Tag: Cynthia Lummis

Crypto collapse: Mt Gox payouts, Tether hooks up the feds, SEC says no to Coinbase, crypto media mergers

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

It’s not over until withdrawals are temporarily paused due to unusual market activity.

— Jacob Silverman

Tightening Tether’s tethers

Tether’s been under some regulatory heat after the reports of how useful USDT is for financing terrorists and other sanctioned entities. Even Cynthia Lummis, the crypto-pumping senator from Wyoming, loudly declared that Tether had to be dealt with.

The US government isn’t entirely happy with Tether’s financial shenanigans. But they’re really unhappy about sanctions violations, especially with what’s going on now in the Middle East. 

So Tether has announced that it will now be freezing OFAC-sanctioned blockchain addresses — and it’s onboarded the US Secret Service and FBI onto Tether! [Tether, archive; letter, PDF, archive]

Tether doesn’t do anything voluntarily. We expect they were told that they would allow this or an extremely large hammer would come down upon them.

There’s more to Tether’s criminal use case than sanctions violation. The most jaw-dropping chapter in Zeke Faux’s excellent book Number Go Up (US, UK) is when he traced a direct message scammer to a human trafficking operation in Cambodia that favored tethers as its currency. South China Morning Post follows up on this with an in-depth report on how Cambodian organized crime uses tethers. [SCMP]

Credit rating firm S&P Global rated eight stablecoins for risk. Tether and Dai got the lowest marks. S&P notes in particular the lack of information on Tether’s reserves. [press release; S&P; Tether report, PDF]

At least some of the claimed Tether backing in treasuries is held in the US with Cantor Fitzgerald — exposing Tether to US touchability. This has been known since February 2023, and was proudly confirmed in December 2023 by Cantor CEO Howard Lutnick: “I hold their Treasuries, and they have a lot of Treasuries. I’m a big fan of Tethers.” [Ledger Insights; Forbes]

Cointelegraph had a fascinating story on a company called Exved using tethers for cross-border payments from Russia! Then they deleted it, for some reason. Exved was founded by Sergey Mendeleev, who also founded the OFAC-sanctioned crypto exchange Garantex, which was kicked out of Estonia. Exved is working with InDeFi Bank, another Mendeleev venture. We’re not so sure the new OFAC-compliant Tether will be 100% on board with this. [Cointelegraph, archive; Telegram, in Russian; Protos]

SEC answers Coinbase’s prayers: “No.”

In July 2022 — just after crypto crashed — Coinbase wrote to the SEC proposing new regulatory carveouts for crypto.

The SEC took its sweet time responding. Eventually, Coinbase sued in April 2023 with a writ of mandamus, demanding a bureaucratic response. The court told the SEC to get on with it, or at least supply a date by which it would answer.

Finally, the SEC has responded: “the Commission concludes that the requested rulemaking is currently unwarranted and denies the Petition.” The SEC thinks existing securities regulations cover crypto securities just fine, and there’s no reason for special rules for Coinbase. [SEC rejection, PDF; Coinbase letter to court, PDF; Gensler statement]

Coinbase general counsel Paul Grewal welcomed the opportunity to challenge Coinbase’s dumb and bad proposal being turned down. [Twitter, archive]

4 (continued)

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao will not be returning home to Dubai anytime soon. US District Judge Richard Jones ordered CZ to remain in the US until his sentencing on February 24. He can travel within the US, but he cannot leave. [Order, PDF] 

After being busted hard, Binance is still behaving weird. At the FT Crypto and Digital Assets Summit in London, the exchange’s new CEO Richard Teng refused to answer even basic questions, like where Binance is headquartered and whether it’s had an audit. “Why do you feel so entitled to those answers?” Teng said when pushed. “Is there a need for us to share all of this information publicly? No.” [FT]

CZ and Binance have been trying to dismiss the SEC charges against them. This is mostly loud table pounding, wherein Binance claims that what the SEC argued were securities are not really securities. [Doc 190, PDF, Doc 191, PDF]

France was the first country in Europe to grant Binance regulatory approval. State-endorsed blockchain courses for the unemployed and NFT diplomas helped push the country’s most vulnerable into crypto. Since the collapse of FTX and Binance’s $4.3 billion fine for money laundering, French President Emmanuel Macron’s relationship with CZ has fallen under scrutiny. [FT, archive]

London law firm Slateford helped to cover up Binance’s crimes and attempted to intimidate media outlet Disruption Banking from writing about Binance’s sloppy compliance hiring practices. (Disruption Banking told Slateford to get knotted and didn’t hear from them again.) [Disruption Banking]

Binance is finally removing all trading pairs against Great British pounds. [Binance, archive]

FTX: The IRS wants its money

FTX filed a reorganization plan in mid-December. The plan is 80 pages and the disclosure statement is 138 pages, but there’s a notable lack of detail on what happens next. None of the talk of starting a new exchange has made it into the current plan — this appears to just be a liquidation.

The plan treats crypto claims as their value in cash at the time of the bankruptcy filing on November 11, 2022, back when bitcoin was at $17,000 — less than half of what it is now.

Creditors will vote on the plan in 2024. The court must approve the plan before it is implemented. [Bloomberg, archive; Plan, PDF; Disclosure statement, PDF]

The IRS is demanding $24 billion in unpaid taxes from the corpse of FTX. John Jay Ray wants to know how the IRS came up with that ludicrous number — the exchange never earned anything near those amounts. The IRS originally wanted $44 billion, but brought the number down. Judge John Dorsey has told the IRS to show its working. [Doc 4588, PDF; Bloomberg, paywalled]

Three Arrows Capital

Three Arrows Capital was the overleveraged crypto hedge fund that blew up in 2022 and took out everyone else in crypto who hadn’t already been wrecked by Terra-Luna. After months of dodging culpability, co-founder Zhu Su was finally arrested in Singapore in September as he was trying to skip the country. 

Zhu was released from jail and appeared before the Singapore High Court on December 13, where he had to explain to lawyers for the liquidator Teneo what happened when 3AC went broke. The information will be shared with creditors. [Bloomberg, archive]

A British Virgin Islands court froze $1.1 billion in assets of Zhu and his co-founder Kyle Davies and Davies’ wife Kelly Chen. [The Block]

Teneo expects a 46% recovery rate for 3AC creditors on $2.7 billion in claims. [The Block]

Crypto media in the new Ice Age

Crypto news outlet Decrypt has merged with “decentralized media firm” Rug Radio. No, we’d never heard of them either. The two firms will form a new holding company chaired by Josh Quittner. Decrypt had spun out from Consensys in May 2022, just before everything crashed. It’s reportedly been profitable since then — though crypto sites always say that. [Axios; Axios, 2022] 

Forkast News in Hong Kong has merged with NFT data provider CryptoSlam and fired most of its staff. Forkast was founded in 2018 by former Bloomberg News anchor Angie Lau; it shut down editorial operations on November 30. [The Block] 

Crypto news outlets ran seriously low on cash in 2019 and 2020, just before the crypto bubble, and they’re struggling again. We expect more merges and buyouts of top-tier (such as that is in crypto) and mid-tier crypto outlets. We predict news quality will decline further.

Amy recalls the old-style crypto media gravy train and eating in five-star restaurants every night in Scotland and London while embedded with Cardano in 2017. Thanks, Charles! Nocoining doesn’t pay nearly as well, but these days crypto media doesn’t either. There’s probably a book in those Cardano stories that nobody would ever read.

Regulatory clarity

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, which monitors domestic and international regulatory proposals, wants more US legislation to control crypto. FSOC’s 2023 annual report warns of dangers from:

crypto-asset price volatility, the market’s high use of leverage, the level of interconnectedness within the industry, operational risks, and the risk of runs on crypto-asset platforms and stablecoins. Vulnerabilities may also arise from token ownership concentration, cybersecurity risks, and the proliferation of platforms acting outside of or out of compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Yeah, that about covers it. FSOC recommends (again) that “Congress pass legislation to provide for the regulation of stablecoins and of the spot market for crypto-assets that are not securities.” [Press release; annual report, PDF]

IOSCO, the body of international securities regulators, released its final report on how to regulate DeFi, to go with its November recommendations on crypto markets in general. IOSCO’s nine recommendations for DeFi haven’t changed from the draft version — treat these like the instruments they appear to be, and pay attention to the man behind the curtain. These are recommendations for national regulators, not rules, but look at the DeFi task force — this was led by the US SEC. [IOSCO press release, PDF; IOSCO report, PDF]

London-based neobank Revolut is suspending UK crypto services — you can no longer buy crypto with the app — citing a new raft of FCA regulations, which go into force on January 8. [CityAM; CoinDesk]

Crypto exchange KuCoin has settled with New York. The NY Attorney General charged KuCoin in March for violating securities laws by offering security tokens — including tether — while not registering with NYAG. KuCoin has agreed to pay a $22 million fine — $5.3 million going to the NYAG and $16.77 million to refund New York customers. KuCoin will also leave the state. [Stipulation and consent order, PDF; Twitter, archive] 

Montenegro plans to extradite Terraform Labs cofounder Do Kwon to either the US or South Korea, where he is wanted on charges related to the collapse of Terra’s stablecoin. Kwon was arrested in Montenegro in March. Originally it looked like Montenegro was going to pass him off to the US, but the case has been handed back to the High Court for review. [Bloomberg, archive; Sudovi, in Montenegrin]

Anatoly Legkodymov of the Bitzlato crypto exchange, a favorite of the darknet markets, has pleaded guilty in the US to unlicensed money transmission. Legkodymov was arrested in Miami back in January. He has agreed to shut down the exchange. [Press release]

The SEC posted a new investor alert on crypto securities with a very lengthy section on claims of proof of reserves and how misleading these can be. [Investor.gov; Twitter, archive] 

Santa Tibanne

It’s been nearly ten years, but Mt. Gox creditors are reportedly starting to receive repayments — small amounts in Japanese yen via PayPal. [Cointelegraph; Twitter, archive] 

Some payouts are apparently bitcoin payouts — with the creditors not receiving a proportionate share of the remaining bitcoins, but instead the yen value of the bitcoins when Mt. Gox collapsed in February 2014. This means a 100% recovery for creditors! — but much less actual money.

There are still 140,000 bitcoins from Mt. Gox waiting to be released. If payouts are made in bitcoins and not just yen, we expect that claimants will want to cash out as soon as possible. This could have adverse effects on the bitcoin price.

Trouble down t’ pit

In the Celsius Network bankruptcy, Judge Martin Glenn has approved the plan to start a “MiningCo” bitcoin miner with some of the bankruptcy estate. He says that “the MiningCo Transaction falls squarely within the terms of the confirmed Plan and does not constitute a modification.” [Doc 4171, PDF]

Bitcoin miners are racing to buy up more mining equipment before bitcoin issuance halves in April or May 2024. Here’s to the miners sending each other broke as fast as possible [FT, archive] 

Riot Platforms subsidiary Whinstone sent its private security to Rhodium Enterprise’s plant in Rockdale, Texas, to remove Rhodium employees and shut down their 125MW bitcoin mining facility. The two mining companies have been brawling over an energy agreement they had made before prices went up. [Bitcoin Magazine]

More good news for bitcoin

The UK is setting up a crypto hub! ’Cos that’s definitely what the UK needs, and not a working economy or something. [CoinDesk]

Liquid is a bitcoin sidechain set up by Blockstream at the end of 2018. It was intended for crypto exchange settlement, to work around the blockchain being unusably slow. It sees very little use — “On a typical day, there are more tweets about Liquid than there are transactions on its network.” [Protos] 

A16z, Coinbase, and the Winklevoss twins say they’ve raised $78 million as part of a new push to influence the 2024 elections. [Politico] 

Little-known fact: coiners can donate to the PAC in tethers. All they have to do is send them via an opaque Nevada trust structure to hide the origins of the funds. And this is perfectly legal! [FPPC, PDF, p. 85, “nonmonetary items”]

Ahead of the SEC’s deadline to rule on a bitcoin ETF, Barry Silbert, CEO of Digital Currency, has quietly stepped down from the board of DCG subsidiary and ETF applicant Grayscale and is no longer chairman, according to a recent SEC filing. Silbert will be replaced by Mark Shifke, the current DCG senior vice president of operations. US regulators are suing DCG over the Gemini Earn program co-run by its subsidiary Genesis. [Form 8-K]

Ordinals are an exciting new way to create NFTs on bitcoin! ’Cos who doesn’t want that? The bitcoin blockchain immediately clogged when it was actually used for stuff. Now TON, the blockchain that is totally not Telegram’s, no, no no, has ordinals — and it’s getting clogged too. [The Block]

Image: Mark Karpeles with aggrieved bitcoin trader outside Mt. Gox in Tokyo in 2014.

Posted on by Amy Castor 1

News: MicroStrategy needs more cowbell, Tether surpasses $34B, those laser eyes, Tether collapse doomsday scenario

I nearly ventured to Austin Wednesday, but my flight was canceled due to the storm, havoc, and general disaster in the area. I found another flight later in the day and was headed out the door, when I thought, nah. Turned out to be a good decision, since I probably wouldn’t have survived more than a day without wifi.

Last week, Tether issued another 2.2 billion tethers, so you can buy bitcoin with real cash at a higher price. As of today, Feb. 21, there are now $34 billion worth of tethers in circulation—all backed by Tether’s good word. Oh, and they just printed another 800 million this morning.

More lulz for Mr. Musk—this time a double entendre.

Bitcoin is over $57,000. Why? Because it is a Ponzi scheme, and people who put their money into a Ponzi or MLM scheme get excited when numbers go up because they think they are getting hilariously rich. When bitcoin reached $1 trillion market cap earlier this week, it was an occasion for celebration in the bitcoin world. All of the bitcoiners on Twitter gave themselves laser eyes—in the hopes of pushing bitcoin to $100,000—and posted pictures of raw, juicy steaks.

Market cap, as I have explained, is a delusional number when it comes to crypto. A trillion-dollar market cap assumes everyone who owns bitcoin bought it for $55,000 and could sell it for that. That is nowhere near the truth. Many bitcoiners bought bitcoin for a fraction of what it is today. And if everyone sold at once, the market would collapse. It’s all fantasy.

My weekly reminder that I have a Patreon account. Thank you to my new patrons, who pushed me up over $600 last week. You can subscribe for as little as $5 a month. It’s like buying me a beer or a latte every four weeks.

Okay, let’s talk about bitcoin’s newest crazy god, who also has laser eyes on his Twitter profile.

MicroStrategy: More cowbell

Every single day, MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor is on Twitter—or elsewhere—shilling bitcoin. This has literally been his new day job since he staked the future of his entire company and his reputation on “number go up.” His tweets are bizarre and often make no sense. Lately, he has been taking random quotes from famous people and attributing them to bitcoin.

In his latest move, Saylor has taken MicroStrategy deeper down the debt hole. Last week, the company sold $1.05 billion in convertible senior notes, which it plans to invest in more bitcoin. The notes mature in February 2027. (Decrypt, MicroStrategy PR)

This is on top of the firm’s $650 million bond offering in December, which MicroStrategy also used to buy bitcoin. Those notes mature in December 2025. The company owns 72,000 bitcoin per a February regulatory filing. And don’t forget, Saylor has his own personal stash of bitcoin, though we don’t know how much he still has—or if he was selling when MicroStrategy was buying.

If the price of bitcoin collapses, MicroStrategy could literally go bankrupt. But remember, Saylor owns 70% of the company’s voting stock, so he calls the shots. The other MicroStrategy board members can only sit back and watch in horror.

Big companies buying bitcoin and putting them into cold storage means more bitcoin getting pulled out of circulation so that the already small supply of circulating bitcoin grows smaller and the market becomes easier for whales to manipulate—even if those whales bought their hoards of BTC via alias accounts funded with tethers.

So what if MicroStrategy puts another $1 billion into bitcoin and Tesla buys $1.5 billion worth? Tether issues that much fake money in a week. Meanwhile, all the real cash in bitcoin goes out the door as miners sell their 900 newly-minted bitcoin per day for fiat. Bitcoin itself generates no revenue. It’s simply investor money going in one end and out the other.

Jorge Stolfi, a Brazilian computer scientist, estimates that the accumulative amount that bitcoin investors have lost so far is at least $15 billion. When you invest in bitcoin, you immediately lose money, just like all those who invested in Bernie Madoff’s fund, though they went on for years thinking they were making money.

NYAG / Bitfinex—status update

We should be hearing something soon on the New York attorney general’s investigation into Bitfinex/Tether, but probably nothing big, or earth moving—not yet at least.

Bitfinex’s law firm Steptoe filed a letter on Jan. 19, saying Bitfinex/Tether needed more time to send in their documents. Here is what they said exactly: “We will plan to next contact the Court in approximately 30 days to either provide a final status update or to schedule a conference with the Court to discuss any open items.”

The office of the attorney general still has to take a position on the material it receives, and Bitfinex boasted that it had spammed them with some 2.5 million documents. My guess is that Bitfinex, like failed Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, hasn’t kept accurate records of their financial dealings and they are flying by the seat of their pants. Quadriga operator Gerald Cotten kept no books, commingled funds, and viewed customer money as his personal slush fund.

Tether doomsday scenario

Some people—Nouriel Roubini in particular—have predicted that Tether will get taken down this year, though it will take a much larger effort than the NY AG alone. Still, what will happen if Tether’s operators are arrested and its bank accounts seized? If Tether collapses, we may see something like the following unfold:

  • Panic ensues on offshore exchanges, like Binance and Huobi, as traders begin dumping USDT and buying up BTC at any price.
  • The price of BTC on banked vs. unbanked exchanges begins to diverge. BTC goes up on unbanked exchanges and drops on banked exchanges, like Coinbase, as people start selling their BTC for cash en masse.
  • Banked exchanges face liquidity crises as they can’t keep up with withdrawals. We start to see system outages and paused trading—similar to what happened with Robinhood on Jan. 28.
  • The price of BTC collapses to the point where bitcoin miners cannot pay their monstrous power bills.
  • At some point, the bitcoin hash rate will drop, and bitcoin will go into a death spiral. When miners can’t pay their electric bills, they unplug from the network. This leaves bitcoin vulnerable to attacks, and the virtual currency becomes worthless.

Mind you, bitcoin will never die off completely. Unlike other Ponzi schemes, which disappear when they collapse, bitcoin will spring back to life from time to time. This is the fourth—and by far the biggest—bitcoin bubble since 2009.

Bitcoin’s sick energy consumption

After Tesla announced it bought 1.5 billion worth of BTC, bitcoin’s grotesque energy consumption has come under fire. Based on some estimates, the network consumes as much energy as the entire country of Argentina with 45 million people. Christmas lights are literally a more productive use of electricity to bring joy to people’s lives than bitcoin. (This is a joke. In 2018, bitcoiners claimed that Christmas lights consumed more energy than bitcoin.)

Bitcoiners like to argue this is all green energy, but that is simply not true. Two-thirds of bitcoin mining is based in China, a country that relies heavily on coal-fired electricity. Some miners in the Sichuan province get power from hydro, but only during the wet season. The rest of the time, they turn to fossil fuels. (My blog)

And for those still claiming bitcoin uses clean energy, Trolly had a few more points to add: 

  • The Three Gorges Dam—a gargantuan structure straddling the Yangtze River in China’s Hubei province—has long been criticized for its environmental impact and displacement of two million people. The dam generated a record 112 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020. According to Digiconomist, bitcoin consumes 79 TWh of electricity per year—more than half that.
  • You need one million Bitmain’s Antminer 19s Pros to reach the current bitcoin hashrate of 110M TH/s. That means there are at least one million nodes on the bitcoin network—more if miners are using Bitmain’s outdated S17 model. These machines are good for two years max before they get tossed into landfills and replaced with more efficient ASIC rigs.
  • Bitcoin processes 300,000 transactions per day. The all-in cost of a single bitcoin transaction is $20 for infrastructure and $40 for electricity. Miners currently break even when the BTC price is $20,000. (That’s based on energy and other costs.)

Coinbase behind Tesla’s BTC purchase

Coinbase facilitated Tesla’s recent $1.5 billion purchase of bitcoin, according to The Block. An unidentified source told the outlet that the San Francisco-based crypto exchange made the purchase on behalf of Tesla over the course of several days in early February. The price of BTC in the first week of Feb. was around $38,000.

Similar to how it helped MicroStrategy make its big BTC purchase, Coinbase broke up Tesla’s order into small pieces and routed those to over-the-counter trading desks to minimize the impact on the overall bitcoin market.**

Coinbase wrote up a case study on how it bought bitcoin for MicroStrategy.

Motley Fool’s ship of fools

Another ship of fools has headed off to sea.

The Motley Fool is a private financial and investing advice company based in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s been around since 1993, so you would think they actually do their due diligence. Apparently not. Also, regular folks rely on them for sage investment advice, which is why I was shocked to learn Motley Fool was putting $5 million into bitcoin. (Fool announcement)

Motley Fool justified the investment with these three reasons:

  1. We believe it will store value more effectively than gold over the long term.
  2. We believe it may become a medium for transactions, as/if pricing stabilizes in the decade ahead.
  3. We believe it can act as a productive hedge against inflation.

All three reasons are blitheringly stupid. Medium for transactions? If the price stabilizes in the future? Name one time in the past decade where the price of bitcoin has stabilized. As I explained earlier, the more people who hodl bitcoin, the less stable it becomes. It will never be a stable asset. And you can’t call bitcoin a “store of value” if you get only 20% of what you paid for it.

At least one sensible Motley Fool contributor explained why investing in bitcoin is a horrible idea.

GameStop hearing #1

I spent two hours on Thursday watching the first half of a five-hour GameStop House Financial Services Committee hearing. Most of the questions were not that interesting. This is the first of three hearings. I’m not sure I can watch anymore, unless someone from the SEC, such as Gary Gensler, joins in on the questioning.

The nut is that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev apologized to his users for stopping customer trading during the peak of the madness, but says he wasn’t colluding with hedge funds. “We don’t answer to hedge funds,” he said. “We serve the millions of small investors who use our platform every day to invest.” (NPR)

He also would not admit there was a liquidity problem when he limited trades in January.

David Portnoy doesn’t like Vlad’s hair. He thinks it makes him look untrustworthy.

And Keith Gill (Roaring Kitty), who made $48 million from a $53,000 investment in GameStop, came off as a likable, honest guy. Although, he may need those profits to defend himself against at least one proposed class-action. (Complaint)

Other newsy bits

Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) added laser eyes to her Twitter profile pic, confounding the political press and turning bitcoiners into a bunch of cooing babies (Slate)

A few years ago, the SEC shut down the entirely fraudulent ICO market. A sudden shutdown of the DeFi money market (DMM) may be the start of the next regulatory wave. (David Gerard)

The U.S. Treasury Department accused crypto payments platform BitPay of facilitating over 2,100 transactions with individuals in sanctioned nations. BitPay will pay $500,000 to settle the charges. (Coindesk, enforcement notice)

JP Morgan calls Tether an unbacked wildcat bank. “A sudden loss of confidence in USDT would likely generate a severe liquidity shock to Bitcoin markets, which could lose access to by far the largest pools of demand and liquidity,” analysts said. (Bloomberg)

FTX, one of Tether’s biggest customers, claims on Twitter that its volume and customer numbers are real. All you need is an email to set up an account—no KYC for tier 0, 1 accounts with up to $9,000 USD daily withdrawal,* which means anyone can set up any number of alias accounts. Trading volume is a meaningless number due to robot trading and probably wash trading.

Stephen Diehl on Bitcoin mining: “The Crypto Chernobyl.” (blog post)

BitMEX’s Arthur Hayes—who was indicted in October and is still at large—has resurfaced to argue the Robinhood shutdown was orchestrated by financial elites. This is a sign that retail investors should buy crypto, he said. (Cointelegraph) (Tweet)

*Updated to note FTX has no KYC on both tier 0, 1 accounts. In an earlier version of this newsletter, I said you did not need KYC to withdraw up to $1,000. But it’s actually up to $9,000 per day for high-volume accounts.

**Updated March 2: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Coinbase routed the Tesla order to OTC desks, so as not to “crash” the price of BTC. This is incorrect. A large order would lift the market. Story has been altered to reflect that.

Feature image: Ship of fools depicted in a 1549 German woodcut

Posted on by Amy Castor 9