said. (CBC radio)

Douglas Johnston, a Winnipeg lawyer and writer, also reviewed “Bitcoin Widow.” His review was more critical than others. “This is autobiography, so it’s told in the first person. But Robertson puts herself at the forefront of far too much of the narrative.” (Winnipeg Free Press)

Also on the subject of Quadriga, Michael Patryn, the fraudster who was recently voted off his latest Ponzi scheme Wonderland, has been laundering his crypto. According to his wallet, he has been sending thousands of ETH through mixer Tornado Cash. (Coindesk, Etherscan)

Crypto risks destabilizing emerging markets, says the International Monetary Fund. (FT)

Binance builds a $1 million insurance fund. (Bloomberg)

El Salvador’s Chivo wallet keeps breaking. (The Block)

Silvergate Bank is paying $50 million in cash and 1,221,217 shares to buy Facebook Diem’s “intellectual property.” Silvergate wants to do a stablecoin running on the Diem blockchain. (press release, CNBC)

USDC, the second biggest stablecoin next to Tether, crossed 50 billion in circulation. (Circle)

Meanwhile, Tether is still sitting at 78 billion USDT. No new prints in 2022 yet. (Tether)

Bitcoin has climbed back to $41,500 despite no new Tether prints. (It was down to as low as $34,000 recently.) Retailers who bought BTC for $69,000 in November are still hurting.

Corey Doctorow on the great crypto crash event looming in the future: “If you think Coinbase is looking shaky and take your money out, you’d better hope they last for at least three more months, or you might have to give the money back to the bankruptcy trustees.” (Twitter thread)

Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest launched a criminal case against Facebook, alleging the company failed to prevent scam ads that used his image, and breached Australian AML laws over the spread of crypto fraud. (BBC)

The search for a crypto use case continues. (One Zero)

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Posted on by Amy Castor 0