Tag: Coindesk

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

Crypto collapse: Genesis bankrupt, CoinDesk for sale, Bankman-Fried attacks FTX lawyers, Bitzlato busted

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

I think we made some tremendous progress in the six months before I left.

— Jeffrey Skilling, Enron

Media stardom

Amy’s first piece for Foreign Policy is out now! “The Crypto Dominoes Are Still Falling: The bankruptcy of Genesis shows the need for regulators to have teeth.” She advises that regulators be given the power to act much more quickly against obvious nonsense. [Foreign Policy, paywalled]

Genesis goes down — DCG is fine, fine

The lending arm of Genesis finally filed for chapter 11 in the Southern District of New York on January 19. This has been expected for months, as they froze withdrawals in November. [Amended Petition, PDF; docket on Kroll; press release; Bloomberg; Michael Lito declaration, PDF]

The corporate entities that filed were Global Holdco and its lending subsidiaries Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific, which managed Genesis lending for Three Arrows Capital. Genesis’ derivatives, spot trading, broker-dealer, and custody businesses were not part of the bankruptcy.

Genesis owes its top 50 creditors — mostly unnamed on the petition — over $3.4 billion. Gemini Earn clients are collectively owed $765.9 million. Other big claims include a $78 million loan payable from Donut (a “high-yield” DeFi platform — “high yield” is a euphemism for “Ponzi”) and a VanEck fund with a $53.1 million loan payable. [Reuters]

But fear not! Genesis has a plan to exit the bankruptcy by May 19. It will try to sell its assets at auction within three months. [Chapter 11 Plan, PDF]

The settlement proposal is written in a confusing and opaque manner — but DCG controls the bankrupt entities utterly. DCG is trying to declare its left hand solvent and its right hand bankrupt, and stick the creditors with the losses.

Page 50 of the chapter 11 plan (page 54 of the PDF) sets out the street corner shell game. Claims are shuffled between the bankrupt Genesis entities and the non-bankrupt DCG entities such that heads DCG wins, and tails the creditors lose. Any Gemini Earn creditor who accepts this settlement relinquishes all claims against DCG, Gemini, and the Winklevoss twins personally.

We think DCG screwed up by covering for Genesis in July 2022, when it took on the claim to 3AC and issued Genesis a $1.1 billion promissory note in return. It’s clear that nobody at Genesis could refuse the offer — that this was entirely in the control of DCG. Also, the 3AC loan was secured in part by shares of GBTC, as issued by DCG’s Grayscale. Genesis should have declared bankruptcy then.

In addition to the $1.1 billion note, DCG owes Genesis another $575 million, in cash and cryptos. The Genesis bankruptcy is all about shielding DCG from liability.

“This SHOULD be criminal,” Nicholas Weaver said. “You sell a billion dollars worth of unregistered investments (it is called ‘securities fraud’), they go sour, your victims should be able to go after you. But this is all designed to basically be a perfect crime: a billion dollar theft, in plain sight, and with legal protection.” He advises the unsecured creditors’ committee to reject the offer. [Mastodon]

Gemini Earn claims against Genesis are part of the bankruptcy. It’s unlikely the customers will get all their money back in chapter 11. The question is: will Gemini make Earn depositors whole, or will the Winklevosses argue that Earn depositors are creditors of Genesis?

Cameron Winklevoss is still fighting to get Genesis to pay up. He threatened to sue DCG over the bankruptcy: “Unless Barry and DCG come to their senses and make a fair offer to creditors, we will be filing a lawsuit against Barry and DCG imminently.” [Twitter]

As we noted previously, the SEC case against Gemini Earn makes Gemini and Genesis jointly and severally liable to pay back customers in full, should the SEC win or the defendants settle. And Gemini has the funds and isn’t bankrupt. So Cameron really wants DCG to pay.

Who wants to buy CoinDesk?

DCG’s crypto news site CoinDesk is exploring a partial or full sale. CEO Kevin Worth says that CoinDesk has received multiple unsolicited offers of over $200 million. We raised an eyebrow at this claim, but hey. We doubt the offers were in actual cash dollars, though. [WSJ] 

CoinDesk claims it received $50 million in revenue in 2022. It’s unclear where from. Its main income source was events — which are not so huge in the crypto winter. There are a few ads on the site. Staff expansions in the past year, particularly at CoinDesk TV, won’t have been cheap.

CoinDesk has been propped up by DCG since 2016 when Barry Silbert bought the site for $500,000. We understand that CoinDesk was about to go broke when Silbert dived in and rescued it. CoinDesk was still a small crypto blog then, but Silbert took it into the big time just in time for the 2017 bubble.

CoinDesk’s job is to be a PR machine for Silbert’s empire — often quite explicitly. [CoinDesk memo, archive] The only reason to buy CoinDesk would be to make it your PR machine.

3AC and CoinFLEX — a remarkable team

Three Arrows Capital founders Zhu Su and Kyle Davies are looking to raise $25 million for a new crypto claims exchange. That is, an exchange for claims against bankrupt crypto companies. 3AC are, of course, experts in going bankrupt in a really big way.

Zhu and Davies were going to name their new thing GTX — a take on FTX because G comes after F. They claimed this was just a temporary name after everyone made fun of them.

The pair are working alongside CoinFLEX founders Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam. CoinFLEX filed for restructuring in the Seychelles in June after it suffered $84 million in losses from a large individual customer — Roger Ver. 

GTX will run on CoinFLEX’s software and a legal team will oversee the onboarding of claims for all the recent crypto bankruptcies —including Celsius, Voyager, FTX, and Mt. Gox. Creditors who transfer their claims to GTX will receive credit in a token called USDG. [The Block]  

In its pitch deck, GTX estimated there was a $20 billion market for crypto claims, based on the notional value of those claims. “We can dominate the crypto claims market within 2-3 months of go-live.” [WSJ, paywalled; FT, paywalled; pitch deck, archive, PDF]

The pitch deck ends with a splash detailing 3AC and CoinFLEX’s extensive crypto market successes. This fails to mention that both companies went broke — and that 3AC went broke so hard they took out much of crypto all by themselves.

GTX gets full points for audacity, and here’s to Zhu and Davies going to jail.

FTX: Judge says Sullivan & Cromwell can stay

Amy and Molly White live-tweeted the FTX hearing on Friday, January 20. It was about FTX’s applications to retain various bankruptcy professionals, mainly Sullivan & Cromwell. [Twitter; Twitter, Agenda, PDF]

Judge John Dorsey ruled FTX could continue using Sullivan & Cromwell, despite claims the law firm was too conflicted. [Order, PDF; Motion, PDF]

The US Trustee and the UCC had originally objected to S&C on the grounds the firm failed to make relevant disclosures regarding its prior dealings with FTX. But leading up to the hearing, the parties worked things out, and now the UST and UCC are on board. The only remaining objections came from FTX creditor Warren Winter, with a joinder from FTX creditor Richard Brummond. [Objection, PDF; Joinder, PDF]

In support of Winter’s objection, former FTX (and Ultimate Poker!) lawyer Daniel Friedberg filed a hilariously terrible declaration. Friedberg describes how shocked he was to learn that $8 billion of FTX customer money was missing. After reviewing his “ethical obligations” — a bodily organ hitherto unknown to Mr. Friedberg — he resigned. He tries to imply that S&C took FTX into bankruptcy so they could loot the corpse, helped from the inside by S&C’s former law partner, Ryne Miller. [Declaration, PDF]

Because Friedman filed his declaration late, White followed with an emergency motion to adjourn the hearing, so the court would have more time to chew on it. [Motion, PDF]

S&C’s James Bromely said Sam Bankman-Fried was behind all of this troublemaking. Friedberg’s declaration came hot on the heels of social media posts by SBF attacking the law firm. SBF is living in his parent’s home with an ankle bracelet and Friedberg has been questioned by the FBI. The pair were part of the inner circle that brought down FTX, said Bromely:

“If you are Mr. Bankman Fried or Mr. Friedberg, there is a concern about what is going on and what could happen to them. They can’t throw stones at the US attorney’s office. But they can throw stones at the Debtor’s counsel who are providing information to the prosecutors and the regulators, which is exactly what is happening.” 

As far as Friedberg goes, Bromely added: “He’s got a checkered past. It takes a lot of guts for him to put something in writing that says, ‘I was the chief compliance officer at FTX.’”  

Judge Dorsey dismissed everything in the Friedberg declaration saying, “It’s full of hearsay, innuendo, speculation, and rumor… certainly not something I would allow to be introduced into evidence in any event.”

FTX CEO John Jay Ray III said in his declaration S&C are not the villains. The villains are being pursued by criminal authorities. [Ray declaration, PDF]

We concur that S&C may be conflicted. But they’re competent to do the job, they’ve already spent 70 days on the case, which new counsel would have to do over, and it’s not like someone else would be cheaper.

The Trustee also wants to appoint an examiner in the case. The examiner motion will be heard on February 6. 

FTX: mycrimes.blog

A new mycrimes.blog just dropped, with more drafts from Sam’s forthcoming book* If Caroline and CZ and John Ray and Sullivan & Cromwell Did It. SBF claims that FTX US was solvent when he passed it off to the lawyers, Sullivan & Cromwell. John Jay Ray III responds: “This is the problem, he thinks everything is one big honey pot.” [Substack; WSJ]  

FTX secretly channeled a $50 million loan to Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, in a deal struck with Deltec chair Jean Chalopin. “Deltec is emerging as a central figure in the scrum of lawyers, banks and unwitting associates FTX pulled into its orbit.” Our regular readers will recognize Deltec as the known banker for Tether, who have occasionally claimed to hold more dollars for Tether than are documented in the entire Bahamas banking system. [Forbes, paywall]

It was obvious to executives and software developers at FTX that financial arrangements between FTX and Alameda were somewhat odd as early as 2020. FTX employees have been leaking documents to the New York Times. [NYT]

CFTC commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero gave a speech on FTX’s failure and the nature of public trust in crypto firms. She goes in hard, particularly after the professional gatekeepers: “lawyers, accountants, auditors, compliance professionals and other gatekeepers for crypto firms failed customers in their essential duties.” Venture capitalists and pension funds too. She wants Congress to give the CFTC more power over crypto exchanges. [CFTC]

Romero also went after FTX’s venture capital backers on Bloomberg TV: “What kind of due diligence did they conduct? Why did they turn a blind eye to what should have been really flashing red lights?” [Bloomberg]

* c’mon, you know he will

Bitzlato: Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’em

Everyone heard about the huge Fed announcement of an international cryptocurrency bust and went … who the hell is Bitzlato? Some tiny Hong Kong exchange run by some Russian living in Shenzhen? [Press release; order, PDF; affidavit, PDF]

Bitzlato, formerly called ChangeBot, was a small exchange with a peer-to-peer service, similar to LocalBitcoins. Its user base was Russian crooks doing crooked things with fake accounts. Users with valid Know-Your-Customer info would create “drop” accounts which they would then sell to crooks. So Bitzlato could say it had KYC, even if it didn’t do anything.

Bitzlato was not systemic to the crypto economy. But it was important to the Russia-based ransomware economy, and it was the exchange of choice for users of the Hydra darknet market that was busted in April 2022.

The Feds basically enacted Nicholas Weaver and Bruce Schneier’s 2021 plan to take out ransomware: hit the very few exchanges willing to touch such tainted coins. [Slate, 2021]

The fun part of the FBI affidavit is the tales of Bitzlato’s criminal customer service, page 10 onwards:

•‌ On or about December 27, 2017, a user with the username “Dude Weed” wrote to Bitzlato’s customer service portal, stating: “I have a bitcoin wallet in my account on the Hydra site. I also have a wallet here … How do I recharge a Hydra wallet”? The user also provided transaction details. Based on my training and experience, this query reflects the user’s desire to send funds from Bitzlato to Hydra. A Bitzlato representative responded: “Hello dude weed,” apologized for the delay in the transaction, and stated that “The transaction successfully went online.” The Bitzlato representative provided a link to an online blockchain explorer, reflecting a completed Bitcoin transaction whose total amount was then equivalent to approximately $14,600.

•‌ On December 17, 2020, a Bitzlato representative asked a user to provide his identity documents. The user protested, writing, “I don’t quite understand why you need a photo of this card? It’s not mine[.]” In further conversations, the user clarified that “everyone on the site trades with other people’s cards … they often discuss so-called ‘drops.’” The user commented that he had been told to create an account using credentials supplied by an online cryptocurrency training course that he had found on Instagram. The Bitzlato representative asked the user to provide his true identity documents and, rather than terminate that user, said the user could keep trading on Bitzlato.

Image: Cameron Winklevoss on Instagram

Posted on by Amy Castor 1

Crypto collapse: BlockFi even deader, crypto miners going broke, Sam will not shut up, Binance and Tether are fine

the wonderful thing about bitcoin is that ‘sorry i was too dumb to do things properly so it all collapsed’ is not only a feasible explanation but historically likely

— Boxturret on SomethingAwful

Shut up, Sam

If you may be in legal trouble, any lawyer has one piece of advice: stop talking. If you’ve just filed a high-profile bankruptcy with maybe billions of dollars missing: stop talking. If you’ve got prosecutors sniffing around your activities: stop talking.

Sam Bankman-Fried never got the memo, or he did and threw it in the trash. In reference to his lawyers, he told Tiffany Fong: “they know what they’re talking about in an extremely narrow domain of litigation. They don’t understand the broader context of the world.” [YouTube; Twitter]

Despite producing reams of potential “evidence” that could one day be used against him, SBF will talk to any reporter, anywhere, any time of day. On Wednesday, November 29 he spoke on an NYT DealBook panel. On Thursday, November 30, he spoke to Good Morning America.

He loves the camera. But he still can’t tell you where the money went.

In the DealBook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, SBF said he “never tried to commit fraud,” and he didn’t knowingly commingle $10 billion in customer funds. He frames the whole matter as he seemingly lent Alameda customer funds from FTX as a risk management problem that got out of hand. Well, it sure did that. [Video; Transcript] 

George Stephanopoulos from Good Morning America, who actually flew to the Bahamas to talk to SBF, was a lot tougher on him. SBF again denied “improper use of customer funds,” saying he failed at oversight. “You said one of your great talents in a podcast was managing risk.” “That’s right.” “Well, it’s obviously wrong.” [GMA; Twitter]

As Lying for Money author Dan Davies points out, prosecutors just have to show that SBF intentionally deceived clients as to what was happening to their money. When you tell people their money is segregated and it’s not, that’s fraud. “The offence was committed the minute it went in the wrong account.” [Twitter]

If you ignore your lawyer because you’re smarter than everyone, no lawyer is going to work with you. Martin Flumenbaum at Paul Weiss already dumped SBF. We’re hearing unconfirmed rumors that David Mills, his father’s colleague at Stanford, who was advising SBF, is also refusing to work with him further. [Semafor; Twitter]

A lot of FTX employees bailed after the company filed for bankruptcy. But a few have soldiered on — likely so they can nail SBF, who screwed them over about as much as he screwed over all of his customers and investors. While SBF is telling his side of the story to reporters, FTX employees are leaking emails. NYT wrote about the absolute chaos that FTX lawyers and execs endured in wresting power away from the deluded SBF in the wee hours of November 11. [NYT]

If Sam’s lawyer had jumped in front of the camera and ripped Sam’s larynx out with his bare hands, he could reasonably bill it as extremely valuable and important legal services to his client.

Extremely predictably, there goes BlockFi 

In January, there were three big crypto lenders — Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi. Now all three are bankrupt, and our emails are clogged with new bankruptcy filings.

After weeks of frozen withdrawals, BlockFi filed for voluntary Chapter 11 on November 28 in New Jersey. [Petition, PDF; bankruptcy docket on Kroll; CNBC; press release]

BlockFi was already a dead firm walking. They were dead after Three Arrows blew up in May. FTX kept BlockFi’s head above water with a $400 million credit facility — but then FTX imploded. [Twitter] 

The New Jersey firm doesn’t just have more liabilities than assets — a lot of the assets are missing too. All of BlockFi’s cryptos were in FTX. They were using FTX as their crypto bank.

BlockFi has over 100,000 creditors. Assets and liabilities range between $1 billion and $10 billion. There’s $1.3 billion in unsecured loans outstanding and $250 million in customer funds locked on the platform.

BlockFi has $256.5 million cash on hand — after selling their customers’ crypto:

In preparation for these chapter 11 cases, BlockFi took steps to liquidate certain of its owned cryptocurrency to bolster available cash to fund its business and administrative costs. Through the process, BlockFi was able to raise $238.6 million of additional cash, for a total unencumbered cash position as of the Petition date of $256.5 million.

Ankura Trust is BlockFi’s largest unsecured creditor to which it owes $729 million. Ankura is typically brought in to represent the interest of others in bankruptcy. If so, who are those creditors? We’d love to know.

FTX US is BlockFi’s second-largest unsecured creditor, with a $275 million stablecoin loan. This is the credit facility that SBF “bailed out” BlockFi with in June.

BlockFi’s fourth-largest unsecured creditor is the SEC — BlockFi still owes $30 million of its $50 million in penalties from February. The total settlement was $100 million, with half owed to the SEC and half owed to state regulators. [SEC; Twitter]

All the other creditors’ names are redacted. Very crypto.

BlockFi is entangled in FTX in multiple ways. BlockFi had a $680 million loan to SBF’s Alameda Research. This was collateralized by SBF’s personal shareholding in popular day-trading broker Robinhood — just days before FTX filed for bankruptcy. BlockFi is suing SBF for his stake in Robinhood. It doesn’t help that SBF was shopping his Robinhood shares around as collateral after he’d pledged them to the BlockFi loan. [Filing, PDF; Complaint, PDF; Bloomberg] 

Crypto miners — we told you so

We set out in detail in August this year how publicly traded bitcoin mining companies were always going to leave their lenders and investors as the bag holders.

We predicted that the miners would default on billions of dollars in loans, leaving the lenders with worthless mining rigs and unsaleable piles of bitcoins. They would then go bankrupt — with all the paperwork in order.

The miners depreciated their mining rigs over five years — and not the 15 months they should have — to make their companies look like better investments.

And miners are now defaulting on their rig-backed loans. Lenders — New York Digital Investment Group, Celsius, BlockFi, Galaxy Digital, NYDIG, and DCG’s Foundry — are getting stuck with worthless e-waste. [Bloomberg]

Iris Energy (IREN) faced a default claim from its lender NYDIG on $103 million “worth” of mining equipment. The company’s miners aren’t making enough money to service their debt. So Iris defaulted! And NYDIG now owns some obsolete mining rigs. [SEC filing, Global Newswire; Coindesk; CoinTelegraph]

Shares in Argo Blockchain (ARBK) dropped 40% after the firm announced that its plans to raise $27 million by selling shares were no longer happening. [Twitter; Decrypt]

Core Scientific hired law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges and financial advisors PJT Partners to help figure out ways to stave off bankruptcy. The options include exchanging existing debt for equity or additional debt, asset sales, equity, or debt financing. They’re gonna go bankrupt — because that was always the exit strategy. [The Block]

Binance goes shopping

In the financial crisis of 2008, when banks were dropping like flies, some big banks would buy smaller banks that had healthy books — so they could patch the holes in their own books. Bigger and bigger shells to hide the Ponzi under. 

Crypto is doing the same. FTX was buying up, and planning to buy up, small bankrupt crypto firms to try to hide the hole in its own books. And Binance, the largest crypto exchange, just bought Sakuro Exchange BitCoin (SEBC), a Japanese exchange that is already licensed with the country’s Financial Services Agency. [Binance; Bloomberg]

Japan learned its lesson early. Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, one of the first big bitcoin exchanges, blew up in 2014. Japan went on to become one of the first countries to regulate crypto exchanges with a licensing system. Crypto exchanges in Japan are required to keep customer assets separate, maintain proper bookkeeping, undergo annual audits, file business reports, and comply with strict KYC/AML rules. They are treated almost like banks! [Bitcoin Magazine]

Binance tried to set up operations in Japan in 2018, after getting kicked out of China — but Japan’s FSA told Binance they needed to play by the rules and apply for a license or pack their bags. [Bitcoin Magazine]

Binance’s bogus bailout fund 

Binance announced a $2 billion “industry recovery fund” to prop up all of the other flailing crypto firms that have been struggling since FTX blew up. They claim that 150 crypto firms have applied for a bailout. [Bloomberg] 

Binance has its own stablecoin, BUSD, that it claims is run by Paxos and Binance, “and is one of the few stablecoins that are compliant with the strict regulatory standards of NYDFS.” The crypto bailout fund is $2 billion in BUSD.

BUSD is a Paxos-administered dollar stablecoin. Each BUSD is backed by an alleged actual dollar in Silvergate Bank, and attested by auditors. (If not actually audited as such).

That’s true of BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s not true of BUSD on Binance.

BUSD on Binance is on their internal BNB (formerly BSC) blockchain, bridged from Ethereum. It’s a stablecoin of a stablecoin. Binance makes a point of noting that Binance-BUSD is not subject to the legal controls that Paxos BUSD is under. We’re sure it’ll all be fine if there are any issues, which there totally won’t be. [Binance] 

Treating FTX’s claims about other crypto firms as confessions would have given you pretty detailed correct answers — it was all projection. FTX was accusing others of what they were doing themselves. You should look at what Binance has been saying the same way.

We’re going to go so far as to assert that Binance is a hollow shell too, and the bailout fund is most likely for a hole in its own books.

Every one of the crypto companies accounts for their value in dollars by calculating their mark-to-market value. “We have a billion dollars of $CONFETTI!” Even if they couldn’t get $10,000 in actual money for it.

All of crypto is bankrupt if you account for the crypto assets at realizable value rather than mark-to-market. Realizable value depends on the inflow of actual dollars into crypto — and that inflow has plummeted because the retail suckers went home. 

All crypto companies are Quadriga. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see Celsius/FTX-style non-accounting, a Google spreadsheet if you’re lucky, and incompetence. Such utter blithering didn’t-understand-the-question incompetence. It’s been this way since 2011.

Tether is fine, you FUDster

Tether has been issuing tethers by lending out its USDT stablecoin, rather than exchanging the USDT one-to-one for dollars (LOL).

As of Tether’s attestation for September 30, 2022, 9% of USDT are loans to Tether customers. Tether claims these are collateralized — but they won’t say who the borrowers are or what the collateral is. [Tether; WSJ, paywalled]

In their long-winded response to the WSJ writeup, Tether blames …. the media. [Tether]

We know from the CFTC settlement in October 2021 that Tether was issuing USDT to its big customers with a kiss and a handshake. Now they’re admitting it publicly.

Other crypto exchanges/firms in trouble

CoinDesk’s report on the hole in Alameda’s balance sheet and Alameda’s close ties to FTX did so much damage to the crypto industry — and to Coindesk’s parent company Digital Currency Group — that the news site has attracted take-over interest. [Semafor] 

CoinDesk did not blow apart the crypto industry. This was an unexploded bomb that was set up in May.

It was all going to explode eventually as soon as someone looked inside the box. As CZ told The Block’s Larry Cermak in 2019: “some things are better left unsaid.” [Twitter] 

Japanese social media company Line is shutting down Bitfront, a US-based crypto exchange that it launched in 2020. They said the closure was unrelated to “certain exchanges that have been accused of misconduct.” [Announcement; Bloomberg]

AAX exit scam completed. Hong Kong-based exchange AAX froze withdrawals on November 13, and its executives quietly slipped away as opposed to filing bankruptcy — social media pages removed, LinkedIn profiles deleted. Sources tell us that employees have been laid off and the founders are nowhere to be found. [Hacker News; AAX]

John Reed Stark: Since the FTX debacle, Big Crypto’s SEC hit pieces and talking points calling for “regulatory clarity” are pure pretense and subterfuge, intended to distract and dissemble the truth — that the crypto-emperor has no clothes. [Duke FinReg Blog] 

Image: Sam talking on GMA

Posted on by Amy Castor 3

News: Tether prints $1B at a time, Tesla buys bitcoin, Roubini calls Saylor a cokehead, scammers hijack QuadrigaCX website

We are midway through February. Tether has surpassed $32 billion in tethers and appears to be quite proud of the fact. BTC is scratching $49,000 and ETH is over $1,800. There is so much craziness now in the crypto markets with shitcoins pumping galore, and big companies getting in on the bitcoin Ponzi.

In the meantime, I am concerned crypto is going retail again. Friends are calling and asking about bitcoin. One of my friend’s offspring was talking up dogecoin on Facebook. And I am overhearing conversations about crypto in grocery stores and parking lots—flashbacks of 2017, but this is worse. Retailers are going to get hurt all over again.

Another reminder, I have a Patreon account. If you want to support my writing, please consider subscribing. I’m currently making $572 a month on Patreon, which is fantastic because I can now buy decent bottles of wine. But at some point, I would love to bring that up closer to $2,000 or find a way to make a living doing this.

Tether: We’re done with the baby prints

On Thursday and again on Saturday, Tether issued $1 billion in tethers. These are the biggest single prints of USDT ever—and there were two in a row. Previously, the biggest prints were $600 million, which was rare. Normally, bigger prints were $400 million, and if Tether needed more, it would simply issue several in a row. But that’s clearly not enough to feed the monster now. 

By monster, I mean this snowball is getting so big, Tether is struggling to manage it. Seventy percent of bitcoin is traded against tethers, and as real money keeps getting siphoned out of the system, Tether needs to create more and more fake dollars to fill the ever-widening chasm. Tethers are counterfeit. They are not real dollars, but they are treated as such on offshore exchanges.

You can’t have a system built entirely on fake money. Eventually, it will collapse under its own weight. We saw this with QuadrigaCX. As soon as enough people tried to cash out, the exchange’s founder Gerald Cotten flew to India and pulled off what appears to have been one of the most bizarre exit scams in history—unless you believe he is really dead.* I’m still getting calls from reporters and filmmakers wondering what the hell happened.

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino says the $1 billion prints were for replenishments and chain swaps—wherein a customer sends in tethers and gets them reissued on a different blockchain. If it were a chain swap, you would see a corresponding burn. But we aren’t seeing any burns, meaning those tokens went almost immediately into circulation.

Luca Land tracked the first 1 billion print and found that the entire amount—previously, I said “majority,” but Luca says all of it—went to Bitfinex, Huobi, RenrenBit, Binance, and FTX.** The largest recipient was FTX, followed by Binance. Those of us who follow @whale_alert are accustom to seeing tethers flying off to “unknown wallets.” Luca thinks those unknown wallets serve as intermediate wallets to throw us off the trail.

The Block published a story on Thursday, right after Tether’s first monster print, with lots of quotes from Ardoino, who explains that big companies are buying USDT from over-the-counter desks and high-frequency trading firms. This explains the demand for all these tethers, he claims.

“When clients of these firms want to buy bitcoin, they send USD, and then these firms convert USD to USDT to bitcoin. This method is faster and most convenient,” he told The Block. 

Why would someone go to the trouble of converting cash to USDT to buy BTC when they could simply buy BTC directly with cash on a regulated exchange? That makes no sense—unless it involves money laundering and capital flight. Tether does have a big market in Asia, Ardoino said.

Another explanation is that Tether is printing USDT out of thin air, using those to buy bitcoin with alias accounts on unregulated exchanges and cashing out via banked exchanges and OTC trading desks. Or else, they buy BTC and hold onto it as a way to make the markets more illiquid and easier to manipulate. (If they sold all the bitcoin they were buying with tethers, they would crash the markets, so until a new influx of cash comes into the system, they have to hold onto it.)

Coindesk interviewed Nouriel Roubini on CoindeskTV. Of course, he gave it to them straight, calling Tether a criminal enterprise and Michael Saylor a cokehead. The three reporters broke out into giggles. The questions they asked were naive, for instance, how is Tether printing tethers different from what is going on in Washington with all their dollar printing? Roubini made important points and predicts Tether will be dead within the year—read the transcript on my blog.

NY AG Tether investigation update

Tether has agreed to hand over a slew of documents to the NY attorney general showing how they issue tethers, what’s behind tethers, and so on. The original deadline was Jan. 15, but they needed another 30 days and the NY AG was okay with that. We are looking for another court filing to drop at some point after Feb. 15.

Don’t expect miracles anytime soon, though. The NY AG will still need time to take a position on what she has received. I’m sure her office is working with the Department of Justice in their investigation—and passing all the material along to them.

Someone was asking me on Reddit, what can the NY AG actually do to Tether? Answer: She has sweeping investigatory and prosecutorial powers, and she can issue a cease and desist. But ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security will be instrumental in taking Bitfinex/Tether down.

To put things in perspective, Tether has been in operation for six years. It took seven years and the coordinated effort of law enforcement in 17 countries to bring down Liberty Reserve. (ABC News)

Tesla buys BTC with clean car credits

The big news of the week was Tesla purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin, as revealed in its 10-K filing. Here you have a company dedicated to clean energy buying one of the filthiest assets in the world. The bitcoin network requires the energy of a small country like Argentina, Norway or the Netherlands. Musk doesn’t give a hoot about the planet. (My blog)

Just to be clear, $1.5 billion is peanuts. It will support the bitcoin miners for about a month. Of course, on the news of Tesla buying bitcoin, the price of BTC shot up from 39,400 to 48,000 in less than 24 hours. The higher the price of BTC, the faster real money exits the system when the miners sell their 900 newly minted BTC per day.

Michael Burry, the investor from “The Big Short,” said in a series of deleted tweets (apparently, he routinely deletes tweets) that Musk bought BTC to distract from Chinese regulators looking into quality complaints with Tesla vehicles. Burry is shorting Tesla and has called on the electric-vehicle company to issue more stock at its ridiculous price. (Business Insider)

But wait! It’s green energy!

Most of the world doesn’t realize that bitcoin uses a country’s worth of electricity. They think it’s mainly used for ransomware and by criminals to buy drugs and such, so when they learn about bitcoin’s horrendous CO2 production, they become alarmed.

As a result, bitcoiners are desperately scrambling to declare that bitcoin consumes renewable green energy. Most of what they are spouting is blithering nonsense with no facts to support their claims. They are also trying to say that bitcoin consumes less energy than the rest of the financial system, which is simply dumb, as Frances Coppola points out.

Other interesting newsy bits

Gerald Cotten may be dead and buried—or more likely, sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere—but QuadrigaCX sprung to life again! However, it turns out scammers set up an imitation Quadriga website to lure in potential victims. EY, the trustee for the failed exchange, sent out a warning notice. The website has since been taken down. (EasyDNS)

India is set to ban cryptocurrency investments completely. Investors will be given a transition period of three-to-six months after the new law goes into force to liquidate their investments. (Bloomberg Quint)

Crypto Capital money mule Reginald Fowler has three more weeks to find new counsel after he stiffed his previous attorneys. (My blog)

Dogecoin has been pumping thanks to r/wallstreetbets and Musk and others tweeting about it for the lulz. David Gerard wrote a wonderful piece on dogecoin explaining its unique history. (Foreign Policy, paywalled)

Apparently, Elon Musk was tweeting about DOGE for the lulz back in April 2019. (Financial Times)

Dogecoin creator Billy Markus said on Reddit that he sold all his dogecoin in 2015 after he got laid off. He wanted dogecoin to be a force of good, and he is disappointed to see the nonsense “pump and dumping, rampant greed, scamming, bad faith actors.”

The Sydney Morning Herald did a feature on Australian-born-and-raised Greg Dwyer, one of the founders of Bitmex, who was indicted last year for violating anti-money laundering laws, but is still at large. “As recently as July, social media posts suggested Dwyer was in Bermuda, and enjoying all it had to offer.”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) wants municipal workers to get paid in bitcoin. Aside from the legal and tax ramifications and all the difficulties in setting this up, I’m sure employees will be so happy to wake up and find their paycheck lost 30% of its value whilst they were sleeping. No, this is a terrible idea. (The NY Post)

BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank, said it will hold, transfer and issue bitcoin and other crypto on behalf of its asset-management clients. The bank will begin offering these services later this year. Because they are a state-chartered bank, they can do this in NY without a BitLicense. (WSJ, Coindesk)

Mastercard is planning to support crypto natively on its network. However, it’s only going to support cryptocurrencies that meet certain requirements—including stability, privacy and compliance with anti-money laundering laws. The problem is that no cryptocurrencies meet Mastercard’s criteria. (Arstechnica, Mastercard announcement)

BitPay’s bitcoin cards can be added to Apple Wallet, giving crypto holders a new way to spend via Apple Pay. BitPay converts your bitcoin to cash, so it’s no different than selling your BTC first, and merchants won’t know the difference. (Business Insider)

This Valentines Day, consider giving that special someone a CryptoFlower! It will only set you back 4 ETH ($7,200). Each flower is genetically unique and immutable. And they don’t need water or sunlight because they live on the Ethereum blockchain. (FT)

Last but not least, the CBC QuadrigaCX documentary is coming soon! It was nearly a year ago that David Gerard and I met in Vancouver for the filming. It was also one of the last times I enjoyed a meal inside a restaurant sitting next to people.

*Update, Feb. 14—Someone on Reddit was giving me a hard time, arguing that I can’t say Cotten pulled off an exit scam unless I explain that he might actually be dead. I won’t believe he is dead until someone exhumes the body and proves it’s him. See my Quadriga timeline for details.

**Update, Feb. 15—The unidentified tether customer in Luca Land’s diagram turns out to be FTX.

Posted on by Amy Castor 3

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.

If you like my work, please support my writing by subscribing to my Patreon account for as little as $5 a month. 

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: COVID-19 shuts down crypto conferences, Libra activates plan B, investor sues bitcoin miner Canaan

Good news this week. I’ve started freelancing for Decrypt. I’m in their Slack channel, and it’s nice to feel part of a group again. That and a few freelance gigs mean I’m less freaked out about making ends meet after leaving my last gig. Although now, I’m worried about COVID-19 and its impact on crypto media and the world economy as a whole.

This newsletter is going to be a bit different. I’m going to focus on the bigger stuff—or things that are interesting to me while supplementing them with additional notes or thoughts I might have—and then list off a bunch of other news that has caught my eye.

Coronavirus, crypto conferences, and the hell to come

I wrote a blog post about how the new coronavirus is impacting crypto conferences. My story even got picked up in Charles Arthur’s Overspill newsletter. (He’s a former tech writer for The Guardian.) In a week’s time, things have only gotten worse, with more events canceling. The city of Austin has canceled SXSW, which had a blockchain track. MIT issued an official statement Thursday night that is was canceling any event larger than 150 people but somehow made an exception for the MIT Bitcoin Expo, March 7-8.

What’s shocking is that the school did this despite knowing the dangers—more than two dozen cases of COVID-19 in Massachusetts have been linked to a Biogen meeting in Boston with 175 attendees in late February. The news of this started coming out on Thursday, the very day MIT gave the green light for its expo. Even on Saturday, Boston Blockchain Week, scheduled for March 7-13, removed all events from its calendar.  

Digital Chambers has postponed its DC Blockchain Summit, originally scheduled for March 11-12. Bitcoin Magazine has postponed its Bitcoin 2020 event, March 27-28.

Coindesk has made it clear that it is absolutely not canceling its New York City-based Consensus conference until it is forced to do so. The event, scheduled for May 11-13, drew in 4,000 people last year and 8,500 the year before. Here’s the refund policy:

“If Consensus is cancelled due to guidance from health organizations and local/federal governments, attendees will receive a full refund on their ticket purchase within 60 days of CoinDesk making the announcement to cancel. Further, if an attendee is unable to attend because his or her home country is barred from traveling to the United States, we will also issue a full refund within 60 days.”

South Korea, China, US step up efforts to disinfect dirty fiat

The new coronavirus can live on paper money, says the WHO, so South Korea’s banks are taking banknotes they receive and putting them through a heating process to kill off any germs. China is doing something similar. And now the U.S. is taking any U.S. dollars that it gets from Asia, disinfecting them, and keeping them for 7-10 days before reintroducing them to the financial system. It is routine for banks to disinfect banknotes, but now they are stepping up the process. Bitcoin is a contactless form of payment, but unfortunately, you can’t buy toilet paper, rice, beans or baby formula with it. (Decrypt, Reuters)

Baseline protocol: coaxing the enterprise to use public Ethereum

The Baseline Protocol is a thrilling new enterprise blockchain initiative from ConsenSys, EY, Microsoft, and a handful of other projects looking to sell consulting hours.

In short, the initiative is an effort to get big companies to use the Ethereum public blockchain. Baseline is supposed to serve as a middleware with its secret sauce being privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proofs. ZKP is key because otherwise, why would companies want to put their private dealings on a widely shared blockchain?

But what actually goes on the blockchain? The answer: not a lot, and certainly not any actual documents. What goes on the blockchain is a hash of the file you share via some other means along with a timestamp, so you can check the authenticity of the document. ZKP serves to hide the transaction of tokens and business logic in smart contracts.

A German company called Unibright plans on playing “a major role” in developing Baseline. Interestingly, Unibright has its own token (UBT), which had a big pump recently. UBT couldn’t get listed on any major exchanges. Instead, it is traded mainly on the Estonia-registered Hotbit and decentralized exchange IDEX. (Decrypt, David Gerard)

Reggie Fowler pleaded not guilty to wire fraud

Arizona businessman Reginald Fowler flew from his home in Chandler, Ariz., to stand before a judge Thursday and plead not guilty to a new charge of wire fraud. He now faces five counts and plans to go to trial next year. Yes, that’s right. His trial date, originally scheduled for April 28, has been moved to Jan. 11, 2021, because his lawyers need more time to prepare for the case. Until then, he remains free on bond. (My blog.)

How did bitcoin mining maker Canaan get listed on Nasdaq?

That’s like, such a good question. Bitcoin mining machine maker Canaan Creative operates out of China. Last year, it became the first crypto company to be listed on the Nasdaq. Woot! But after an unexplained pump in February, the stock tanked. And then on Wednesday, Phillippe Lemieux, an investor in Canaan, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, saying Canaan misled investors. Some of the most damning information in the suit comes from a blog post by Marcus Aurelius, or MAV, titled “Canaan Fodder.” Canaan had three prior unsuccessful attempts to list on Asian exchanges. MAV calls the Nasdaq listing a “dumping ground of last resort.” I’m sure CAN stockholders will be happy to hear that. (Decrypt)

UK’s FCA issues warning about Bitmex

U.K.’s financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, is warning Brits about Bitmex. Arthur Hayes’ bitcoin derivatives platform is promoting its services without authorization, the regulator said. Bitmex said it is trying to “assess” the situation.

The FCA issued a similar warning about Kraken, but that was soon taken down. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell said the regulator made a mistake and fixed it. “Seems like it might have been some scams pretending to be Kraken got reported,” he told Decrypt. (Decrypt)

Libra activates plan B

Plan B vs plan AFacebook’s Libra may issue multiple coins based on national currencies in addition to its original idea—a coin based on a basket of assets. If it does that, it’ll be just another PayPal, but on the Calibra wallet.

Bloomberg and The Information were the first to report on the news, and the financial press followed, all linking back to these stories. (The Information originally said the national coins would replace the original Libra token but has since issued a correction, stating that the national coins would run alongside the Libra token.)

This is not a new plan at all. David Marcus and Mark Zuckerberg talked about doing this back in October. In terms of technology, there’s no innovation here either. The big hurdles for Libra are proving to the world that it can comply with anti-money laundering laws. And so far, it hasn’t been able to do that. (Decrypt, David Gerard, Bloomberg, The Information)

Other stuff that caught my eye

“If they’re not outright scams, they’re normally cash grabs.” One former coiner describes his experience working for crypto projects. (Medium)

Looks like Massive Adtoption’s Jacob Kostechki has exited the crypto world and gone into real estate. He’s now tweeting under @_jake_i_am.

Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at crypto venture fund Dragonfly Capital, wrote a good article describing how flash loans work. Flash loans were behind two recent hacks—one for $350,000 and another for $600,000—of margin trading protocol bZx. (Medium)

More info coming out on who invested in Telegram’s $1.7 billion initial coin offering: A Russian oligarch, a former cabinet minister and the COO of Wirecard. (Coindesk)

In April 2018, The Reserve Bank of India banned banks from doing business with crypto companies. On March 4, India’s crypto community rejoiced as the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the RBI’s ban was unconstitutional. The RBI plans to fight the ruling. (Economic Times, Cointelegraph)

The hostile takeover of the Steem blockchain is comedy cold for nocoiners. (Twitter thread)

Stephen Palley offers his take on the Feb. 26 ruling in the Ripple lawsuit: His most ooph worthy comment: If the court’s reasoning is accepted, “purchasers of crypto on secondary markets can state securities claims against the issuer where they did not directly purchase the crypto.” (Twitter thread, court order)

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Coronavirus: Will crypto conferences survive? What about crypto media?

Novel coronavirus is a real threat. We now know the incubation period for COVID-19 is up to 14 days, and people can spread the disease without showing any symptoms at all. The best way to keep from getting ill is to avoid close contact with other people. Ultimately, that means cutting back on air travel and opting out of large events. 

As a result, companies in all fields are canceling conferences in droves. They either can’t sell enough tickets or too many sponsors and speakers are starting to pull out. In some cases, entire cities are outright banning large indoor gatherings.  

Last week, Facebook canceled the in-person part of its F8 developer conference in San Jose, originally scheduled for early May. In 2019, more than 5,000 people attended F8.

Nvidia said Monday that it will not hold its GTC 2020 conference that had been scheduled for March 22-26 in San Jose. As many as 10,000 attendees were expected at the event, which centered around semiconductors, graphic chips, and AI technologies.  

Also, on Monday, Facebook and Twitter pulled out of SXSW Conference & Festivals, a sprawling 10-day event in Austin set to kick off on March 13. The event drew more than 400,000 attendees last year. SXSW says the event is still going as planned, even though an online petition is in the works to cancel it.  

Similarly, the crypto world is feeling the pain. Tron has postponed indefinitely its Nitron Summit due to coronavirus concerns. The event was scheduled to take place between Feb. 29 and March 1 in Seoul, South Korea.

Paris Blockchain Week, originally set to kick off on March 31, is postponed until December. Even that is risky, though. December is when the cold and flu season starts up again, and a coronavirus vaccine isn’t due out until sometime in 2021.  

How will crypto media fair?

Coindesk Consensus 2018
Consensus 2018 was a massive event. People waited in long lines to register.

If the trend continues — and likely it will — conference cancellations could hit some crypto media publications hard. I’m talking about Coindesk in particular. The company pulls in 85% of its revenue from conferences, according to a May 2019 report in The Information. Coindesk doesn’t feature ads on its site anymore, so events are its bread and butter.

It hasn’t always been that way. I remember ads for every bottom-of-the-barrel initial coin offering on the site a few years ago. I’m not sure why Coindesk stopped serving ads, but they seem to have completely disappeared from the site after its relaunch in November. 

Last year, Coindesk held one investor event in New York and another in Asia. But its flagship conference is Consensus. Held annually in Manhattan, Consensus is widely considered the most significant event in the cryptosphere, accompanied by lots of satellite conferences around the same time. This year, Consensus is scheduled for May 11-13 at the New York Hilton midtown.

In 2018, just coming down from the peak of the crypto hype cycle, Consensus drew in more than 8,500 attendees, each paying about $2,000 per ticket. Coindesk’s total revenue for the year was $25 million, so do the math — that’s $21 million in events alone. 

Consensus 2019 saw less than half that with only 4,000 attendees. But even at an estimated $10 million in revenue, that’s still a decent amount of money. Despite the drop-off, Kevin Worth, Coindesk’s CEO, told The Information that Digital Currency Group, which owns 90% of Coindesk, still planned on growing its media business.

Indeed, Coindesk has been on a bit of a hiring spree. Almost anyone who has been writing about crypto has gotten pulled into working for the media outlet. It will be interesting to see what happens if Coindesk ends up having to cancel Consensus 2020 and potentially even Consensus 2021 — or even if it sees a significant drop in attendees.

Oddly, Consensus is the only event listed on the Coindesk’s website at this time. The company’s other two events — “Invest: NYC” and “Invest: Asia,” as they were called last year — are conspicuously missing. I reached out to Coindesk this morning. If they respond, I’ll post their comments here.

Other media pubs also rely on events for revenue, though not to the extent that Coindesk does, and their events aren’t nearly so huge. 

Breakermag started planning an NYC event called Breakercon before it shuttered in 2019. The Block took over the event renaming it “Atomic Swap.” This year, The Block is now calling the one-day-event, scheduled for May 12, The Block Summit. Tickets cost about $800 and CEO Mike Dudas expects things to go as planned with 400 attendees.

Last year, a leaked investor pitch deck for The Block indicated that of the $5 million the startup wished to see in 2020, $3.4 million will come from subscription revenue; $1.1 million will come from ads and $500,000 from events. At least The Block has its revenue model spread out a bit, so it’s not so heavily dependent on a single event. 

Decrypt relies on Ethereum venture studio Consensys’ patronage to keep its doors open. Consensys holds an Ethereal Summit each year in New York City right before Consensus. That also appears to be on track for May 8-9.

Cointelegraph has a separate events division that does BlockShow Asia, which it’s been holding since 2016. This year the event is scheduled for Singapore in November. The outlet, which claims 6 million visitors a month, also makes money on ads and consulting.

My guess is that as the coronavirus spreads, we’ll see more crypto events being canceled. Some conferences are opting to go the “decentralized” route and put everything on video, but I just don’t see that being too popular. Most crypto people go to conferences to network and party — the talks, not so much. 

A bigger threat: Crypto ice age

The bigger problem here is the crypto ice age, a term that refers to the general slowdown in the space that set in after 2017 due to increased regulation and the plunge in the price of bitcoin. As David Gerard details in a recent blog post, crypto media publications and low-end blogs are now collectively chasing an ever-shrinking pool of ad funds.

In general, the media advertising model has gone the way of the dinosaur. Subscriptions work for some publications. But big outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal who employ the model successfully have hundreds of thousands of readers. The crypto world simply does not have that big of a following.

Events are a big deal for many crypto pubs, and if that important revenue stream dries up, it could push some outlets to the breaking point. Expect more layoffs in 2020 with some crypto pubs and blogs falling off the map completely.

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Posted on by Amy Castor 0