Tag: CBDC

Crypto collapse: Treasury comes after DeFi, SEC comes after crypto exchanges, stablecoin bill, FTX first interim report

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

“Please god let FTX go back into business, take a lot of money from crypto rubes, then collapse and lose everything again. Please let there be people who lost money in two separate FTX collapses.”

– Ariong

The Treasury brings good news for DeFi

The US Treasury released its “Illicit Finance Risk Assessment of Decentralized Finance.” The 42-page report examines DeFi from the perspective of anti-money laundering and sanctions laws. [Press release; Report, PDF] 

This report is not about consumer protection — it’s about national security, sanctions busting, and terrorist financing. The Treasury is not happy:

“The assessment finds that illicit actors, including ransomware cybercriminals, thieves, scammers, and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) cyber actors, are using DeFi services in the process of transferring and laundering their illicit proceeds.

… In particular, this assessment finds that the most significant current illicit finance risk in this domain is from DeFi services that are not compliant with existing AML/CFT obligations.”

The report makes clear: blockchain analysis is not sufficient for KYC/AML. Calling something “decentralized” or a “DAO” doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. And almost everything in DeFi falls squarely in the ambit of existing regulation.

How’s regulatory clarity for crypto? Just fine, thank you:

“Through public statements, guidance, and enforcement actions, these agencies have made clear that the automation of certain functions through smart contracts or computer code does not affect the obligations of financial institutions offering covered services.”

The report recommends “strengthening U.S. AML/CFT supervision and, when relevant, enforcement of virtual asset activities, including DeFi services, to increase compliance by virtual asset firms with BSA obligations” and “enhancing the U.S. AML/CFT regulatory regime by closing any identified gaps in the BSA to the extent that they allow certain DeFi services to fall outside of the BSA’s definition of financial institution.”

Nicholas Weaver tells us the report “should be thought of as being as serious as a heart attack to the DeFi community, as this represents the US government regulation at its most serious. Indeed, the report can be summarized in a sentence: ‘If you want to continue to OFAC around, you are going to find out.’”

The SEC brings good news for Coinbase and DeFi

SEC chair Gary Gensler is fed up with Coinbase blatantly trading unregistered securities and not registering with the SEC as a proper securities exchange. So he’s going to update the rules.

The SEC has reopened the comment period for a proposal, initially issued in January 2022, that would update the definition of an “exchange” in Rule 3b-16 of the Exchange Act. [SEC press release; Fact sheet, PDF; Gensler statements]

Gensler’s comments are laser-targeted at Coinbase — and also DeFi:

“Make no mistake: many crypto trading platforms already come under the current definition of an exchange and thus have an existing duty to comply with the securities laws.”

He reiterates that “the vast majority of crypto tokens are securities” — the SEC’s position since 2017 — so “most crypto platforms today” meet the definition of a securities exchange. He adds:  

“Yet these platforms are acting as if they have a choice to comply with our laws. They don’t. Congress gave the Commission a mandate to protect investors, regardless of the labels or technology used. Investors in the crypto markets must receive the same time-tested protections that the securities laws provide in all other markets.”

A regulatory framework for casino chips

On Saturday, The US House Financial Services Committee published an as-yet-untitled discussion draft bill for regulating stablecoins a few days before a hearing on the topic on Wednesday, April 19. [Discussion draft, PDF; hearing agenda]

The bill refers to stablecoins as “payment stablecoins.” This is utterly hypothetical. Nobody uses stablecoins to buy things. They’re chips for gambling on speculative assets in the crypto casinos.

This bill was a sudden surprise for a lot of people — but it appears to be a version of a draft bill that Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-PA) was circulating last year. [Stablecoin TRUST Act, 2022]

The bill divides stablecoin issuers into banks and nonbanks. Credit unions and banks that want to issue stablecoins would need approval from the financial regulator they fall under‚ the National Credit Union Administration, the FDIC, or the OCC. Non-bank stablecoin issuers would fall under the Federal Reserve.

For this bill, USDC or Pax Dollars, under the Fed, might pass muster. But Tether would be kicked out of anything touching the US because they wouldn’t be able to meet the transparency or liquidity requirements.  

All stablecoins that circulate in the US would need to be backed by highly liquid assets — actual dollars and short-term treasuries — and redeemable within one day. That doesn’t leave much room for the issuers to turn a profit by putting the deposits in longer-term investments.

Custodia is not a bank under the Bank Holding Act, so for this bill, it would also be considered a non-bank. This bill would derail Custodia’s lawsuit against the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City to try to force a Fed master account out of them.

The bill also calls for a moratorium on new algorithmic stablecoins until a study can be conducted.

Finally, the bill includes a request for federal regulators to study a central bank digital currency (CBDC) issued by the Fed. As we noted previously, FedNow would make a CBDC completely superfluous.

Hilary Allen, a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, points out important shortcomings in the stablecoin bill. She argues that the bill is stacked in favor of stablecoins, and notes that the bill’s payment stablecoin definition could be a way of avoiding SEC jurisdiction. And while the bill calls for monthly attestations, it doesn’t say anything about full audits for stablecoin reserves. [Twitter]

FTX’s first interim report reads like Quadriga

John Jay Ray III, FTX’s CEO in bankruptcy, released his first interim report on the control failures at FTX and its businesses. Ray documents a shocking level of negligence, lack of record keeping, and complete disregard for cybersecurity at FTX. [Doc 1242, PDF]

The report confirms what we’ve been saying all along: all crypto exchanges behave as much like Quadriga as they can get away with. A few highlights:

  • FTX Group was managed almost exclusively by Sam Bankman-Fried, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang. The trio had “no experience in risk management or running a business,” and SBF had final say in everything.
  • SBF openly joked about his company’s reckless accounting. In internal docs, he described Alameda as “hilariously beyond any threshold of any auditor being able to even get partially through an audit,” and how “we sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life.”
  • FTX kept virtually all of its assets in hot wallets, live on the internet, as opposed to offline cold wallets, where they would be safe from hackers. 
  • FTX and Alameda also kept private keys to billions of dollars in crypto-assets sitting in AWS’s cloud computing platform.
  • SBF stifled dissent with an iron fist. Ex-FTX US president Brett Harrison quit after a “protracted argument” with Sam over how FTX US was run. Sam cut Harrison’s bonuses, and when “senior internal counsel instructed him to apologize to Bankman-Fried for raising the concerns,” Harrison refused.

Ray and his team have so far recovered $1.4 billion in digital assets and have identified an additional $1.7 billion they are in the process of recovering. (We’re still waiting for him to ask for money back from The Block, but maybe that’s coming.)

In other FTX news, Voyager and FTX and their respective Unsecured Creditors’ Committees have reached an agreement on the money FTX paid to Voyager before FTX filed bankruptcy that FTX wants to claw back now — $445 million in cash will go into escrow while things are sorted out. [Doc 1266, PDF]

Terraform Labs did nothing* wrong

South Korean prosecutors have seized 414.5 billion won ($312 million) in illegal assets linked to nine Terraform Labs execs. None of the assets tied to Do Kwon have been recovered. Kwon converted everything to BTC and moved the funds — worth an estimated 91.4 billion won ($69 million) — to offshore exchanges. [KBS, Korean]  

Who crashed UST in May 2022? Terraform Labs seems to have played no small part. In the three weeks leading up to the collapse, Terraform dumped over 450 million UST on the open market. [Cointelegraph]

Crypto mining: the free lunch is over

A bill limiting benefits and tax incentives for crypto miners in Texas unanimously passed a Senate committee vote and now it’s in the chamber. The bill was sponsored by three Republican state senators. Even they’re sick of the bitcoin miners. [SB 1751, PDF; CoinDesk; Fastdemocracy]

Bitcoin mining doesn’t create jobs — so Sweden has ended the 98% tax relief it gave data centers, including crypto miners. Crypto is outraged. [CoinDesk]

More good news for exchanges

The downfall of peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange Paxful is a comedy goldmine. Paxful cofounders Ray Youssef and Artur Schaback originally blamed Paxful’s closure on staff departures and regulatory challenges — but now they’re turning against each other in court.

As an example of their good judgment, in 2016, the pair drew police attention when they were spotted in Miami aiming an A15 rifle off their penthouse balcony for photo purposes. Former employees allege “favoritism, erratic dismissals, lavish spending on travel and reports of routine cannabis usage on the job by Youssef himself.”

Paxful’s business model was based on price-gouging fees on gift cards, according to one former employee. You want 10 euros worth of bitcoin? That’ll be 20 euros worth of gift cards. Coincidentally, money launderers are usually quite happy to pay fees on the order of 50%. Schaback thinks Paxful is still a viable enterprise. [CBS, 2016; CoinDesk]

As you might expect, OPNX, the new exchange for tokenized crypto debt run by the founders of the failed Three Arrows Capital and CoinFLEX, has gotten off to a feeble start. Trading volume in the first 24 hours was $13.64. [The Block]

The Winklevoss twins made a $100 million loan to Gemini. The move came after Gemini had informally sought funding from outside investors in recent months without coming to any agreements. We can’t find if the loan was in actual dollars or in crypto — or if it was just an IOU. [Bloomberg] 

Binance relinquished the financial services license for its Australian derivatives business, Oztures Trading, after the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said they were likely to suspend it. Customers have until April 21 to close their accounts. [ASIC] 

Who were the unnamed “VIP” traders on Binance mentioned in the CFTC suit? Jane Street, Tower, and Radix. [Bloomberg] 

The Mt. Gox payout window has opened! Slowly. [Mt Gox, PDF; The Block]

Cryptadamus thinks that Crypto.com’s Canadian bank accounts are frozen. [Mastodon]  

Good news for bitcoin

The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade went through on April 12. You can now withdraw your staked ether! As we predicted, there wasn’t a rush for the exits. [CoinDesk]

Bitfinex money mule Reggie Fowler will be sentenced on April 20. His lawyer wrote a lengthy letter to the judge asking for clemency — no jail time — because Fowler lived a hard life and never did anything wrong before. Nothing he was busted in court for, anyway. [Letter, PDF]

Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy has bought yet more bitcoin, digging itself ever deeper. The company purchased an additional 1,045 BTC for $23.9 million, or an average price of $28,016, between March 23 and April 4. [8-K filing]

Tether got its tendrils into the US dollar system via Signet — former Signature Bank’s real-time payments system. Tether instructed crypto firms to send dollars to its Bahamas-based banking partner Capital Union Bank via Signet. We’re not clear on whether this violated the New York settlement — though if they lied about who they were, it broke banking law. [Bloomberg] 

Cross River Bank, the banking partner of Coinbase and Circle, built its business on buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) and pandemic loans. What could go wrong? [Dirty Bubble] 

With its firm commitment to quality cryptocurrency journalism, CoinDesk is hot on getting into generating its hopium space-filler using AI text generators. [CoinDesk] 

Media stardom

“Ukraine wants to fund its post-war future with crypto” — with quotes from David. [Techmonitor]

“A lot of ordinary people who got into crypto just lost everything in various ways or lost chunks of it,” Gerard said. “And this is a lot of  why I think retail investors should just keep the hell away from crypto.” [Business Insider]  

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

Nouriel Roubini: ‘Tether is a criminal enterprise,’ SEC should probe Elon Musk’s bitcoin tweets

Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, thinks Tether is issuing fake money. And that nothing short of an audit will prove the $30 billion in USDT the BVI-registered company has spewed out into the crypto markets thus far are even 74% backed. (Stuart Hoegner, the firm’s general counsel, claimed they were three-quarters backed in April 2019 court documents.)

Tether is a “criminal enterprise,” he bluntly told reporters on Coindesk TV. In a 10-minute interview, Roubini predicted Tether’s looming demise, called for the SEC to look into Elon Musk’s bitcoin tweets, and claimed that central bank digital currencies will spell the end for crypto.

Dr. Doom, as Roubini is called, talks quickly, doesn’t mince words, and his face barely changes expression. He has a reputation as a perpetual pessimist. Ask him a question, and he will give you a straightforward, often bleak, answer. Though he might argue, he is simply being a realist.

I am not sure why Coindesk had him on their program. Roubini hates bitcoin and his responses elicited laughter—though it wouldn’t be the first time. Roubini “sounded like a madman in 2006,” when he stood before economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced a crisis of solvency was brewing, IMF economist Prakash Loungani told the NYT in August 2008. “He was a prophet when he returned in 2007.”

Anyhow, I transcribed the talk only because I thought Roubini’s points made sense. He was interviewed by Coindesk’s Lawrence Lewitinn, Christine Lee, and Emily Parker.

Lee: The narrative on bitcoin has shifted from a means of payment to a store of value for some. It is not so much used as a currency as a digital gold. Institutions and public companies are buying this thesis and we are seeing bitcoin hit records as a result. What do you make of this institutional and corporate interest in bitcoin, underlined by Tesla’s $1.5 billion bitcoin investment on Monday? 

Roubini: As you suggested, bitcoin and crypto is not a means of payment. It is not a currency. It is not a unit of account. Is not a scalable means of payment. It is not a single numeraire. Now, people say it is an asset. But think of it. What are assets? Assets like stocks, bonds and real estate give you income or give you some use, like real estate. And, therefore, they give you capital gain. Gold does not give you income but it has other uses,—industrial activity and jewelry—and therefore, has some value. It used to be used as a means of payment. 

In the case of bitcoin, it does not have any income. It doesn’t have any use. It doesn’t have any utility. So the value of it based on what? Based on no intrinsic value and purely a speculative bubble. That is why I argue that bitcoin, like all the other shitcoins, are worth zero. [Coindesk reporters giggle.] 

Actually, negative given the hogging of energy and the environmental cost. If there was a carbon tax on crypto, the value of these assets would be negative. 

So what is the fundamental value? What is the use? What is the utility that justifies the capital gain? None. It is a speculative bubble that is based on pump-and-dump, spoofing, wash trading and manipulation by Tether, which is a total scam. [More giggling from Coindesk crew.]

So, for institutional investors, saying we are going to invest in crypto doesn’t make any sense. You have a failing company that had a flat stock market like MicroStrategy for a decade, and its head was a coke addict who decided to bet the entire house on bitcoin. [CoinDesk crew really losing it.] That is irresponsible behavior. It is not gonna be any corporate head that is going to put his cash, as you point out, into something that is so volatile. You put your cash into something that is stable. 

And for someone like Elon Musk who knows he has a market impact to manipulate to first, take an individual position to bitcoin, pump the price up, and then say that Tesla is invested. And Tesla doesn’t make money yet. It is also irresponsible and it is market manipulation. [Note: Musk was tweeting about BTC, pushing up the price, before Telsa announced it had purchased $1.5 billion worth.]

The SEC should be looking at people that have a market impact that manipulate the price of assets. That is also criminal behavior. It is totally a criminal enterprise. Tether is a criminal enterprise, and a bunch of whales and insiders are manipulating the price of bitcoins and other shitcoins day in and day out. That is a fact.

Lewitinn: Dr. Roubini, always a ray of sunshine, of course. The question about Tether is this: We have known for a while now that it has been backed entirely by dollars. It is something like 70-some-odd percent. That came out a while ago. There have been questions about its backing for some time, for several years. Yet it is still trading on par with the US dollar. Conceivably, they have enough assets at least for a while to keep the peg going with the dollar. How much of a real worry is it for crypto if there is even a small run on tether?

Roubini: First of all, we don’t know if it is backed 70% or not. Their lawyer says 70% but we have no idea. It doesn’t mean any[thing] absolute independent audit of it. [A bit garbled here, but he is saying, outside of a third-party audit, which Tether has never had, there is no way of knowing what’s backing tethers.]

We also know they are really issuing, literally, at an exponential rate, new tethers. In the last year alone, something like 25 billion. And in the last few weeks, a billion per week. So it looks like they are getting desperate, and it is a typical Ponzi scheme, in which you maintain the value of something by issuing more of it and more of it and so on. 

Lewitinn: How different is that from what is going on right now from the money printing happening in Washington? 

Roubini: The money printing in Washington is happening at a rate that is much less than the issuance of fiat by Tether and other shitcoins. If you look at the chart of it, literally, the case of Tether is exponential. Second, central banks, if you know, their assets are matching their liabilities. For every dollar of currency in excess of reserves that are in the central bank balance sheet there is an asset, foreign reserve, or gold or treasury assets. 

So the idea that fiat currencies are not backed by anything is utterly false. If you look at the balance sheet of any central bank, there are assets and there are liabilities. And actually, there is a positive net worth most of the time. But in the case of Tether there is nothing backing it. Again, even 70% is not true. And we know that every fixed exchange rate that is based on not-full-backing and not fully collateralized eventually collapses. 

The entire monetary history, every fixed exchange that is not backed has collapsed. It is only a matter of time. And the trigger is gonna be when the indictments of Tether and Bitfinex are going to occur, and it is only a matter of time this year. Because we know that there are investigations occurring. 

Parker: Let’s move to central bank digital currencies for a moment. We know that China is moving quite rapidly in this area. Do you think that the US dollar will remain the world reserve currency?

Roubini: I think that the Chinese are going to go ahead. [Sweden’s] Riksbank bank is going to go ahead. The [European Central Bank] is going to go ahead. And until now the US was behind the curve, but they realize that the Chinese had a plan to dominate the global financial system. It’s their e-commerce. It is their own platform of private payment systems like AliPay and WeChat Pay and that is going to be the e-RNB. And it is only a matter of time before we are going to phase out cash all over the world. And if the US wants to maintain the role of the US dollar as a major global reserve currency, they will have to move to an e-dollar. 

The problem with that is that people get excited in the crypto world when central banks end up talking about a central bank digital currency. A CBDC, first of all, has nothing to do with blockchain. It is going to be private. It is going to be centralized. It is going to be permissioned. And it is going to be based on a bunch of trusted authority verifying transactions.

It has nothing to do with blockchain. It has nothing to do with crypto. And as a payment system, it is going to dominate, not only crypto, which has absolutely no payment services, but also any private form of payment system that is digital, from credit cards to bank deposits to AliPay to WeChat pay to Venmo to Square to PayPal, and so on. Because it is going to be cheap, it is going to be instantaneous clearing and settlement. It is going to be a system that is going to dominate any form of private money

If and when a central bank currency is going to be introduced, the problem is going to be that any form of private digital payment system is going to be crowded out, starting with crypto, which doesn’t have any payment service in the first place. 

Lee: Dr. Roubini, it sounds like you believe that the technology underlying bitcoin is at least sound and that governments and central banks around the world will adopt it, and if that is the case, what happens to privacy? And you also mentioned something about negative rates becoming the norm. Tell us about that?

Roubini: First of all, I said the opposite of the technology. The central bank digital currencies will not be based on blockchain. They are going to be private, not public. They are going to be centralized, not decentralized. They are going to be permissioned, not permissionless. They are going to be a bunch of central banks and private banks that are trusted verifiers of the transaction, rather than being trustless. So the technology is not going to be blockchain. It is not going to be crypto. That is my point. 

Secondly, the advantage of having a central bank digital currency is that right now, if there is a very severe economic recession, central banks cannot go very negative with the policy rates. That is why they do quantitative easing. They do credit easing. Because if you go lower than, say, 75 basis points, people are going to switch their excess reserves into cash if there is a nominal zero interest rate. So they are not going to pay the tax. 

However, if you phase out cash, then you have no option than to keep your money in the digital form. And then the negative policy rate in a severe recession or depression can go to minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five, whatever you want it to be. So if and when that happens, and if there is a recession that is severe enough, central bank digital currencies are going to allow you to have much more [of an] easing monetary policy with much more negative policy rates. That is the direction we are going to go. 

Lee: Is there anything that can happen that would change your mind about bitcoin? 

Roubini: So far, no. As they say, it is not a unit of account. It is not a means of payment. It is not a single numeraire. It is not a stable store of value. And with proof-of-work, you get five transactions per second. And if it was to be adopted as a means of payment, you would have deflation. Because the quantity of it is limited in the long run. If you want to create a digital currency that actually works as a means of payment, its growth has to be the growth of nominal GDP, so that the demand can be satisfied by supply that increases as much as nominal GDP, meaning the inflation target plus the growth of the economy. Otherwise, you are going to get permanent deflation on every price in goods and services, so it’s fundamentally flawed even from that point of view. 

Update: In an earlier version of this story, I mentioned Musk had deleted some of his BTC tweets. So far, I haven’t found any hard evidence of that, so I removed my comment.

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Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: CBDCs are what’s hot, Vodafone pulls out of Libra, more WB21 stuff, Quadriga update

Let me kick off this newsletter with some personal news — I’ll be in Vancouver in the third weekend in February to meet up with David Gerard, the bitter nocoiner we all know and love. We’re both being interviewed for a documentary on QuadrigaCX. It’ll be a quick trip, but I suspect we’ll have enough time for a bottle of champagne, or two. I can’t wait to meet him for the first time in person. Next, on to the news.

CBDCs are all the rage

The big excitement these days tends to be around central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. Ever since Facebook announced its plans for Libra in June 2019, central banks have been leaping into the digital currency bandwagon, researching the possibility of launching their CBDC.

China wants to be the first advanced economy to launch a CBDC. (Other central banks, such as the Central Bank of the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, are well on their way with pilots up and running.) Lawmakers for Japan’s ruling party say they are planning to put a proposal for a digital yen in front of the government next month. (Oops! Apparently, Japan’s legislators are looking to issue a state-backed digital yen, not a CBDC, as I previously thought.) And the Bank for International Settlements says that in three years, one fifth of the world’s population will be using a CBDC. 

What’s a CBDC? While Libra is supposed to be backed by a basket of assets, a CBDC is a  an actual replacement for cash. In other words, it’s legal tender issued and backed by the state’s central bank—not the state itself. This is where things get a bit confusing. 

John Kiff, a senior financial sector expert at the International Monetary Fund, tells me the taxonomy for digital currencies is tricky and some definitions are still a bit fuzzy. He defines a CBDC as “a digital representation of sovereign currency that is issued by a jurisdiction’s monetary authority and appears on the liability side of the monetary authority’s balance sheet.” That should clarify things!

The general idea is, you should be able to use a CBDC to buy movie tickets, pay for groceries or buy a house. The big question here is, why would you want to use a CBDC if your debit card is more convenient and costs less to use? 

Apparently, all this CBDC stuff is nothing new. Aleksi Grym, head of digitalization at the Bank of Finland, said in a Twitter thread that we are going through the third historical wave of digital currencies. During the first wave, in 1993, the Bank of Finland launched a CBDC product called Avant. It was discontinued after 13 years. This February 2000 article in the Economist (paywall) describes the second wave of digital currencies, he said.

Taking us back through time, David Gerard has written a blog post detailing the history of Avant. CBDC advocacy hasn’t changed since the days of Avant, he argues. “CBDCs are the sort of thing the vendor loves — but I’ve yet to see the case for consumers.” Does that mean the debit card will win?  

Another blow to Libra, Tether Gold, Pornhub

Screen Shot 2020-01-25 at 8.31.12 PMVodafone dealt another blow to the Libra project, when it announced on Tuesday it had pulled out of the Libra Association, the independent governing council for Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency. The British telecom giant said that it wants to put the resources it originally intended for Libra into its African mobile money transfer service M-Pesa. The 28 companies originally joining the association had pledged to put in $10 million apiece. Vodafone is the eighth big company to pull out.

You can’t blame Vodafone. Who would want to throw $10 million into a project whose chances of getting off the ground — at least in the format originally intended — are slim to none? Facebook is facing too many regulatory headwinds at this point, and clearly Vodafone doesn’t want to take that risk. 

Elsewhere in the stablecoin world, on Thursday, Tether launched Tether Gold, a stablecoin backed by — you’ll want to sit down for this — real gold. That’s right. No longer do you need to bear the burden of worrying about where to safely store your personal stockpile of gold. Tether will take it off your hands and issue you I.O.U.s in it’s place. Similar to its fiat-backed cousin, Tether Gold is fully redeemable — under certain terms! If you want your full gold bars back, you’ll have to pick them up in Switzerland.  

PayPal stopped supporting payments to Pornhub in November, but that’s okay because now the world’s most popular porn site accepts tethers — the kind that run on the Tron blockchain. The big question here is, what are the webcam models going to do with all the heaps of tether they earn? At some point, they need to convert those to dirty fiat to buy groceries and pay rent. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be easy. 

More WB21 stuff

I wrote a lengthy story on WB21 (now Black Banx) for Modern Consensus last week. Roger Knox, who was a client of WB21, the payment processor that is allegedly holding $9 million in QuadrigaCX funds, pleaded guilty to running a $165 pump and dump on Jan. 13. Three other individuals connected to the scam have also pleaded guilty. 

  • Matthew Ledvina, a Swiss attorney, pleaded guilty in Boston on Feb. 1, 2019. 
  • Milan Patel, a Swiss attorney, pleaded guilty in Boston on Dec. 3, 2018. 
  • Morrie Tobin, a California resident, pleaded guilty in Boston on Dec. 3, 2018. 

Michael Gastauer, who ran WB21, has not been formally charged, though he was named in the October 2018 civil suit along with Knox. I would assume plans are to indict him as well. It is not unusual for somebody charged by the SEC or law enforcement to cough up information in return for a lesser sentence. So all these guilty pleas probably don’t bode well for him. I’m just not sure if anyone knows where Gastauer is right now. But guessing by some of the schemes he has been involved with, he likely has access to plenty of money. If he is at large, he could stay that way for a while. 

WB21 also allegedly laundered money for cryptocurrency ponzi scheme OneCoin, according to a recent report in Financial Telegram.

Quadriga news

On Wednesday, Miller Thomson, the representative counsel for QuadrigaCX creditors, asked creditors for help in identifying any records — financial or otherwise — related to Crypto Capital Corp.

In a letter (archive) posted on its website, the law firm said it had received information that a “Panamanian shadow bank” may have been a payment processor for the exchange in the final quarter of its operation. In other words, sometime in Q4 2019.

Crypto Capital at one time listed Quadriga on its website as a client. The exchange’s now-deceased founder also admitted to using the firm in the past. In an email to Bloomberg News on May 17, 2018, Gerald Cotten wrote: “Crypto Capital is one such company that we have/do use. In general it works well, though there are occasionally hiccups.”

In other news

On the legal front, in a complaint filed Tuesday, the SEC charged blockchain marketplace Opporty for conducting an unregistered ICO. The company raised $600,000 preselling its OPP tokens to roughly 200 investors in the U.S. and elsewhere. Opporty sold the tokens to wealthy investors via a simple agreement for future tokens, or SAFT contract.  

SAFTs are a bad idea to begin with, but Opporty likely drew even more regulatory scrutiny to itself in describing its platform as some kind of magic do-it-all system. In its offering material, the company described its “ecosystem” as an “online platform that combines a blockchain-powered service marketplace, a knowledge-sharing platform, a system of decentralized escrow and a Proof-of-Expertise blockchain protocol.”

Elsewhere, the Blockchain Association has thrown its support behind Telegram. In a brief filed with the court on Tuesday, the advocacy group sided with the messenger app in the SEC v. Telegram lawsuit. It told the judge that a ruling in favor of the SEC would stifle innovation in the field and hurt investors. Those investors included prominent VC firms Benchmark and Lightspeed Capital, along with several wealthy Russians. Together they put up $1.7 billion in exchange for the promise of future grams. 

The Chamber of Digital Commerce also filed an amicus brief with the court, but with a broader focus, asking the court to come up with a better definition of digital assets.

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit naming Tether have requested the consolidation of three lawsuits claiming that Tether manipulated the price of bitcoin and related bitcoin futures markets. They filed a letter with the court on Jan. 16. Tether seems to be okay with it. 

French officials on Friday filed preliminary charges of money laundering and extortion against Alexander Vinnik, according to a report in the AP. The Russian nationalist was first arrested in Greece in July 2017, after he was accused of laundering $4 billion through the now-defunct exchange BTC-e. Greek authorities ruled that Vinnik should go to France, then to the U.S. and finally to Russia. Vinnik’s not happy about it. He was hoping to go straight to Russia, where he would face lighter sentencing.

Finally, Decred dumped it’s PR agency Ditto PR because they weren’t able to get a Wikipedia page for the project despite getting paid a retainer of $300,000. (It’s not clear if they were paid in DCR or dirty fiat.) Ben Munster covers the story in a hilarious article for Decrypt. And here is the full thread of Decred’s former publicist arguing their case. 

Updated Jan. 26 at 4 p.m. E.T. with a clearer definition of CBDCs and a quote from John Kiff.
Updated Jan. 27 at 10 p.m. E.T. to add a section about Quadriga.

 

Posted on by Amy Castor 0