Tag: Elizabeth Warren

Silvergate settles with SEC, DFPI, and Federal Reserve over FTX money laundering

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate — it’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies. — Sam Bankman-Fried

Silvergate Bank, of La Jolla, California, was the main US dollar bank for crypto exchanges from 2017 to 2022. The Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) operated 24/7 — not just during normal banking hours — and was essential to US dollar crypto and inter-exchange liquidity. By 2021, 58% of Silvergate deposits were from crypto firms.

After crypto crashed in May 2022, Silvergate got broker and broker. FTX crashed in November 2022, and panicked Silvergate customers withdrew $8.1 billion. The bank had to unload assets, realizing ghastly losses. In March 2023, Silvergate finally announced it would be unwinding.

The assorted regulators promptly dived in to work out what on earth had happened here. They’re finally applying penalties. Also, they’re all still extremely annoyed about FTX.

The SEC rap sheet

The SEC is suing Silvergate for making false or misleading claims to investors — the bank’s holding company, Silvergate Capital Corporation, was publicly traded (NYSE:SI) — about Silvergate’s anti-money-laundering compliance on the SEN. [Press release; Complaint, PDF; Docket]

The complaint also names former CEO Alan Lane, former COO Kathleen Fraher, and former CFO Antonio Martino as defendants.

Silvergate has agreed to pay the SEC $50 million in civil penalties for misleading investors post-FTX.

Lane and Fraher also agreed to settlements — $1 million and $250,000 respectively — and a five-year ban on serving as officers or directors of a public company. 

Martino was accused of lying to investors about the bank’s solvency. He maintains his innocence. He has not agreed to settlements and plans to challenge the SEC in court. [Bloomberg, archive]

The Fed and DFPI rap sheet

The Federal Reserve and California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) have also brought state and federal charges against Silvergate. [DFPI; Consent order, PDF]

The only detail in the consent order of the Fed and DFPI’s concern is regarding Silvergate’s SEN:

An investigation by the Department identified deficiencies with respect to Silvergate’s monitoring of internal transactions.

Silvergate has agreed to pay $63 million to settle — $20 million to the DFPI and $43 million to the Federal Reserve Board. The $50 million SEC fine will be offset by this settlement — if Silvergate pays these penalties, it won’t have to pay the SEC as well.

What happens in the SEN stays in the SEN

Crypto firms flocked to Silvergate for its Silvergate Exchange Network. Unlike bank wires, SEN let crypto exchanges move dollars between exchanges at all hours of the day, including nights and weekends.

From 2017 to 2021, deposits from crypto customers grew from $770 million to $14.1 billion. Between April 2021 and September 2022, SEN processed more than $1 trillion of transactions.

Silvergate claimed in its original 2019 S-1 filing that it had “proprietary compliance capabilities,” which constituted “policies, procedures and controls designed to specifically address the digital currency industry.”

Before April 2021, Silvergate had an automated monitoring system (ATMS-A) that was part manual. The system would trigger an alert for suspicious activity, and the bank’s compliance staff would review and track transactions on a spreadsheet.

But in April 2021, the bank switched to a new system, ATMS-B, that was fully automated. ATMS-B just … didn’t bother checking transactions on the SEN!

The coverage assessment concluded that ATMS-B had not been monitoring SEN transactions “as expected because [ATMS-B] does not consider internal transfers as risky activity within any financial crime typologies.”

SEN was a speakeasy, a money laundromat. Just what FTX and the wider crypto bubble needed!

Silvergate’s previous BSA compliance officer warned Fraher repeatedly that the Federal Reserve Board would likely be unsatisfied with the bank’s AML monitoring system, or lack thereof. The Fed and the DFPI told Lane and Fraher that Silvergate’s AML monitoring was indeed inadequate.

In its 2021 SEC 10-K filing, the bank touted “the enhanced procedures” of its compliance program. The same statements were repeated in its 2022 10-Q — even though Silvergate’s SEN hadn’t had automated monitoring in 15 months. 

Silvergate and FTX

FTX declared bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. Rumor had it that FTX had been laundering customer money via Silvergate — which it indeed had — and a bank run ensued.

Just after FTX collapsed, a Silvergate compliance staff analysis found 300 suspicious transactions by FTX-related entities from January 2022 until November 2022:

Most troubling to the BSA staff was the trend of funds that flowed from FTX’s custodial accounts — which held FTX customer funds — to a series of non-custodial FTX-related entities’ accounts, followed by transfers of these funds to other third parties — either through the SEN or to accounts external to the Bank. 

Despite knowing that FTX alone had run up $9 billion in suspicious transfers, Lane continued to assure the public that everything was just fine and Silvergate had a robust AML system. On November 30, 2022, he told CNBC Squawk on the Street:

Again, we built this business compliance first. We satisfy all the regulatory requirements. And we have also, in the past, we have offboarded customers if we see activity that is inconsistent and if they can’t correct it or can’t explain it, then we offboard those customers. 

On December 5, 2022, Lane posted a letter, which Fraher approved, on Twitter and LinkedIn, stating:

Silvergate conducted significant due diligence on FTX and its related entities including Alameda Research, both during the onboarding process and through ongoing monitoring, in accordance with our risk management policies and procedures and the requirements outlined above.

All of these claims were false. What’s more, the SEC says Lane and Fraher knew the claims were false.

Senators Elizabeth Warren, John Kennedy, and Roger Marshall issued a public letter demanding a better explanation of Silvergate’s role in FTX. 

Silvergate’s CEO Alan Lane replied that the bank monitored transactions for every account and had “conducted significant due diligence on FTX and its related entities, including Alameda Research, both during the on-boarding process and through ongoing monitoring, in accordance with our risk management policies and procedures.” 

All of these claims were false too.

Whoops, liquidity!

On September 30, 2022, Silvergate had approximately $12 billion in deposits. By December 31, 2022, deposits had dropped to $3.9 billion.

By the end of 2022, the regulators told Silvergate it needed sufficient cash to cover its crypto asset customers’ deposits. Silvergate borrowed $4.3 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (FHLB).

Silvergate also issued brokered certificates of deposit (BCDs). By December 31, 2022, Silvergate reported $2.4 billion in BCD liabilities.

But interest rates were going up. This pushed many of Silvergate’s securities into an unrealized loss position. From September 30 to December 31, Silvergate’s securities holdings plummeted from $11.4 billion to just $5.7 billion. 

Borrowing to cover debts

We wrote before about how Silvergate was unable to file its 2022 10-K on time and that its auditor had refused to sign off on the Q4 2022 accounts. This complaint fills in some of the gaps.

The SEC says that Martino understated Silvergate’s losses and misrepresented that the bank remained well-capitalized at the end of 2022. According to the complaint, he “engaged in a fraudulent scheme to mislead investors about the bank’s dire financial condition.” 

Martino knew that the bank had borrowed billions of dollars in 2022 via BCDs, which were due in January and February 2023.

Martino approved a January 17, 2023, earnings release stating that Silvergate expected to sell $1.7 billion of securities in Q1 2023 — of which it had already sold $1.5 billion. This would leave just $200 million more to sell by March 31. But Silvergate sold another $1 billion in that quarter — because there was no other viable source of funding to cover the previous quarter’s BCDs.

The SEC alleges that the earnings release “falsely reported” how the $1.7 billion was calculated, understated losses on the sales, and overstated a leverage metric. It also alleges that Martino made “false or misleading” statements on Silvergate’s Q4 2022 earnings call, falsified financial statements, and failed to maintain accounting controls.

What does this mean?

The SEC suit is about lying to investors. The Federal Reserve and the California DFPI action is about money laundering. But it’s all really about FTX.

The message for other banks is: don’t pull any more SEN-like arrangements without close monitoring. Don’t set up a money laundromat for your high rollers. Don’t let in customers like FTX. Beware of crypto.

You might have thought Silvergate was already scorched earth — but with a sufficiently awful public disaster, there’s always room for more scorching.

Also, don’t lie to your investors. Remember: everything is securities fraud.

Posted on by Amy Castor 1

Tether and sanctions: what’s coming for Paolo’s beautiful launderette

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Tether has long played financial shell games to keep its dollar stablecoin USDT up and running. It’s also been happy to ignore money laundering laws for most of its existence.

But we think Tether’s day of reckoning is on the horizon due to USDT’s latest use case: sanctions evasion.

How sanctions work

The international financial sanctions system, led by the US and Europe, aims to cut off cash flows to serious bad actors — terrorists, enemy countries, major criminals, and so on.

As Congressman Juan Vargas told Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook in the Libra hearings: “The dollar is very important to us as a tool of American power and also a tool of American values. So we would much prefer to put sanctions on a country than send our soldiers there.”

The US regards the power of the dollar and the sanctions system as part of the national defense. Sanctions are taken very seriously. 

The Office of Foreign Assets Control at the US Treasury keeps a list of sanctioned individuals, countries, and companies. [OFAC]

Doing business with an OFAC-sanctioned entity is a strict liability offense that can result in massive fines. That hasn’t stopped Tether.

Use case for Tether: North Korea, Hamas, Russia

Tether’s sanction violations started hitting the papers two years ago. 

In August 2022, the US sanctioned Tornado Cash — the favorite crypto mixer of North Korea’s Lazarus Group for laundering stolen ETH to help the country get hard currency. OFAC posted a list of sanctioned Ethereum blockchain addresses for the Tornado Cash smart contract.

Tether flat-out ignored the sanctions. The  company posted that it “does not operate in the United States or onboard U.S. persons as customers,” so is not obliged to comply with US sanctions. [Tether, archive]

(This theory doesn’t quite hold, as we detail later.)

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad received $93 million in crypto between August 2021 and June 2023, according to Elliptic. Wallets connected to Hamas received $41 million over a similar period, almost all in USDT, according to Israeli blockchain firm Bitok. [WSJ, archive]

Chainalysis found that stablecoins like Tether were used in the vast majority of crypto-based scam transactions and sanctions evasion in 2023. [Wired, archive; Chainalysis]

TRM Labs concurred, saying that Tether was the most used stablecoin in illicit crypto flows in 2023. Tether on the Tron blockchain in particular had “cemented its position as the currency of choice for use by terrorist financing entities.” [TRM; Bloomberg, archive]

In April 2024, Reuters reported that PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, was steering users to USDT and asking for half of each payment upfront in tethers to avoid having their money frozen in foreign bank accounts. US President Biden lifted sanctions in October — but said he would be reimposing them as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro had failed to uphold his commitment to free and fair elections. [Reuters, archive; CoinDesk]

Also in April, the Wall Street Journal reported that tethers had become “indispensable” to fund the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian middlemen used USDT to skirt US sanctions and procure parts for drones and other equipment. [WSJ, archive]

Bloomberg reported that the US and the UK were investigating $20 billion in tethers that passed through Garantax, a Russian-based crypto exchange that both the US and the UK have sanctioned. [Bloomberg, archive] 

Russians were using tethers to skirt sanctions quite soon after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. You would buy tethers in Russia with rubles and sell them in London for pounds. [CoinDesk]

The Counter ISIS Finance Group is a group of countries aiming to cut off funding to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Most of ISIS’s funding is in cash — but the US Treasury fact sheet on the CIFG’s January 2024 meeting has a whole section on their fondness for tethers, particularly in Western Africa. [Press release; fact sheet, PDF]

Liberty Reserve

Liberty Reserve was a digital currency service run out of Costa Rica, active from 2006 to 2013. It issued dollar-backed liabilities called “LR.” These were just entries in a ledger at Liberty Reserve — everything was centralized. But otherwise, LR worked very like a stablecoin.

Customers purchased LR through middlemen — such as Gerry Cotten and Michael Patryn, who ran Midas Gold before starting the now-collapsed Quadriga crypto exchange. These “exchangers” bought LR in bulk directly from Liberty Reserve and sold them to secondary users. This helped obscure the money trails.

LR and its ilk ushered in a new era of cyber money laundering. Gone were the days of crossing borders with suitcases full of cash. You could simply set up an LR account and send dollar equivalents digitally!

Liberty Reserve was a bustling laundromat for seven years — until the DOJ seized its website and arrested its merry band of founders in Spain and New York. The US charged them under the Patriot Act with money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitter. Liberty Reserve’s founder, Arthur Budovsky, is currently serving a twenty-year sentence. [DoJ; DoJ] 

Liberty Reserve Junior

Tether is Liberty Reserve but on the blockchain.

Tether has large clients who purchase USDT in bulk — or maybe borrow it, the tethers being created out of thin air with the loan being the “backing reserve.”

Secondary users buy the tethers on offshore crypto exchanges, such as Bitfinex, Binance, and Huobi.

Tether disclaims any responsibility for what these secondary users do with their tethers — even as Tether has complete control over all USDT and can freeze or destroy individual tethers at any time.

Tether is an improvement over Liberty Reserve because it runs on a blockchain — 15 different blockchains, in fact, with Tron being its main blockchain.

As well as DeFi shenanigans local to each chain, this also facilitates chain hopping — where you take a pile of tethers from multiple customers, mix them up, and move them to a new chain, making the funds harder to trace. 

Tether routinely creates hundreds of thousands of tethers at a time on one chain, so they can “swap” them from another chain. Sometimes they actually burn the old tethers on the original chain! [Tether]

While Liberty Reserve was mainly used by fraudsters, hackers, and traffickers, it never grew to the scale that Tether has — and it never became popular as a tool for sanctions evasion, not just crime. 

Why hasn’t Tether been shut down yet?

Shutting down Liberty Reserve was a huge job — it took a multi-year investigation spanning 17 countries. Tether is even more complex.

Tether is not very linked to the US. None of its principals are US citizens. The company is registered in the British Virgin Islands. The CEO, Paolo Ardoino, lives in El Salvador. Tether’s main bank is Deltec in the Bahamas. A major owner is based in Thailand. 

Tether has a long and sketchy history, back to its launch in 2015. They operated under the radar for years. By 2017, federal enforcement agencies were too busy tackling the ICO boom to take notice. So Tether grew unchecked.

In 2018, the New York Attorney General charged Tether and its crypto exchange sibling Bitfinex with fraud when they tried to cover up $850 million in missing reserves. The companies settled in February 2021 for $18.5 million, a small slap on the wrist. 

In the process of investigating Tether and Bitfinex, the NYAG accumulated quite a lot of dirt on the companies. You might think they would have passed this pile of evidence to the Feds with a bow on top — and they did try.

In his book Number Go Up, Zeke Faux writes how New York reached out to the SEC, the DOJ, and the CFTC about Tether in early 2021 — but the Feds just weren’t interested?! The CFTC did eventually act against Tether later in 2021.

It wasn’t until 2022 that the Feds finally started to pay attention — when they noticed Tether’s role in sanctions evasion.

A bigger hammer

Despite Tether’s claims to have no links to the US, the company has more than a little US exposure — they have substantial backing reserves held in the US in dollars, such as their Treasury notes at Cantor Fitzgerald. This makes them at least slightly subject to US law.

In any case, non-US entities who work around US sanctions risk being sanctioned themselves. This may be applied to individuals as well as companies. [OFAC, PDF]

An entity may be cut off from the US dollar system altogether — and from any entity elsewhere in the world that wants to keep its access to US dollars. This is a financial death penalty. It’s a big stick.

If Tether remains noncompliant, this could put their banking and reserve relations at risk. Having Tether as a client could become too risky even for Cantor. 

By 2023, Tether had wised up a bit. They froze 32 wallets that were linked to terrorism and warfare in Ukraine and Israel in October 2023. In December, Tether froze 41 wallets tied to sanctions as a “precautionary” measure. [Tether; Tether]

By this time, the Feds were keeping a close eye on Tether. 

Ardoino wrote public letters to US senators in November and December proclaiming Tether was now in “alignment” with OFAC, and they were fine with freezing secondary addresses. Also, Tether had “onboarded” the Secret Service onto their platform — though it’s not clear just what that meant — and they were working with the FBI and the DOJ. [Yahoo; Tether; Letter, PDF; Letter, PDF]

Seriously, stop it

While Tether was blocking addresses and trying to convince the world it was in full compliance, the US government was making its annoyance more explicit.

Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo gave a speech at the November 2023 Blockchain Association Summit. This was the earliest example we could find of the government using the words “national security” about cryptocurrency: [Treasury]

While some have heeded our calls and taken steps to prevent illicit activity, the lack of action by too many firms—both large and small—represents a clear and present risk to our national security.

Adeyemo doesn’t name Tether in the speech, but it’s clear who he’s talking about:

We cannot allow dollar-backed stable coin providers outside the United States to have the privilege of using our currency without the responsibility of putting in place procedures to prevent terrorists from abusing their platform.

He gave this speech just after the Binance settlement dropped.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) sent a letter to the Treasury, the Department of Defense, and the White House in April 2024 saying that they were concerned about Russia, Iran, and North Korea using Tether to evade sanctions: [Letter, PDF; WSJ]

The national security threat posed by cryptocurrency requires a commensurate response by our country’s defense community. We seek information on the additional authorities you may need in order to neutralize this threat.

The US has decades-old laws in place for dealing with sanction violators. The Bank Secrecy Act, the Patriot Act, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act give the US sweeping powers. 

The government is also working on new stablecoin regulations — and any effective regulation on US dollar stablecoins would likely be fatal to Tether. 

What happens next?

Binance already learned this lesson after supplying services to Iran. They had to settle fines of more than $4 billion for violating the BSA, money transmitter laws, and the IEEPA. Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison. Binance is getting a monitor.

We expect something similar to happen to Tether — large fines, compliance requirements, and the possibility of jail time for Tether principals.

If the heat gets too much, Tether might try to unwind the entire fund and shut down. The tricky parts will be how to do this while keeping as much of the money as possible and how to realize and return the dollar value of what reserves actually exist in any tangible sense.

But most importantly, they have to not unduly upset any of the more demanding sort of Tether customer who knows where they live.

___________________

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Posted on by Amy Castor 3

News: Regulators zero in on stablecoins, El Salvador’s colón-dollar, Tether printer remains paused

My Patreon account saw seven new subscribers this month, so far. Thank you! Your support is a big deal. It helps me keep doing what I’m doing.

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Here’s what’s happening in the land of crypto. 

Regulations 

A new academic paper on stablecoins is up on the Social Science Research Network. It’s called “Taming Wildcat Stablecoins.” The 49-page paper was co-authored by Gary Gorton, a finance professor at Yale, and Jeffery Zhang, an attorney at the Federal Reserve.

The pair say that Tether is an equity contract, similar to a money market fund, while other stablecoins, such as USDC, Paxos Standard, and the Gemini Dollar, are more like debt. Liberty Reserve isn’t mentioned anywhere in the paper but the authors draw parallels between stablecoins and 19th Century wildcat banks — which is saying a lot because wildcat banks needed corralling. 

Frances Coppola, a UK freelance writer who spent 17 years in banking, tweeted some harsh criticisms of the report. Overall, I think it is worth a read. FT Alphaville has their own take on the paper.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen met with the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets — aka “The Plunge Protection Team” or the “holy shit guys” — to discuss stablecoins. The group includes the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (Treasury Press Release; WSJ, paywalled)

Their discussion builds on a document the PWG published in December outlining regulatory issues regarding stablecoins — back from when former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin brought them all together to discuss Facebook’s Libra, now Diem. That paper, in turn, grew out of the Financial Stability Board’s final report on the regulation of stablecoins in October.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler spoke about crypto exchanges at the Piper Sandler Global Exchange and FinTech conference. “When you go into one of these exchanges, you don’t know whether the order book is accurately reporting the bids and the offers,” he said. “You don’t really know if there is front-running. You don’t know whether some of the trading that is reported is real or fake.” (WSJ, paywalled)

Elizabeth Warren, a Senator from Massachusetts — so famous, she gets into international news slightly more than most senators — sent a letter to Gensler about crypto exchanges telling him that “the lack of common-sense regulations has left ordinary investors at the mercy of manipulators and fraudsters.” She wants the SEC to use its “full authority” to address these risks.

El Salvador and bitcoin

Bitcoin will officially become legal tender in El Salvador on Sept. 7. The fast-approaching deadline has left the country’s President Nayib Bukele and his team scrambling to figure out a way to pull this off without landing on their collective rear ends. 

“So far, it looks like Bukele will be getting everyone onto the government’s official Chivo custodial wallet, using that as an officially-supported payment system, and saying that’s ‘Bitcoin.’” David Gerard wrote in a recent blog post spelling out how Chivo is coming along. Hint: not very well.

In a normal world, you would create the payment system first and then add in the crypto later once you made sure everything was working properly. El Salvador is going about it ass backwards — taking bitcoin, and trying to build a payment system around that. 

The challenge is that bitcoin doesn’t really function as a payment system — and the Lightning Network, a second layer solution that was meant to scale bitcoin, can’t handle a small country with 6.5 million users. 

The Chivo wallet is the one thing that Bukele and his buds can’t afford to screw up on. It’s their wallet, so they’ve hired someone named “Lorenzo” to get the job done right. I assume that Bukele and co’s first instinct was to find someone they could trust to do their bidding — not necessarily someone competent. 

The weird thing is you don’t really need to build a payment system. You can literally hire a white label payment gateway and use it under your name while the processing is done by a third party.

Anyhow, it looks like “Lorenzo” is Lorenzo Rey, the Venezuelan developer from Dash — a crypto that started off as a fork of bitcoin. I’m sure the bitcoin maxis will love that.

El Faro reports that the Bukele regime is now planning to launch a national stablecoin called “colón-dollar.” Colón (Columbus) was the name of El Salvador’s currency before it was replaced by the dollar. It’s technically still legal tender in the country, but nobody uses it. 

According to the plan, the colón-dollar will be issued by El Salvador’s Central Reserve Bank, backed by a reserve of US dollars, and integrated with the Chivo wallet. “The move would restore a key element of monetary policy, which the country lost when it adopted the US Dollar in 2001: the ability to issue national currency,” says El Faro.

A stablecoin makes sense given that Bukele needs greenbacks to pay for the national debt, finance his new party’s campaigns, and pay back owed favors to shadowy figures like José Luis Merino, a high-ranking government official in El Salvador. 

You’ll find Morino’s name — along with several others associated with the Bukele regime — on the US Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors report.

Bukele doesn’t like El Faro — which translates to “The Lighthouse” — a publication that for two decades has dug into corruption, human-rights abuses, and gang violence. 

His government recently expelled an El Faro editor who was Mexican, saying it could not verify his work credentials. (Washington Post, paywalled)

El Faro is co-owned by Jose Simán, Bukele’s rival, so of course, Bukele hates them. The paper has fought a tough battle, but its toughest battle yet may be against the Bukele regime. (Global Investigative Journalism Network)

Circle’s sly plan to go public

I wrote about Jeremy Allaire’s Circle, how it plans to go public via a special purpose acquisition company, and why SPACs are bad. (My blog) 

Circle hasn’t been transparent about what is backing its now 26.4 billion USDC. They haven’t released their Q1 financials to the public, so now we are waiting for the SPAC to file an S-4 sometime in Q4. The S-4 will be the real test of transparency. 

[Update, moments after I published this newsletter, Circle came out with its May attestation. It’s a step toward greater transparency, but we still have questions. Why no full audit? Why the delay in making this info public?]

In his recent article, “A Stablecoin Applies to Become a Stonk,” Doomberg says he thinks SEC chair Gary Gensler is unlikely to let Circle pull off its terrible SPAC. “Under [former SEC chair] Clayton’s watch, the SPAC boom soared to historic heights. But from the early signs, Gary Gensler is no Jay Clayton.”

Here’s something I missed earlier: On page 52 of Circle’s Q4 2020 financials, there is a vague mention of a dispute with a “financial advisor” who claims they are entitled to “9% of any value issued to the Company’s shareholders in connection with the proposed business combination.”

Circle hasn’t disclosed who this financial advisor is, although there is some speculation as to whether Circle tried to go public with a different SPAC company earlier, and that didn’t work out. 

Here’s the text:

“The Company is currently in a dispute with a financial advisor regarding advisory fees in connection with the potential consummation of a proposed business combination. The advisor believes it would be entitled to a fee of approximately nine percent (9%) of any value issued to the Company’s shareholders in connection with the proposed business combination based on the advisor’s interpretation of its engagement letter with the Company. The Company disputes this and maintains that the advisor would receive, at most, a reasonable fee reflecting the custom and practice among investment bankers in similar size and type of transactions. At this time, no business combination has been entered into, and there is no fee owing. However, if any such transaction is completed, and a fee becomes payable to the advisor, we cannot determine the ultimate outcome of this dispute.”

Binance CEO: This is fine. Everything is fine

Binance is fast becoming a train wreck. Regulators around the world have been issuing warnings about the exchange, fiat off-ramps keep shutting, and users are complaining they can’t get their funds out. I wrote about it here and here.

Meanwhile, amidst the smoke and fire, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao — aka “CZ” — continues to behave like everything is going swimmingly.

“A new chapter awaits us, as we embrace compliance and regulations,” he tweeted — after his Brazil director abruptly quit, and Italy, Lithuania, and Hong Kong issued notices about its questionable stock tokens.

CZ talks a big game when it comes to compliance, but that’s all it is — talk. In a June press release, the exchange bragged about helping to take down a Ukrainian crypto money laundering group.

If Binance was following proper KYC/AML procedures, it likely wouldn’t be a target for money laundering groups to begin with. 

Binance routinely reaches out to law-enforcement agencies to request thank-you notes after it cooperates with criminal probes as a way to show how law-abiding it is. The habit has become so disingenuous that the US Department of Justice straight out told federal agencies to stop signing the letters. (Bloomberg)

A bit of trivia — six years ago, CZ was the head of OKCoin’s Singapore branch, registered as a separate company during the infamous Roger Ver vs OKCoin dispute over the bitcoin.com domain. CZ was the go-between who transmitted — or fabricated — the version of the contract with a grossly forged digital signature. The saga was comedy gold on r/buttcoin in 2015.

Oh, and in case you’ve ever wondered about those “maintenance shutdowns” on leveraged exchanges, this Youtube video by Francis Kim, an investor and founder of 80bots, is a must see. “The biggest mistake I made that night was trusting Binance — that my open position would be safe with them.”

Tether printer still on pause

Tether hasn’t printed a darn thing in 50 days. They are stuck at 62.3 billion tethers. Actually, it looks like they even burned 400 million tethers since two weeks ago.

Bitcoin has lost more than half its value since April 14. Down from nearly $68,000, it’s now below $30,000. The concern is that the price of BTC will continue to drop if the Tether printer does not start up again soon.

Keep in mind, there are still a lot of tethers out there moving around between unknown wallets. And we have two other popular stablecoins — USDC and BUSD — to pick up some of the slack. 

In my last newsletter, I offered three theories on why Tether had stopped printing. Now, I am beginning to suspect some regulator may have sent them a cease-and-desist notice.  

There’s also Binance, one of Tether’s biggest customers. Binance is holding 17 billion tethers — about 30% of all the USDT out there. California-based Silvergate Bank terminated their relationship with the exchange in June. (Coindesk)

This means users can no longer transfer US dollars from their US bank to Binance, likely often used to fund purchases of USDT.

Faisal Khan, a banking and payments consultant, thinks that USDT demand probably came from leveraged traders (aka degenerate gamblers) who needed more chips for the Binance casino. (Startups and Econ)

The FT did a profile on Giancarlo Devasini, the 57-year-old CFO of Bitfinex and Tether. A former plastic surgeon, at one point, Devasini got into trouble for “unwittingly” loading unlicensed Microsoft software onto computers he was selling. He goes by the handle “Merlin.”

In communication logs from April 2018 to early 2019 shared with the New York attorney general, Merlin pleaded with “Oz” at Crypto Capital to return funds. Bitfinex had lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars of customer money entrusted to the shadow bank. The exchange had to eventually dip into Tether’s reserves to fund user withdrawals.

“Please understand, all this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community. BTC could tank to below $1K if we don’t act quickly,” said Merlin. (Court document)

So, to all those who think Tether has nothing to do with the price of bitcoin, Devasini would argue differently. 

Other newsworthy stuff

BlockFi just got hit with a cease and desist from the New Jersey attorney general. The high-yield crypto lender has to stop accepting new clients in NJ as of July 22. (Order)

BlockFi has been funding its lending through the sale of BlockFi Interest Accounts, or BIAs. You put your crypto in and get BIAs in return that earn interest. The NJ AG claims these interest earning accounts are unregistered securities.*

High-yields come with high risks. Still, BlockFi CEO Zack Prince says customer funds are safe. The question is, how safe will your funds be now that BlockFi is not getting as much new money coming in?

Dogecoin dropped below $0.2, so Elon Musk stepped in to do his part. He changed his Twitter profile pic to doge eyes, which helped lift the price back up to $0.19. (Decrypt)

Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer returned to Twitter briefly to post a scathing thread on why he left crypto. According to him, crypto is an “inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.” He is 110% correct, of course. (Twitter)

Remember Virgil Griffith, the former Ethereum developer who went to the DPRK against all better judgment to speak at a conference? Virgil doesn’t really listen when people tell him not to do something. He got himself into trouble again, this time for trying to access his crypto — a violation of his bail conditions. (Court filing)  

Reggie Fowler — the person linked to $371 million in missing Bitfinex and Tether funds — has ditched plans for renegotiating a plea deal that he got very, very close to in January 2020. He’s headed to trial with his new defense team early next year. Hopefully, his new lawyer demanded payment in advance. (My blog post)

Trading volumes at the largest crypto exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Bitstamp, fell more than 40% in June, according to CryptoCompare. The cause? Bitcoin’s dropping price and China’s renewed crackdown on crypto. (CNBC)

As an article in WSJ points out, China arrested more than 1,100 people suspected of using crypto to launder dirty money in the month of June. That’s enough to put a damper on any exchange volume.

David Golumbia, a professor of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Politics of Bitcoin, has a new podcast out where he talks about the right-wing politics of crypto. (Tech Won’t Save Us)

The Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau has banned an organization called China Blockchain Application Research Center. The founder is OKEx founder Star Xu, and its members include Huobi founder Lilin, Bibox founder and other giant whales of Chinese crypto. (Wu blockchain)

Hong Kong authorities have arrested four men allegedly tied to a money-laundering racket that used tethers to move $155 million through shell companies. (South China Morning Post, paywalled.)

Image: A one colón note. The colón was the currency of El Salvador between 1892 and 2001, until it was replaced by the US dollar. It is still legal tender, however.

*(July 20, 2021 — Updated to clarify that the NJ AG claims that BlockFi’s BIAs — interest earning accounts — are illegal securities. It doesn’t matter what type of crypto you buy those BIAs with, be it bitcoin, ether, or assets tied to Chainlink or UniSwap. It’s the BIAs. Also added link to the order.)

Related stories:
Binance: Italy, Lithuania, Hong Kong, all issue warnings; Brazil director quits
The curious case of Tether: a complete timeline of events
Tether’s first breakdown of reserves consists of two silly pie charts
NYAG/Tether, Bitfinex settlement reveals commingling of funds, years of shenanigans
Michael Peterson, El Salvador, and Bitcoin Beach

Posted on by Amy Castor 0