Crypto collapse: Venture capital goes home, Coinbase, Tether backing, FTX sues Hollywood VCs, 3AC on the beach

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

“My survey of three card monte tables suggests they’ve always got at least one patron but you won’t see anyone playing at the big casinos which just shows the system is rigged.”

crossestman

Crypto’s not dead! Look, it’s still twitching

Crypto venture capital investments have gone full crypto collapse, from $21.6 billion in 2022 to just $0.5 billion so far in 2023. This Fortune article includes the funniest graph of the week: [Fortune, archive]

Investors are leaving the crypto sector without any plans to return. [Bloomberg

Crypto trading is at its lowest level since October 2020. The Block puts the volume for May 2023 at $424 billion. For comparison, May 2021 was $4.25 trillion and May 2022 was $1.4 trillion. [The Block]

Volume numbers are considerably less if you take into account that unregulated crypto exchanges are known for faking their volumes. Crypto trading is all but dead. We know this because exchanges run by normal finance guys don’t see any trading. [Bloomberg]

Traditional finance groups want to start their own crypto exchanges run in a non-clown-shoes manner. A nice ambition — but that was Gemini’s pitch and even they still had to resort to risky garbage. [FT

The Winklevoss twins marketed Gemini as an exchange that played by the rules — one that serious money people could trust. But after the failure of FTX and the Genesis bankruptcy — in which Gemini is the largest creditor — they lost that trust. Maybe they could pivot to AI? [Bloomberg

Crypto.com halted services for institutional traders in the US on June 21. The exchange cited “limited demand” as the reason. [news.bitcoin.com]

The rest of crypto is also desperate. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian is still pushing play-to-earn games and touts Axie Infinity as a huge success. Gamers hate play-to-earn and think it’s vacuous horse hockey. [Twitter, archive]

Universe.xyz is the latest NFT market to shut down, taking all the images on the site with it. As more NFT markets shut down, your apes are in danger of going blank forever. [Twitter, archive]

TechMonitor asks: “Is crypto finally dead?” We should be so lucky. With quotes from David. [TechMonitor

Coinbase: We didn’t do it, nobody saw us, and it wasn’t even a thing

Coinbase has responded to the SEC’s complaint with 177 pages of chaff. [Doc 22, PDF]

Paragraph 2 makes the claim that in approving Coinbase’s original S-1, the SEC approved Coinbase’s business. Let’s quote again this line from the S-1, signed off by Brian Armstrong: [SEC]

Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.

Coinbase argues that Congress is looking into cryptos, therefore existing laws don’t matter. Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s general counsel, has told Bloomberg how Coinbase’s big hope is that new laws will save their backsides. This is correct — Rep McHenry’s new crypto markets bill is indeed Coinbase’s only hope. [Bloomberg]

Coinbase claims that with this complaint, the SEC is working well outside its remit and that its ideas about whether crypto tokens are securities are entirely novel. Never mind the SEC’s repeated wins in court whenever a crypto issuer is dumb enough to take the matter that far. [Doc 23, PDF; CoinDesk]

Earlier, Coinbase filed a writ of mandamus demanding that the SEC consider its proposal for new crypto regulations. The SEC says it’ll have something to report within 120 days. Judge Cheryl Ann Krause expects a decision on Coinbase’s proposal from the regulator by October 11. [Doc 30, PDF; Doc 32, PDF]  

Tether: Yes! We have no Chinese commercial paper

CoinDesk finally got access to documents from the New York Attorney General related to Tether’s reserves from March 31, 2021. [CoinDesk; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; Bloomberg]  

The NYAG claimed that Tether had been lying about its reserves — which it had been. Tether and Bitfinex settled with New York for $18.5 million in February 2021.

The settlement required Tether to publish a breakdown of its reserves quarterly for two years. But what the public got to see in May 2021 were two skimpy pie charts, showing where Tether had parked its alleged $41 billion in backing reserves at the time. [Tether, archive]

CoinDesk then filed a Freedom of Information request for the fully detailed version of Tether’s report to the NYAG on its reserves.

Tether fought the release of the documents for two years. In February, they lost in court and decided not to go ahead with an appeal. So the NYAG sent Coindesk the documents on June 15. New York also sent the same documents to Bloomberg and Decrypt.

In June and July 2022, Tether vigorously denied that it held money in Chinese commercial paper — loans to Chinese companies which most money market funds avoid. It also said in September 2021 that it had no debt or securities linked to Evergrande, a cash-strapped Chinese real estate company. [Tether, 2022; Tether, 2022; CoinDesk, 2021]

Bloomberg called out Tether’s wider claims of no involvement in Chinese commercial paper as nonsense. [Bloomberg, 2021]

It turns out that Tether did hold Chinese commercial paper in 2021, and quite a lot of it. It held securities issued from banks around the world — but mainly China, including debt issued by the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China. ChainArgos took a close look at the funds and put together a spreadsheet. [Google Docs]

The Tether press releases on the FOIed docs are a hoot. Lots of table pounding. [Tether, archive; Tether, archive]

We give CoinDesk a bit of stick from time to time. But we also read the site every day and follow the livewire feed. They get all the credit for doggedly pursuing this one.

FTX versus the venture capitalists to the stars

John Jay Ray’s team at FTX seems to have found some more truly fascinating documents. FTX is suing venture capital firm K5 Global, its managers, Michael Kives and Bryan Baum, and various related entities to recover the $700 million that Sam Bankman-Fried put into the firm.

Kives worked at Creative Artists Agency from 2003 to 2018 as a Hollywood talent agent. He left in 2018 to found K5.

In February 2022, SBF attended a dinner party at Kives’ house, with A-list celebrities, billionaires, and politicians. He was deeply impressed with Kives’ “infinite connections” and even contemplated that Kives could work with FTX on “electoral politics.”

Less than three weeks later, SBF signed a “term sheet” agreeing to give Kives and Baum $125 million each personally and to invest billions of dollars into K5 over three years: 

The Term Sheet was little more than a cursory list of investment ideas, and repeatedly stated that the actual “mechanics” of these very substantial investments would be later worked out “in the long form documents.” 

SBF wired $300 million to K5 the next day. No due diligence was done on any of the deals — including $214.5 million for a 38% stake in MBK Capital LP Series T, whose gross asset value was just $2.94 million as of March 2022.

K5 were very close advisors. Kives and Baum joined FTX’s internal Slack chat. SBF reserved a room for them in his Bahamas luxury apartment. In May, Alameda transferred another $200 million to K5.

Sam didn’t worry too much about the fine details. In an August 2022 internal document, he wrote that “Bryan is ~100% aligned with FTX,” that “FTX is aligned with Bryan too,” and that “if there are significant artificial up-downs between FTX and K5 as entities, I’m happy to just true it up with cash estimates.”

SBF wrote that he was:

… aligned with Bryan and K5, and treats $1 to it as $1 to FTX even though we only own 33%, because whatever, we can always true up cash if needed, but also, who cares … There are logistical, PR, regulatory, etc reasons to not just merge K5 100% into FTX but I and Bryan will both act how we would if they were merged.

… Is Bryan an FTX employee, or a random 3rd party? The answer, really, is neither. The answer is that it’s sorta complicated and liminal and unclear. Bryan lives in the uncanny valley.

FTX and Alameda employees flagged K5’s “pretty bizarre” expenses at the time, such as “over $777k in design expenses” that had been billed to Alameda.

FTX wants the $700 million back as having been avoidable transfers. It may want even more money, as Ray’s team suspects that more interesting details will come out in discovery. FTX also wants K5’s claims in the bankruptcy disallowed until this matter is resolved. [Adversary Case, PDF]

More news from Chapter 11

Cameron Winklevoss tweeted yet another open letter to Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group on July 4, demanding back Gemini Earn customers’ money. Winklevoss accuses DCG of “fraudulent behavior” and wants them to do the “right thing” and hand over $1.465 billion of dollars, bitcoin, and ether. If Silbert doesn’t pay up, Winklevoss threatens to sue on Friday, July 7. CoinDesk, which is owned by DCG, couldn’t get a comment from their own proprietor on the story. [Twitter, archive; CoinDesk]

After the deal for Binance.US to buy Voyager Digital fell through, Voyager gave up trying to sell itself and is liquidating. Here’s the liquidation notice. [Doc 1459, PDF]  

Celsius is finally converting its altcoins to BTC and ETH as it pursues its plan to relaunch with the auction-winning consortium Fahrenheit. [CoinDesk]  

If you have vastly too much time on your hands, here’s the full Celsius Network auction transcript — all 256 pages of it. [Doc 2748, PDF]

Customers of the bankrupt US branch of the Bittrex crypto exchange — which is being sued by the SEC — can withdraw those holdings that are clearly theirs … whatever that means. [CoinDesk]  

Three Arrows Capital: What Su and Kyle did next

Crypto was taken out in 2022 by a one-two punch of Terra-Luna collapsing in May and then crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital collapsing in June.

Other crypto firms had invested in Terra-Luna and 3AC because they paid the highest interest rates! Now, you might think that investment firms would know that high interest means high risk.

3AC’s two founders, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, just shut their office door in Singapore in late May 2022 and skipped the country, leaving their staff to tell investors the bad news.

What did Zhu and Davies do next? They spent the summer traveling around Asia, went surfing, and played video games. Davies is currently in Dubai and Zhu is back living in Singapore. [NYT]

Zhu and Davies insist they must have done nothing wrong because no government has filed charges yet. Uh huh.

3AC’s creditors think Zhu and Davies have done one or two things wrong. Teneo, the liquidator trying to clean up the 3AC mess, wants the pair fined $10,000 a day for contempt, saying that Davies has failed to respond to a subpoena. [CoinDesk]

The pair are suing Mike Dudas, the original founder of crypto media outlet The Block, for defamation. In the US, LOL. They allege Dudas said nasty things about their new crypto venture OPNX, though the suit doesn’t say what allegedly defamatory claims Dudas made. We expect the 3AC boys to have some trouble demonstrating they have a reputation to malign. Stephen Palley is representing Dudas. [CoinDesk]

Regulatory clarity

In the UK, the Financial Services and Markets Bill has passed. One part of this gives the Treasury greater powers to regulate crypto, likely via the Financial Conduct Authority. We should expect more detailed regulations within a year. [CoinDesk]

This comes not before time. UK losses to crypto fraud increased more than 40% to surpass £300 million (USD$373 million), according to Action Fraud, the national reporting center for fraud and cybercrime. [FT

Europe’s MiCA is now law from the end of June 2023. It goes into application in one year for stablecoins and in 18 months for general crypto assets and virtual asset service providers. [EUR-Lex]  

The European Central Bank keeps talking about doing a CBDC. This is good news for crypto! Or maybe it isn’t: [ECB]

Policymakers should be wary of supporting an industry that has so far produced no societal benefits and is increasingly trying to integrate into the traditional financial system, both to acquire legitimacy as part of that system and to piggyback on it.

The CFTC Division of Clearing and Risk sent out a staff advisory to registered derivatives clearing organizations on May 30, reminding them of the risks associated with expanding the scope of their activities. It specifically addressed crypto. [CFTC]

When the CFTC points out that market shenanigans are illegal in crypto just like they are in regular commodities, keep in mind that Avi Eisenberg is finally going to trial for allegedly committing those precise market shenanigans in DeFi. These are real go-to-jail crimes. [Bloomberg; Schedule, PDF; Case docket]  

The Thailand SEC has banned crypto lending that pays returns to investors. It now also requires crypto trading firms to post the following warning: “Cryptocurrencies are high risk. Please study and understand the risks of cryptocurrencies thoroughly. because you may lose the entire amount invested.” [SEC Thailand, in Thai]

New York has settled with CoinEx after suing them in February for failing to register as a securities exchange. The company has to stop operating in the US — not just New York — return $1.1 million to investors, and pay $600,000 in penalties. [NYAG; Stipulation and consent, PDF]

The ETF trick will surely work this time

Guys, guys, the Blackrock and Fidelity bitcoin ETFs will change everything! They’re going to get surveillance of trading and market data from somewhere! This will surely answer all of the SEC’s previous objections to bitcoin ETFs! The market will be delighted!

… oh. The SEC has found these applications inadequate. [WSJ]  

Blackrock and Fidelity are going to try again with Coinbase as the exchange supplying market surveillance. [CoinDesk]  

But the trouble with monitoring at Coinbase is that Coinbase isn’t where the market is — the bitcoin market is at Binance. That’s where price discovery happens.

We expect these ETF applications to go no further than all the previous bitcoin ETF applications.

The good news for bitcoin continues its monotonous patter

Binance senior staff have been jumping ship. General counsel Han Ng, chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann, and SVP for compliance Steven Christie all resigned this week. They specifically left over CZ’s response to the ongoing Department of Justice investigation. [Fortune]

Binance.US’s market share has dropped to 1%, down from a record 27% in April. Is Binance giving up on its US exchange? The market share nose-dived after the SEC sued Binance in June. [WSJ]  

Fortune favors the internal trading desk: Crypto.com has been caught trading directly against its own customers. Dirty Bubble spotted the job ads for a proprietary trading desk at the firm in November 2022, of course. [FT, archive; Twitter, archive]  

Russia is giving up on the idea of a unified state-run crypto exchange. Instead, it’s focusing on regulation for multiple exchanges. Russia is continuing to promote crypto as a way to evade sanctions for making international payments. When you’ve devastated your economy by embarking upon a very stupid war, that’s … a strategy? [Izvestia, Russian]

In crypto collapse news from the distant past, something’s happened in Quadriga! The government of British Columbia is seeking forfeiture of $600,000 in cash, gold bars, and Rolex watches that QuadrigaCX cofounder Michael Patryn has in a safe deposit box. The RCMP alleges the items are the proceeds of unlawful activity. [Vancouver Sun]

Crypto collapse: Crypto.com’s shadow bank Transactive, US banks and crypto, Binance not so good with actual money

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

“funds are safe. we’ve done a risk assessment and found that 100% of hacks happen when someone has access to their coins, so we’re revoking that access to make them even safer”

— Boxturret

Transactive: Lithuania shuts down a money laundromat 

Crypto exchanges have trouble finding stable gateways for actual money. Proper banks won’t talk to them, so they turn to shadow banks, which cater to high-risk clients and use lots of tricks to skirt the traditional banking system.

Sometimes the exchanges just lose their gateway — and your money.

We wrote earlier about how Crypto.com customers’ euro deposits were seized by the Lithuanian government as part of an anti-money laundering enforcement action against the exchange’s payment provider, Transactive Systems UAB. Cryptadamus has a great post explaining what happened. [Substack]

If you had EUR on Crypto.com before this, it’s gone. The “EUR” you see in your account is unbacked. Work out what you can do to extract value from your outstanding balance, while Crypto.com gives you the runaround.

Transactive was also the payment channel for crypto lender Nexo, whose Bulgarian offices were recently raided by authorities. Transactive has an office in the UK as well — Transactive Systems Ltd. [Transactive]

After getting authorization from the UK Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of Lithuania to act as an electronic money institution (EMI), Transactive grew astonishingly quickly in just five years — thanks to its clientele in crypto, gambling, and forex, and whoever else they were processing money for. [Bloomberg, archive]

Given Transactive’s sordid history, it’s amazing that the FCA authorized them at all.

Transactive emerged from the rubble of PacNet Services, an international payments company that started in Vancouver. PacNet was forced to wind down after the US Treasury sanctioned it as a “transnational criminal organization” — specifically, being the middleman for mail-fraud scam artists. Several PacNet executives were charged with fraud and money laundering. [US Treasury, 2016; DOJ, 2019

A CNN investigative report from 2016 details how PacNet employees moved large piles of money around the world. PacNet set up bank accounts in the names of shell companies, they sent packages of cash labeled “legal documents,” they bribed Russian banking officials, and they even used a private plane to ferry cash to customers. [CNN, 2016]

So the money launderers left PacNet and moved over to a totally legitimate new business —Transactive, co-founded by convicted healthcare scammer Scott Roix.

In February 2022, the Bank of Lithuania fined Transactive 20,000 EUR for commingling customer and company funds. Transactive had also misreported its customer balances and its equity capital. [Lieutvos Bankas, in Lithuanian]

In January 2023, the Bank of Lithuania accused Transactive of massive money laundering and froze the company’s funds. It ordered Transactive to stop servicing clients in finance, forex, and crypto, pending a review. [Lietuvos Bankas, in Lithuanian]

Transactive notified clients about this trivial hiccup and said their funds were being “safeguarded” — a word meaning “you’ll never see your money again.” If an investigation discovers any of the money was dirty (if!), the government will seize the funds. [Reddit]

Crypto.com has told its euro-using customers that their SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) transfers are being migrated to a new provider. Now the exchange has to find a new provider.

Here are Crypto.com customers screaming into the void to get their funds back. Crypto.com has yet to tell them what actually happened to their money. [Twitter, Twitter]

Unless Crypto.com had euros stored somewhere other than Transactive Systems UAB, they are likely insolvent in EUR and will have to start from scratch, paying withdrawals with new deposits until they can somehow fill the gap — or not.

US crypto banks are out of favor

In the US, Crypto.com still banks with Silvergate, which allows their institutional clients to transfer USD from their bank accounts to the exchange. This channel may have problems in the near future, due to Silvergate’s dealings with FTX.

The US Federal Reserve really, really hates banks touching crypto and is not putting up with it even a bit — especially after Silvergate needed a $4.3 billion bailout. The Fed issued a policy statement on January 27: [Federal Reserve; Federal Reserve, PDF]

“The statement makes clear that uninsured and insured banks supervised by the Board will be subject to the same limitations on activities, including novel banking activities, such as crypto-asset-related activities.

In particular, the preamble would provide that the Board would presumptively prohibit SMBs from holding most crypto-assets as principal, and also would provide that any SMB seeking to issue a dollar token would need to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of Federal Reserve supervisors, that the bank has controls in place to conduct the activity in a safe and sound manner, and to receive a Federal Reserve supervisory nonobjection before commencing such activity.”

That second paragraph directly addresses Silvergate’s plan to revive Diem (née Facebook’s Libra) and do their own private stablecoin for retail customers. Yeah, no. Silvergate says it’s written off its Diem investment after previous regulator refusals to let them print private money, but the Fed evidently thought it was still worth emphasizing their “no.”

The US Department of Justice is investigating Silvergate over its FTX and Alameda Research dealings. FTX customers were wiring money to Alameda and to Alameda’s dubious subsidiary North Dimension via the bank, thinking that money was going directly to FTX. The DOJ wants to know what Silvergate knew, and when they knew it. [Bloomberg]

Binance: increasingly freed from the chains of filthy fiat

In the UK, the Binance crypto exchange should have no access to pounds, ever. After the Financial Conduct Authority warned in March 2022 that “in the FCA’s view, Binance Markets is not capable of being effectively supervised,” UK banks cut off direct deposit to Binance immediately. [FCA, 2022]

But Binance knows you can’t keep a dedicated gambling addict down, so they keep trying to weasel their way back into the UK’s Faster Payments network, most recently through payments processor Paysafe. Sometimes this works. Binance recommends UK customers send money in and out via Visa — but even that’s being cut off by the banks. [Twitter; CoinDesk]

Cryptadamus traces Binance’s Visa connection — Binance owns crypto debit card issuer Swipe, which it bought in 2021! Swipe also issued a crypto debit card for FTX. [Twitter; Binance; FX Empire]

Australian users also report payment issues with Binance — even via Visa. [Twitter]

In the US, Binance users say they can’t withdraw funds in amounts of less than $100,000 from American banks. Binance says that’s fake news and everything is fine. Cryptadamus has been documenting the difference between Binance’s official statements and what customers report. [Reddit]

When Bitfinex was cut off from banking in 2017, users would buy bitcoins just to get their funds out of the exchange. This drove the price of bitcoin up and may have helped trigger the 2017 crypto bubble. So all of this is good news for bitcoin!

FTX in bankruptcy

At the next FTX bankruptcy hearing on February 6, Judge John Dorsey will hear arguments for and against appointing an examiner. FTX and the Unsecured Creditors’ Committee are against hiring an examiner, but the US Trustee and various state regulators want one. John Reed Stark thinks it’s absolutely necessary. [Agenda, PDF; LinkedIn]

Brian Glueckstein of Sullivan & Cromwell for FTX filed a declaration in support of FTX’s objection to an examiner. It’s 3,855 pages of mainly exhibits. But the US Trustee wants it stricken from the record because the deadline to file was January 25, and Glueckstein filed on February 3, one business day before the hearing. Oops. [Declaration, PDF; Doc 617, PDF]

FTX is suing Voyager for repayment of $446 million of loans. After Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July, it demanded repayment of all outstanding loans to FTX and Alameda. FTX paid the money back for Alameda — but because they paid it back so close to FTX’s bankruptcy filing, FTX wants to claw it back again. [Complaint, PDF; Reuters]

In the legal case against Sam Bankman-Fried, Judge Lewis Kaplan has barred Sam from using Signal or Slack and from contacting any former FTX employees without lawyers present until February 9, when he’ll hear arguments. He wasn’t impressed when Sam reached out to a key witness, who we assume is FTX US counsel Ryne Miller, to “vet” things on the phone. [Order, PDF]

SBF’s bail conditions required two more sureties. These are now in, with their names redacted: $200,000 and $500,000. Judge Kaplan has agreed to unseal the names, but they’ll remain redacted pending possible appeals. [Bond, PDF; Bond; PDF, Memorandum Opinion, PDF]

Digital Currency Group

The second day hearing in the Genesis bankruptcy is February 22. No agenda yet. We wonder if anyone will attempt to go after Genesis’ owners, DCG. [Notice, PDF]

The Gemini crypto exchange implied to its Gemini Earn customers in 2022 that their deposits were protected by FDIC insurance, and customers took Gemini’s statements to mean they were protected by the FDIC from Genesis failing. But Gemini didn’t technically say that! So it must be fine, right? [Axios]

DCG’s crypto news site CoinDesk claimed to have prospective buyers approaching them unsolicited and offering hundreds of millions of dollars for the site. The new rumor is that the prospective buyers are looking at buying only parts of the site — the conference business or the media outlet — and certainly not at paying hundreds of millions of dollars. [Twitter]

Other good news for bitcoin

Coinbase was fined 3.3 million EUR (USD$3.6 million) by De Nederlandsche Bank for not registering as a money transmitter in the Netherlands. [Reuters

Coinbase bragged about having proper registration in September 2022. But the violation occurred in the years prior when they weren’t properly registered. [Coinbase, 2022]

MicroStrategy posts another loss. This is its eighth straight quarterly loss in a row. Before former CEO Michael Saylor started to amass bitcoin in 2020, the company had $531 million in cash. Now it’s down to $43.8 million in cash. [Bloomberg

MicroStrategy is one of the loans that Silvergate is particularly worried about. In March 2022, MicroStrategy borrowed $205 million in a three-year loan from Silvergate. The loan was collateralized with bitcoin — and Silvergate will need to worry about that too. 

Image: PacNet’s part owner Don Davis (on the left) posted on LinkedIn. Airplanes are great for moving piles of cash.

Crypto.com’s bad weekend — crypto exchanges are shaky

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

“i have a lot more respect for the binance guy, having seen a competitor stumble and taken the opportunity to very publicly shank them five or six times while they’re on the ground, under the guise of trying to help”

— infernal machines, SomethingAwful

We’re exhausted keeping up with all the good news for bitcoin.

Crypto.com didn’t have the greatest weekend. As we write this, withdrawals are clogged, but some are reported to be coming through okay.

The test an exchange faces is: can it stand a run on the bank?

The test bitcoin as a whole faces is: how will the price hold when lots of people are dumping for cash?

Number go down

After the bitcoin price had been floating at around $20,000 for several months, FTX crashed. On the day Binance reneged on its offer to buy FTX’s remains, BTC dropped below $16,000. It’s a bit above that now.

The actual dollars have gone home, and the wider crypto casino is having to pretend harder and harder that the alleged mark-to-market value of illiquid trash means anything.

Real dollars continue to disappear from crypto. Retail trading at Coinbase was down 43% in the third quarter of 2022, compared to Q2.

Reddit /r/buttcoin has a new header image

A slight case of the runs

Crypto.com is not having a great time.

The crypto markets are jittery. After the dramatic collapse of FTX, crypto holders are left shell-shocked and traumatized. They don’t trust any centralized exchange now at all.

It doesn’t take much to set the markets off. 

Despite claiming to have near-zero exposure to the fallout of FTX, over the last year, Crypto.com sent multiple very large stablecoin transfers to FTX, totaling approximately $1 billion. [Reddit, Australian Financial Review]

On November 12, crypto Twitter caught wind of the fact that Singapore-based Crypto.com and China-based Gate.io were passing funds back and forth to post stronger-looking proof of reserve statements, suggesting they didn’t have the funds they purported to have.   

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek waved it off as just a whoopsie, saying they accidentally sent $400 million of their ETH to Gate.io on October 21, instead of their cold wallets, but that Gate.io had sent the money back. Everything was fine. [Twitter, archive; WSJ]

The crypto market wasn’t buying it. Instead, the news set off an FTX-style bank run, as panicked users raced to get their funds off Crypto.com. Within hours, more than 89,000 transactions pulled customer funds out of Crypto.com wallets. You could watch it in real time on Etherscan. [Chainsaw, Twitter]

Picture old-timey cartoons of guys in a stock exchange, hats popping off their heads and cigars falling out of their mouths in shock, shouting, “SELL! SELL! SELL!” Crypto.com was like that but in basements around the world.

By Monday, the run had made mainstream international news —  Sky, AFP, and Reuters, as well as financial outlets such as Bloomberg. [SkyNews]

Crypto.com should have collapsed right then, but it didn’t. Binance bailed Crypto.com out with infusions of ETH and USDC from their “recovery fund.” Cryptocurrency just reinvented the idea of a central bank as a lender of last resort. [Twitter; Twitter; Twitter]

Of course, given what he had just done to FTX, is it really a smart idea to let CZ know you have liquidity problems?

The following day, Marszalek did an Ask-Me-Anything to reassure everyone that the funds were safe. “At no point were the funds at risk of being sent somewhere they could not be retrieved,” he said. “It had nothing to do with any of the craziness from FTX.” [YouTube

Binance also held an AMA to tell everyone that everything is fine. [Twitter; Verge]

The life and times of Kris Marszalek 

Kris Marszalek co-founded Crypto.com in 2016. It was initially called Monaco but bought the “crypto.com” domain from cryptographer Matt Blaze in 2018.

Based in Singapore, the firm has spent huge money on ad campaigns, including a $700 million deal to put its name on LA’s sports arena (formerly Staples Center) and a “Fortune Favors the Brave” Super Bowl commercial featuring Matt Damon. [GQ]

The company makes money by charging fees for trades on its smartphone app. It promises Ponzi-like yields — up to 14.5% annually, paid out in stablecoins. 

To access the higher stake yield, you have to buy Cronos (CRO), the platform’s native trader token, whose price floats freely. CRO tanked over the weekend over concerns about Crypto.com’s reserves. [BeinCrypto]  

Marszalek, 42, is a Polish-born serial entrepreneur who lives in Hong Kong. He dropped out of college and started his career selling computer equipment. He doesn’t appear to have any trading experience at all prior to Crypto.com.

You’ll be delighted to hear that Marszalek has the sort of background you want in a crypto CEO. Specifically, running a voucher sales company that collapsed in 2016 and stiffed everyone.

Founded in 2010 in Singapore, Ensogo offered Groupon-style “daily deals” and so forth. After going through multiple name changes and acquisitions, Ensogo was listed as a standalone company on the Australian Securities Exchange. It pivoted to an “open marketplace platform” in late 2015. [ASX, PDF]

By April 2016, Ensogo had closed its Malaysian office and had stopped paying merchants. The company’s first-quarter report to the ASX showed an AUD$5 million deficit, despite firing half its staff in the first quarter of 2016. It had already lost AUD$67 million in 2015. Ensogo finally stopped operations in June — leaving merchants and consumers in the lurch. One Hong Kong merchant lost HK$20,000. [Tech in Asia; Tech in Asia; Tech in Asia]

Other exchanges 

In the third quarter of 2022, US exchange Coinbase suffered “another tough quarter.” Institutional trading was down 22% and retail volume was down 43%, compared to the previous quarter. Net revenue in Q3 was $576 million, down from $803 million in Q2, and $1.2 billion the year before. The company lost $545 million in Q3, compared to a net profit of $406 million in the same period last year. [FT, archive; Shareholder letter, PDF]

In Hong Kong, AAX has suspended withdrawals. The crypto exchange had just blogged that it had no exposure to FTX and that user funds were never exposed to counterparty risk. [AAX; AAX; Coindesk]

What’s a user to do?

The FTX collapse has taken out a variety of firms across crypto, including other exchanges and crypto hedge funds. Many projects used FTX like it was a bank. So many projects are now wrecked because they treated FTX like it was a safe place to store their cryptos.

Expect more trouble and possible bankruptcies to come. People keep treating crypto exchanges as banks. They are not banks.

The hard part is: what do you do instead?  

Loud and weird crypto nerds, particularly bitcoin maxis, are saying “not your keys not your coins” again a lot.

Back in the real world, approximately 100% of crypto users are in it for the money. And that’s only achievable with the coins on an exchange, where they can actively buy and trade them.

More importantly, almost all crypto users have flat zero technical knowledge. They have no idea how any of it works. They trusted the newspaper headlines. They just about get “number go up.” They won’t be self-custodying en masse.

DeFi traders will tell you that self-custodying is the only way to do anything, but they also get rekt a whole lot.

We concur that users should treat centralized exchanges as risky places to store cryptos. The trouble is, what else to do with them? If you don’t want to do the sensible thing — i.e., dump your coins and get the heck out of crypto — you’re going to have to learn way more about how the technology works than you ever wanted to.

It’s going to suck because — despite the user-friendly Super Bowl ads — crypto is not a product. It’s a pile of wires on a lab bench. Get out your soldering iron, you’re gonna be your own bank.

The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto Crashing — a quick map of where we are and what’s ahead

Since November 2021, when Bitcoin hit its all-time high of $69,000, the original cryptocurrency has lost 70 percent of its face value. And when Bitcoin falters, it takes everything else in crypto down with it. 

The entire crypto space has been a Jenga stack of interconnected time bombs for months now, getting ever more interdependent as the companies find new ways to prop each other up.

Which company blew out first was more a question of minor detail than the fact that a blow-out was obviously going to happen. The other blocks in the Jenga stack will have a hard time not following suit. 

Here’s a quick handy guide to the crypto crash — the systemic risks in play as of June 2022. When Bitcoin slips below $20,000, we’ll officially call that the end of the 2021 bubble.

Recent disasters

TerraUSD collapse — Since stablecoins — substitutes for dollars — are unregulated, we don’t know what’s backing them. In the case of TerraUSD (UST), which was supposed to represent $18 billion … nothing was backing it. UST crashed, and it brought down a cascade of other stuff. [David Gerard; Foreign Policy; Chainalysis Report]

Celsius crumbles — Celsius was the largest crypto lender in the space, promising ridiculously high yields from implausible sources. It was only a matter of time before this Ponzi collapsed. We wrote up the inevitable implosion of Celsius yesterday. [David Gerard]

Exchange layoffs — Coinbase, Gemini, Crypto.com, and BlockFi have all announced staff layoffs. Crypto exchanges make money from trades. In a bear market, fewer people are trading, so profits go downhill. Coinbase in particular had been living high on the hog, as if there would never be a tomorrow. Reality is a tough pill. [Bloomberg; Gemini; The Verge]

Stock prices down — Coinbase $COIN, now trading at $50 a share, has lost 80% of its value since the firm went public in June 2021. The company was overhyped and overvalued.

US crypto mining stocks are all down — Bitfarms ($BITF), Hut 8 Mining ($HUT), Bit Digital ($BTBT), Canaan ($CAN), and Riot Blockchain ($RIOT). Miners have been borrowing cash as fast as possible and are finding the loans hard to pay back because Bitcoin has gone down.

UnTethering

Crypto trading needs a dollar substitute — hence the rise of UST, even as its claims of algorithmic backing literally didn’t make sense. What are the other options?

Tether — We’ve been watching Tether, the most popular and widely used stablecoin, closely since 2017. Problems at Tether could bring down the entire crypto market house of cards.

Tether went into 2020 with an issuance of 4 billion USDT, and now there are 72 billion USDT sloshing around in the crypto markets. As of May 11, Tether claimed its reserve held $83 billion, but this has dropped by several billion alleged “dollars” in the past month. There’s no evidence that $10.5 billion in actual dollars was sent anywhere, or even “$10.5 billion” of cryptos.

Tether is deeply entwined with the entire crypto casino. Tether invests in many other crypto ventures — the company was a Celsius investor, for example. Tether also helped Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange launch, and FTX is a major tether customer.

Tether’s big problem is the acerbic glare of regulators and possible legal action from the Department of Justice. We keep expecting Tether will face the same fate as Liberty Reserve did. But we were saying that in 2017. Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research said he fully expects Tether execs to end the year in handcuffs. 

Other stablecoins — Jeremy Allaire and Circle’s USDC (54 billion) claims to be backed by some actual dollars and US treasuries, and just a bit of mystery meat. Paxos’ USDP (1 billion) claims cash and treasuries. Paxos and Binance’s BUSD (18 billion) claims cash, treasuries, and money market funds.

None of these reserves have ever been audited — the companies publish snapshot attestations, but nobody looks into the provenance of the reserve. The holding companies try very hard to imply that the reserves have been audited in depth. Circle claims that Circle being audited counts as an audit of the USDC reserve. Of course, it doesn’t.

All of these stablecoins have a history of redemptions, which helps boost market confidence and gives the impression that these things are as good as dollars. They are not. 

Runs on the reserves could still cause issues — and regulators are leaning toward full bank-like regulation.

Sentiment

There’s no fundamental reason for any crypto to trade at any particular price. Investor sentiment is everything. When the market’s spooked, new problems enter the picture, such as: 

Loss of market confidence — Sentiment was visibly shaken by the Terra crash, and there’s no reason for it to return. It would take something remarkable to give the market fresh confidence that everything is going to work out just fine.

Regulation — The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve were keenly aware of the spectacular collapse of UST. Rumour has it that they’ve been calling around US banks, telling them to inspect anything touching crypto extra-closely. What keeps regulators awake at night is the fear of another 2008 financial crisis, and they’re absolutely not going to tolerate the crypto bozos causing such an event.

GBTC — Not enough has been said about Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, and how it has contributed to the rise and now the fall in the price of bitcoin. GBTC holds roughly 3.4 percent of the world’s bitcoin.  

All through 2020 and into 2021, shares in GBTC traded at a premium to bitcoin on secondary markets. This facilitated an arbitrage that drew billions of dollars worth of bitcoin into the trust. GBTC is now trading below NAV, and that arbitrage is gone. What pushed bitcoin up in price is now working in reverse.

Grayscale wants to convert GBTC into a bitcoin ETF. GBTC holders and all of crypto, really, are holding out hope for the SEC to approve a bitcoin ETF, which would bring desperately needed fresh cash into the crypto space. But the chances of this happening are slim to none.

The bitcoins are stuck in GBTC unless the fund is dissolved. Grayscale wouldn’t like to do this — but they might end up being pressured into it. [Amy Castor]

Whales breaking ranks — Monday’s price collapse looks very like one crypto whale decided to get out while there was any chance of getting some of the ever-dwindling actual dollars out from the cryptosystem. Expect the knives to be out. Who’s jumping next?

Crypto hedge funds and DeFi

Celsius operated as if it was a crypto hedge fund that was heavily into DeFi. The company had insinuated itself into everything — so its collapse caused major waves in crypto. What other companies are time bombs?

Three Arrows Capital — There’s some weird stuff happening at 3AC from blockchain evidence, and the company’s principals have stopped communicating on social media. 3AC is quite a large crypto holder, but it’s not clear how systemically intertwined they are with the rest of crypto. Perhaps they’ll be back tomorrow and it’ll all be fine. [Update: things aren’t looking good. 3AC fails to meet lender margin calls.] [Defiant; Coindesk; FT]

BlockFi — Another crypto lender promising hilariously high returns. 

Nexo — And another. Nexo offered to buy out Celsius’ loan book. But Nexo offers Ponzi-like interest rates with FOMO marketing as well, and no transparency as to how their interest rates are supposed to work out.

Swissborg — This crypto “wealth management company” has assets under management in the hundreds of millions of dollars (or “dollars”), according to Dirty Bubble Media. [Twitter thread]

Large holdings ready for release

Crypto holders have no chill whatsoever. When they need to dump their holding, they dump.

MicroStrategy — Michael Saylor’s software company has bet the farm on Bitcoin — and that bet is coming due. “Bitcoin needs to cut in half for around $21,000 before we’d have a margin call,” Phong Le, MicroStrategy’s president, said in early May. MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin stash is now worth $2.9 billion, translating to an unrealized loss of more than $1 billion. [Bloomberg]

Silvergate Bank — MicroStrategy has a $205 million loan with Silvergate Bank, collateralized with Bitcoin. Silvergate is the banker to the US crypto industry — nobody else will touch crypto. Silvergate is heavily invested in propping up the game of musical chairs. If Silvergate ever has to pull the plug, almost all of US crypto is screwed. [David Gerard]

Bitcoin miners — Electricity costs more, and Bitcoin is worth less. As the price of Bitcoin drops, miners find it harder to pay business expenses. Miners have been holding on to their coins because the market is too thin to sell the coins, and borrowing from their fellow crypto bros to pay the bills since July 2021. But some miners started selling in February 2022, and more are following. [Wired]

Mt. Gox — at some point, likely in 2022, the 140,000 bitcoins that remained in the Mt. Gox crypto exchange when it failed in 2014 are going to be distributed to creditors. Those bitcoins are going to hit the market immediately, bringing down the price of bitcoin even further.

Feature image by James Meickle, with apologies to XKCD and Karl Marx.

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News: Jennifer Robertson speaks (QuadrigaCX), BTC tumbles, Crypto.com hacked, SEC shoots down another Bitcoin ETF

“Bitcoin Widow” went on sale this week. Jennifer Robertson was busy giving interviews to promote her book. It’s the first time we’ve gotten to see her live and hear her voice.   

Robertson was married to Gerald Cotten, who ran QuadrigaCX like a Ponzi. He mysteriously died in India just before things fell apart. Robertson was clever enough to go to college and start a business, but somehow remained completely clueless when it came to her partner’s shenanigans. The lavish vacations, the houses, and private plane trips were nice, though. 

Globe and Mail interviewed Robertson. Actually, they interviewed the journalists who interviewed her. You still get to hear a little of Jen’s voice. The interview is pretty dry. No tough questions. (Globe and Mail) 

The National, CBC’s flagship current affairs program, was a lot tougher. As politely as possible, they asked why she wouldn’t simply allow Cotten’s body to be exhumed and checked to make sure it’s really him. I make an appearance on the show. (YouTube)

Matt Galloway on The Current spoke with Robertson at length. (The Current)

Galloway: “Did you ever ask why hundred dollar bills were scattered around your house?” 

Robertson:  “It was kind of a Gerry thing.”

As a follow-up to Galloway’s interview, CBC On The Coast interviewed me about QuadrigaCX and asked me what I thought about the book. Worth a listen! (CBC, My review of the book

BTC keeps falling

Bitcoin is down to $35,000 from its November record of nearly $70,000. The sell-off has outpaced that of the U.S. stock market. David Gerard opines his thoughts on what is driving down the price. (blog post)

He notes the crypto miners are holding on to their bitcoin. If they sell, they know they will crash the markets, so they’ve got to sit tight on their piles of BTC.

There are still $78 billion tethers out there. Tether hasn’t minted any new tethers in 2022, for some reason. And the Tether transparency page has a new look and feel. 

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is now trading at 28% below NAV, its lowest ever. (YCharts)

MicroStrategy stock is dropping in tandem with the price of BTC. MSTR tumbled nearly 18% this week. (And the SEC doesn’t care much for the company’s crypto accounting methods, either.) (CNBC)

Another exchange hack

Fortune favors the brave, or does it? Maybe not.

Crypto.com, the fourth largest crypto exchange, was hacked on Jan. 17 in a 2FA compromise. All told, the thieves got away with $34 million in crypto — 4,836 ETH, 443 BTC, and about $66,000 in another crypto. All funds are SAFU.

The hack was confirmed by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, but otherwise, the company has been murky on the details, noting “suspicious activities,” and referring to the event as an “incident.” (Crypto.com announcement, Techcrunch)

Crypto derivatives trading platform BitMEX aspires to become a “regulated crypto powerhouse” in Europe. Its European arm BXM Operations AG wants to purchase Bankhaus von der Heydt, a bank in Munich. BaFin, Germany’s financial watchdog, has yet to approve the transaction. The purchase price is undisclosed. (Bitmex blog, Decrypt)

Last summer, BitMEX agreed to a $100 million settlement with FinCEN and the CFTC. Regulators accused the Seychelles-based exchange of failing to maintain a compliant AML program.  

In an effort to clean up its image, BitMEX has hired former Coinbase managing director ​​Marcus Hughes as its chief risk officer. (Bitmex blog, WSJ)

Everybody still despises Binance.

Armed with fake credentials, journalist Hary Clynch went undercover to interview for a top position at Binance. Naturally, he was offered the job. Part two of his three-part story is up. (Disruption Banking)

In her latest blog post, Carol Alexander, professor of finance at Sussex, provides visual proof that price manipulation bots on Binance caused massive liquidations on July 25-26, 2021. (blog post

In public, Binance CEO CZ welcomes regulatory oversight and boasts about his sparkly AML program. Behind the scenes, he withholds information about finances and corporate structure from regulators, according to a report in Reuters.

Everything is “FUD,” says CZ. (Twitter)

Regulations

The SEC shot down a spot market Bitcoin ETF from First Trust Advisors and SkyBridge. The ETF didn’t meet “the requirement that the rules of a national securities exchange be ‘designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices’ and ‘to protect investors and the public interest,’” the regulator said.

In other words, all the things that the SEC previously objected to—wash trading, whale manipulation, mining manipulation, manipulative activity involving Tether, fraud and manipulation on exchanges, and so on—were never addressed in the proposal. (SEC, p. 15; Decrypt)

Meanwhile, in Europe, regulators are clamping down on crypto advertising.

Spain’s market regulator issued a mandate that ads for crypto assets must carry a warning that investors risk losing all their money. (Bloomberg)

In Singapore, the city-state is getting rid of bitcoin ATMs as it moves to dramatically limit consumer marketing of crypto. (Bloomberg)

In Italy, Consob, the country’s financial services regulator, has warned of risks linked to an increasing number of financially illiterate Italians investing in crypto. (FT)

And in the UK, the Treasury wants to bring advertising for the crypto industry under the same standards as other types of financial products. (Official statement, FT)  

Bitcoin miners running out of places to go

The bitcoin network consumes vast amounts of energy, mainly fossil fuels. As countries in Eastern Europe struggle to rein in electricity use in the coldest months of winter, they want the miners out. 

The Bank of Russia is doing all it can to pull the plug on crypto and make bitcoin mining and crypto trading illegal. (Bloomberg)

In Kosovo, where the government has temporarily banned bitcoin mining, miners are now rushing to get out of the business, selling their mining equipment at bargain-basement prices. (Guardian

And in the Ukraine, authorities bust another crypto mining farm illegally stealing power from the grid. (SSU)

NFTs and more NFTs

Every celebrity and big business wants to get into the NFT market, it seems.

Gamers won’t have it. They don’t like NFTs because they’re already familiar with broadly similar exploitative paid weapons, skins, loot, etc. When their favorite online games announce plans to incorporate NFTs, gamers push back. (NYT)

If only consumers would push back on this nonsense with a similar passion as gamers.

Dan Davies, author of “Lying for Money,” says gamers are more aware than most of AML compliance issues. He pointed out that Tencent shut down its online version of Call of Duty, after discovering the platform was being widely abused by criminals. (Twitter)

Scammers set up a new server at the URL previously used by Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT project, stealing over a hundred thousand dollars in ETH. (The Verge)

Flyfish Club is an exclusive NFT restaurant in New York City. When it opens in 2023, you can only enter if you buy an NFT. You still have to pay for your food in dirt fiat, because they won’t accept crypto in the establishment. Parent company Crypto VC Group has raised $14 million selling Flyfish tokens, which are being flipped on OpenSea. (Fortune

What would you expect from an NFT restaurant? Stephen Colbert investigates. (YouTube)

I see a new trend developing, and the SEC is not going to like it. BrewDAO just announced it wants to start a brewery. (Twitter)

Coinbase is teaming with Mastercard, so you can purchase NFTs with your credit card on its soon-to-launch NFT marketplace. (Coinbase blog, CNBC)

Walmart is considering creating its own crypto and selling NFTs. Of course, it is. (Bloomberg)

Meta wants to profit on NFTs as well. Facebook and Instagram are prepping a feature that will allow users to display their NFTs on their profiles. Meta is also working on a prototype for minting NFTs. (FT)

After spending $3 million on a rare Dune book, SpiceDAO is still looking for a way to justify the expense. It failed to negotiate IP rights. Now it wants to develop an entirely independent animated series. (Twitter)

RatDAO, which wants to accumulate blue-chip art, says it’s bought an unsigned Banksy print. Most DAOs I’ve looked at tend to focus on NFTs. (Twitter)

Cryptoland’s plans to buy a $12 million Fijian island have fallen through. The real estate agent selling Nananu-i-cake said the contract to sell it to Cryptoland’s backers fell through and the island is back on the market. Here is the listing, in case you’re interested. (Guardian)

One Jan. 18, Cryptoland founders Max Olivier and Helena López did an AMA. Molly White uploaded it to YouTube. It’s hysterical if you can stand to listen. If not, Molly has threaded the highlights.

Wikipedia editors have voted not to classify NFTs as art, sparking outrage in the crypto community. Beeple and Pak will not be included on its list of the most expensive art sales by living artists. (Artnet)

A women-led NFT project, Famed Lady Squad, is actually being led by guys, the same guys who are behind a bunch of failed NFT projects. (Input magazine

Other interesting bits

President Nayib Bukele, thinking Moody’s had downgraded El Salvador’s credit rating, said he “DGAF.” It turns out, Moody’s had not downgraded his country’s credit rating. Moody’s has rated El Salvador Caa1, a very high credit risk, since a downgrade in July. (Bloomberg)

Crypto media outlet CoinDesk is offering employees an equivalent of stock in its parent company DCG, which has its hands in hundreds of crypto companies. David Gerard notes that DCG has a history of pressuring CoinDesk employees to pump company interests. (Blog post) 

VC firm A16z wants more money for crypto investments. It’s seeking another $4.5 billion—more than double than what it raised less than a year ago. VCs are fueling the boom in everything crypto. (FT

MetaMask founder Dan Finlay acknowledges they’ve failed to remedy an IP address leak vulnerability that’s been “widely known for a long time.” (Twitter)

A flood of crypto rich are moving to Puerto Rico for the tax breaks, driving up real estate prices and making the natives unhappy (CNBC)

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Elon Musk exchange tweets about synthetic wombs. (Twitter)

Dan Olsen posted a two-hour YouTube video explaining NFTs and the problems with blockchain in general. The video is going viral. (YouTube)

Martin Walker explains Web 3.0 in a 20-minute interview. (YouTube)

Crypto promoters often tell us it’s still “early days.” Molly White says the nauseating phrase sounds like it’s coming from people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme. (blog post)

Stephen Diehl has a great take on Web3, if you haven’t read it yet. (blog post)

Cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. (Jacobin

Fais Khan illustrates that Coinbase Ventures-backed coins tend to underperform bitcoin after an initial pop on crypto exchange Coinbase—when the VCs cash out. (blog post)

Laura Shin’s book “Cryptopians” is coming out next month. It’s nearly 500 pages long. Public Affairs is the publisher. If you don’t have the time to read it, Patrick McGinty, who teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University, wrote up a great review. (Baffler)

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