Tag: FATF

Crypto collapse: Fahrenheit buys Celsius, DCG may be broke, Hong Kong cracks down, Binance commingling, how Bitfinex was hacked

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Temperature drop

Fahrenheit has officially won the bid for the bankrupt Celsius Network’s assets —  pending approval by the court, which is near-certain, and by regulators, which is less so. A $10 million deposit is due by Monday. [Doc 2713, PDF]

Fahrenheit is a consortium that includes VC firm Arrington Capital, miner US Bitcoin, investment firm Proof Group, former Algorand CEO Steven Kokinos, and Seasons Capital CEO Ravi Kaza.

The new deal is an adaptation of the previous NovaWulf proposal. A “NewCo” will be created to take ownership of Celsius’ remaining DeFi tokens, its loan portfolio, its venture capital investments, its bitcoin mining operation, and $500 million in “liquid cryptocurrency” (not specified, but presumably Celsius’ remaining BTC and ETH). US Bitcoin will manage Celsius’ bitcoin mining operation.

Holders of Earn claims, some holders of Convenience claims, Withhold claims, and Borrow claims will receive equity in NewCo, pro rata. NewCo will endeavor to get a public stock exchange listing for the equity. Earn claimants will also get a distribution of the liquid cryptocurrency and any proceeds from litigation.

If you’re a Celsius creditor, the plan contains lots of important details. Read it and discuss this with your fellow creditors.

As with the original NovaWulf proposal, we think this is a Hail Mary pass that can only work if number goes up. On the other hand, it’s doing something and not just liquidating what little remains. Also, Alex Mashinsky won’t be involved.

DCG: When your left pocket can’t pay your right pocket

In the Genesis bankruptcy, Genesis’ parent company Digital Currency Group missed a $630 million payment to Genesis due earlier this month. Note that that’s a payment from themselves to themselves, and they still failed to make it.

This failure to pay was noted by Gemini, which has a tremendous interest in getting that money so Gemini Earn investors can be paid back. Gemini Earn’s retail customers are the largest creditor of Genesis. [Gemini, archive of May 25, 2023]

Gemini Earn was an investment product where Gemini customers put their money into Genesis to earn unlikely interest rates. Gemini’s customers were not so happy at the prospect of their money being stuck in the Genesis bankruptcy for months or years.

So in February, the creditors worked out an “agreement in principle” — not, you’ll note, an actual deal — whereby they would get money back from DCG, as the owners of Genesis. [press release]

In April, the creditors got sick of DCG messing about and upped their demands. This led to a bizarre statement from DCG on May 9 that they were “in discussions with capital providers for growth capital and to refinance its outstanding intercompany obligations with Genesis.” They didn’t have the money to pay themselves. [CoinTelegraph]

Gemini also plans to file a reorganization plan of its own. This is likely why Genesis has filed asking for its exclusive right to make reorganization proposals to be extended to August 27. The court will hear this motion on June 5. [Doc 329, PDF]

Either DCG is trying extremely hard to screw over Genesis customers … or, despite all the millions and billions with dollar signs in front in their accounts, and “$200 million” a year in Grayscale management fees, DCG is broke — at least in actual money — and has been pretending not to be broke. And we’re pretty sure Gemini is pushing this point this hard because they can’t cover their customers either. Imaginary assets are great — until you have to pay up.

Binance is outraged at Reuters catching them out again

Reuters has caught Binance at it again. This time, Binance was commingling customer funds and company revenue on the order of billions of (actual) dollars in their Silvergate accounts in 2020 and 2021. Controls? What are controls? [Reuters]

Binance told Reuters that this was money being used to buy BUSD and this was “exactly the same thing as buying a product from Amazon,” per Brad Jaffe, Binance’s VP of communications since August 2022.

This explanation is at odds with Binance’s previous claims to customers that dollars they sent to Silvergate were “deposits” that they could “withdraw” as dollars. Jaffe said that “the term ‘deposit’ is a communication term, it’s not an indication of the technical treatment of the funds.” Oh, a communication term — you mean like when words mean things in a context?

Reuters didn’t find any misappropriation of customer funds in the documents they saw. But commingling is a massive red flag for incompetence (as it turned out to be with FTX) and fraud — such as moving money around to evade regulatory scrutiny. Reuters includes a complex diagram of the international flows of Binance’s cash in the report.

Binance PR person Patrick Hillmann dismissed the story as “1000 words of conspiracy theories” and said that Reuters was “making stuff up.” Though Hillmann never stated at any point that Binance hadn’t commingled funds at Silvergate. Hillmann also decried “the xenophobia behind consistently mentioning @cz_binance’s ethnicity without noting that he’s been Canadian since the age of 12” … which the Reuters story didn’t do at all. [Twitter, archive]

Hong Kong brings some regulatory clarity

The Hong Kong Securities And Futures Commission (SFC) has finished its consultation on virtual asset trading platforms opening to retail investors. The rules allow licensed exchanges to offer trading to the public in tokens that are highly liquid and are not securities.

The rules are strict — no securities, no lending, no earn programs, no staking, no pro trading, and no custody. Unlicensed crypto exchanges are not allowed to advertise. Hong Kong very much wants to avoid the sort of embarrassment that comes with a large exchange like FTX failing. 

Exchanges will be required to assess the failure risk of all tokens they offer trading in. Tokens are required to have a 12-month track record. Exchanges will need to get smart contract audits where appropriate. 98% of client assets must be in cold wallets (offline); hot wallets must not hold more than 2%.

Margin trading is not yet allowed even for professional investors, but the SFC will issue guidance on derivatives in the future.

The guidelines take effect June 1, which is when exchanges can begin to apply for a license. [SFC; Consultation Conclusions, PDF]

Regulatory clarity around the world

Japan will be enforcing FATF rules on crypto from June. This went through with no objections because Japan learned its lesson from Mt. Gox and regulated crypto exchanges early. [Japan Today]

FATF tells CoinDesk that it didn’t actually demand that Pakistan not legalize crypto. “Countries are permitted, but not required, to prohibit virtual assets and virtual asset service providers.” [CoinDesk]

The International Organization of Securities Commissions is putting together recommendations on crypto. Service providers need to address conflicts of interest, separation of functions, and accounting client assets, and this has to work across borders. Get your comments in by July 31. [IOSCO, PDF; recommendations, PDF]

Huobi gets kicked out of Malaysia for failure to register. Not registering is a violation of Malaysia’s Capital Markets and Services Act of 2007. The Securities Commission Malaysia said Huobi has to disable its website and mobile apps on platforms including the Apple Store and Google Play.  [Securities Commission Malaysia]  

The CFTC is talking about all the fraud in crypto, says it’s on good working terms with the SEC on these matters, and warns the crypto industry that it’s not going to be a soft touch. [Reuters] 

The SEC has changed the disclaimer that commissioners say before speeches — probably in response to William Hinman’s comments saying ether wasn’t a security being cited in the Ripple case. [blog post]

Molly White put up Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) questions at May 18, 2023, stablecoin hearing, and it’s a lovely five minutes. This guy understands precisely how Web3 was fundamentally a venture capital-funded securities fraud. [YouTube]

Bitfinex: whoops, apocalypse

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project obtained an internal report on the August 2016 hack of the Bitfinex crypto exchange — the hack that led to the Tether printer going wild and the 2017 crypto bubble.

The report was commissioned by iFinex and prepared by Ledger Labs. It was never released, but OCCRP has obtained a draft.

Bitfinex kept transaction limits secured by three keys. It looks like someone made the mistake of putting two of the three keys on the same device. This is how the hacker was able to raise the global daily limit and drain the accounts.

One key was associated with a generic “admin” email address and another linked to “giancarlo,” which belonged to Bitfinex CFO Giancarlo Devasini. The report does not blame Devasini for the hack.

Ledger Labs thinks the hacker came in from an IP address in Poland. [OCCRP]

Tether’s issuance is up — but its usage is through the floor. The trading volume is at its lowest in four years. Most of the tether trading happens on Binance, which is where the majority of all trading volume happens, and where USDT is accepted as being worth a dollar. We mentioned last time that volume was down, but Kaiko has the numbers. [Kaiko]

More good news for bitcoin

Do Kwon’s bail has been scrapped. He’s back in jail in Montenegro, awaiting his local trial on charges of forging documents, specifically the ones he was using to try to get out of Montenegro to his next bolt-hole. [Reuters]  

Glassnode tells us that hodling has never been more popular! 68.1% of BTC hasn’t moved in the past year! Now, you might think that this is because most people who bought in during the bubble are still underwater. But “baghodler” isn’t yet a word. [Glassnode]

Shaquille O’Neal was finally served in the FTX class action suit against the exchange’s celebrity promoters — at the former FTX Arena. [Washington Post] 

Openfort is scraping up the very last of the Web3 gaming venture cash — they just got $3 million to do an online crypto wallet for blockchain games. You know, that gigantic current market that anyone has the slightest interest in. Openfort doesn’t appear to have a customer as yet. [VentureBeat]

Coinbase has a new TV ad! We know you lost all your money — but crypto is like the early Internet, really. [Youtube]

Solana is so thoroughly out of ideas that they’re adding a ChatGPT plugin. Presumably, it can write tweets for them. [The Block]

Crypto fans make up new justifications for the importance of their magic beans all the time. David Rosenthal takes us through a few. [DSHR Blog] 

Video: The problems with Crypto Currency. Max Silverman wanted to do an animation, so asked David for 90 seconds of audio. It came out great! [YouTube]

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: EU to make BTC traceable, Circle’s stab at transparency, DoJ probes Tether for bank fraud

If you are not signed up for my blog already, sign up! To do this, click the three little lines on the top left of my website, scroll down and enter your email. This way, you’ll be sure to get all my blog posts hot off the press. 

If you want to contribute to my work, please subscribe to my Patreon. I’ve got 86 wonderful patrons at the moment for a total of $866 a month. It’s not a living (yet), but it pays for the extras. I’d love to get that over $1,000 soon!

Regulation

It’s time for Bitcoin to put on its big-boy pants. If you want to be real money, it turns out, you have to follow real money rules.

In light of that, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, wants to apply FATF’s travel rule to crypto to make transactions more traceable. The rule, which already applies to real money transfers, will require all transfers of crypto assets to be accompanied by full details of both the sender and the receiver. 

“Crypto assets are increasingly used for money laundering and other criminal purposes,” the European Commission VP said in a press conference. “We’ll now bring crypto assets fully in scope of EU AML rules. (Press release; BBC)

In my last newsletter, I touched on a new stablecoin academic paper — “Taming Wildcat Stablecoins.” I’m bringing it up again because of the paper’s political importance, which is getting overlooked right now.  

The paper describes Tether as an equity instrument akin to a money-market fund and all other stablecoins as debt instruments. This appears to be an intentful regulatory distinction. I’m guessing it will come up again when the hammer falls on stablecoins — particularly Tether. Read the paper!

A bipartisan infrastructure bill agreed on by Senators and President Biden proposes to raise $28 billion from crypto investors by applying stricter IRS reporting requirements to exchanges and other parties. (Bloomberg)

CFTC Commissioner Dan Berkowitz spoke about decentralized finance at DACOM DeFI 2021. He has talked about DeFi platforms in the past. But this time, he said the contracts themselves are illegal. (Youtube)

“If you have a system where you take out the intermediary and you just have a bunch of people trading contracts, those contracts are still in violation of the Commodity and Exchange Act,” he said. “It’s not just the intermediaries that are regulated — it’s the instruments themselves and the people that are using them.”

On June 27, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing called “Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?” If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at nonprofit coalition Americans for Financial Reform, recaps the important bits in a Twitter thread.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is concerned about the risk crypto poses to the financial system. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, she suggested Yellen tap the Financial Stability Oversight Council — a panel of top regulators that the Treasury secretary chairs — to “act with urgency.” Warren cited stablecoins, DeFi, exposure to hedge funds, and risk to banks. (Politico)

Tether’s criminal probe

The big news: The US Justice Department is investigating Tether for bank fraud. It looks like the DoJ may have leaked a target letter to Bloomberg. (If you’re not sure what that is, here is a sample target letter.)

I wrote a blog post explaining Tether’s banking history. David Gerard and I also did a podcast on the topic for “When the Music Stops.” 

Why would the DoJ leak a target letter? Because they are giving the public a heads up on what is to come. Fifty percent of all bitcoin is still traded against tethers and this could have a potentially big impact on the market. In other words: Get your funds off Tether exchanges now. 

The Tether printer is still paused, as it has been since the end of May/early June. There are currently 62 billion USDT in circulation, with Tether having burned another 200 million USDT in the last week. 

We don’t know why Tether stopped printing. But the timing corresponds with China’s crackdown on crypto and all the stuff going on with Binance. It’s also possible Tether knew the DoJ was onto them.

Tether says that its reserves consist mostly of commercial paper, which would make it one of the largest commercial paper holders in the world. Is it Chinese commercial paper? Tether won’t say, but if it is, that could pose a problem for Tether as Chinese regulators want real estate developers — major issuers of CP — to start disclosing more details of CP issuance on a monthly basis. (CNBC)

In their infinite wisdom, Tether execs — CTO Paolo Ardoino and General Counsel Stuart Hoegner — decided it would be a good idea to go on CNBC to be interviewed by Deirdre Bosa. (Youtube)

Naturally, Bosa asked them about their commercial paper. 

“We don’t disclose our commercial partners, so that is quite important,” Ardoino said. “Given our portfolio composition in commercial paper, we believe that it is quite important to respect the privacy of the banking partners that we work with.” 

Privacy of banking partners? Just about every money-market fund out there lists all of its holdings by size and issuer and CUSIP — a unique code assigned to most financial instruments.  

“Everything in this interview melted my brain,” says Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. 

Circle releases a new attestation

Circle released its May attestation with additional transparency around its USDC stablecoin. The Boston firm is trying to go public via a SPAC. 

In the past, Circle’s attestations pointed vaguely to “approved investments.” Now it has released a full breakdown of its investments, sort of. (Doomberg)

Sure, it’s a step toward greater transparency, but why doesn’t Circle just go ahead and release its Q1 financials? If everything is on the up and up, that would seem like the simplest way to remove any doubt about USDC’s backing. 

Frances Coppola, who worked in banking for over a dozen years, thinks Circle is commingling funds. (Twitter thread)

Binance loses another wheel

The wheels keep falling off the Binance bus. UK bank NatWest has joined Santander and Barclays in cutting off payments to the crypto exchange. (Coindesk)

The bad news follows the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority issuing a consumer warning about Binance on June 26, which Binance played down as no big deal.  

In the UK, crypto businesses are required to register with the FCA. Binance Markets Ltd., the company’s UK arm, applied but withdrew its application on May 17 after intensive engagements with the FCA who had concerns with the exchange’s AML safeguards and lack of a headquarters. 

Hedge funds are also backing away from the ticking time bomb that is Binance. Tyr Capital has significantly reduced its exposure, along with ARK36. (FT)

Binance changed its withdrawal limit from 2 BTC to just 0.06 BTC for all users without KYC. The change goes into effect for new users right away and existing users on Aug. 4. (Binance website; archive)

Either Binance is making a greater effort to comply with AML rules — or they are insolvent. I’m going to go with #2. 

Meanwhile, CZ is pretending everything is fine, so people don’t move all their funds off the exchange in a panic, causing the entire house of cards to collapse, like Mt Gox in 2014. 

CZ talks a big game about making Binance compliant, but that is all it is and all that it’s ever been — talk. Along those lines, he is now discussing taking Binance US public via an IPO. (Cointelegraph)

He also says he wants to hire a new CEO as the exchange tries to comply with regulations.(Coindesk)

If you still have money on Binance, get it off now. Otherwise, #SFYL.

A world of hell for BlockFi

New Jersey-based crypto lending firm BlockFi is getting into all sorts of trouble over its high-yield BlockFi Interest Accounts, or BIAs, which look a lot like unregistered securities.

You send crypto to BlockFi and they issue you BIAs, which earn 7.5% interest. You get paid monthly, and the incentive is to just keep rolling the funds back into BIAs, because look how rich you are — on paper!

The New Jersey Bureau of Securities issued a summary cease and desist order to BlockFi ordering the company to stop offering BIAs to customers in NJ. Originally, the order was set to hit on July 22, but it has been delayed to Sept. 2, according to BlockFi. 

In a press release on July 21, the Alabama Securities Commission said it has issued a show of cause to the firm. The order gives BlockFi 28 days to explain why they should not be directed to cease and desist from selling unregistered securities in Alabama. 

Following that, the Texas State Securities Board said in a notice of hearing on July 22 that the BIA is a security under state law. A hearing is set for Oct. 13. Texas also claims BlockFi violated the state laws by selling securities without being registered as a dealer or agent. 

Vermont also issued a show of cause order on July 22.

Meanwhile, BlockFi CEO Zac Prince has spun this like a bunch of good news. “We’ve said time and again that the key to our industry’s success is appropriate regulation. Ultimately, we see this as an opportunity for BlockFi to help define the regulatory environment for our ecosystem,” he said in a blog post.

Virgil Griffith taken into custody

Virgil Griffith, the former Ethereum developer who got himself into hot water by going to DPRK and giving a talk on crypto, has got himself into more hot water. 

Griffith, who has been living with his parents since his indictment, violated his bail conditions by trying to access his crypto on Coinbase. The judge thinks he is a flight risk, so he’s put Griffith behind bars to await trial in September. 

Since his arrest in November 2019, Griffith’s $100,000 in ETH has grown to $1 million in ETH. He had his mother reach out to Coinbase on his behalf. Griffith is a smart guy, who apparently does dumb things. 

“Though the defendant is a bright well-educated man, his method of circumvention of the Order was neither clever nor effective,” the judge said. (Court filing)

Other newsworthy bits

MicroStrategy just posted a $299 million loss for Q2 after betting the house on Bitcoin. But like any crazed degenerate gambler, Michael Saylor plans to keep buying more bitcoin. (Press release; Forbes)

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is pioneering hustle bro populism. Bukele distracted from his self-coup when he announced bitcoin soon after. (FP)

El Faro got a copy of the presentation Cardano gave to the El Salvador government. This is somewhere between hilarious and tragic. Bukele and his regime want to implement their colón-dollar stablecoin by Sept. 7, yet they literally have no plan for how to make it happen, so they are fishing for anything. (Leaked presentation)

Coinbase is the target of a class-action. The lead plaintiff, Brandon Leidel, claims he lost money investing in COIN when the price of the shares fell right after all the VCs cashed out. (Complaint; Law360, paywalled)

Dfinity has been hit with a class-action claiming the company sold its Internet Computer Project (ICP) tokens as an unregistered security. The suit targets Olaf Carlson-Wee’s crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Dfinity’s founder Dominic Williams as the “controlling defendants.” (Complaint; Decrypt)

DeFi exchange Uniswap is blocking 100 tokens from its website — including tokenized stocks and some derivatives. The move came right after the CFTC commissioner said contracts were illegal on DeFi. (Alexis Goldstein)

Paxos’ General Counsel takes aim at Tether and USDC, claiming that the two stablecoins it issues — Paxos Standard and BUSD — are both regulated, while Tether and USDC are not. It also claims Paxos Standard and BUSD are are backed by 96% cash or cash equivalents. (Paxos blog post; The Block)

Multilevel-marketing schemes are a predatory wealth transfer from low-information people recruited into the scheme directly to the company upper ranks’ pockets. Stephen Dhiel writes about unintentional scams. (Blog post) 

Bitcoin’s gold rush was always an illusion. Millions of people have bought into the idea that crypto could make them rich, fast. But these booms are fake. Really good story in the New Statesmen.

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: Tether printer on hold, China’s crypto crackdown, the world hates Binance, El Salvador’s Chivo wallet

In case you missed my tweet, I ended up sick at the end of June. I was chatting with a friend over Zoom when he noticed that I was tilting over in my chair. Was I drunk? No. Should he call an ambulance? I’m fine.

I ended up in the ER the next day on IV fluids and hooked to monitors. Turns out I had Anaplasmosis from a tick bite. Doxycycline did the trick, and I was on my feet again within 48 hours. 

Apparently, this is the price you pay for walking blissfully unaware through grassy fields and woodsy trails. 

I mentioned earlier I was writing a book on NFTs. While I did a lot of research on the subject, I’m putting the book on hold for now. My concern is, who would read it? NFTs seem to have been a fad, slipping out of fashion. 

If you are interested in the topic, check out my recent notes on NFTs and money laundering. I also wrote for Business Insider on how Metakovan was pumping Beeple NFTs months before he bought Beeple’s $69.3 million NFT at Christie’s. 

I think we can all admit that the art behind almost every NFT is absolute garbage, which the author of this blog post does a fine job of pointing out. 

China’s crackdown on crypto

The People’s Bank of China has hated crypto since 2017, when it initially kicked the crypto exchanges out. 

In recent months, the country has gone after crypto with a renewed vengeance, banning FIs from providing services to crypto firms and forcing bitcoin miners in the country to take their hardware offline. 

Up until recently, most of the world’s bitcoin mining (~ 65% to 75%) took place in China. The country’s crackdown on mining caused more than 50% of the bitcoin hashrate to drop since May.

The hashrate dropped faster than bitcoin’s difficulty algorithm could keep up. Every 2,016 blocks, the difficulty adjusts to account for how many miners are on the network. 

On July 3, bitcoin experienced a record 27.94% drop in mining difficulty, according to BTC.com, meaning now, bitcoin miners will have an easier time finding blocks. (CNBC)

Beijing even told companies they are no longer allowed to provide venues, commercial displays, or even ads for crypto-related businesses. On Tuesday, the PBoC said it had ordered the shutdown of Beijing Qudao Cultural Development, a company that makes software for crypto exchanges. (Reuters)

Why does China loathe crypto? Some people say the PBoC is trying to make way for China’s CBDC, but I doubt that has anything to do with it. The most likely reason is the country wants to stem capital outflows. According to a Chainalysis report last August, $50 billion in crypto assets moved from China to other regions in a 12-month period. 

Why has Tether stopped printing?

Tether is currently at 62.7 billion tethers, and it’s been stuck there for more than a month. Tether had several big prints at the end of May and now, crickets all through June and into July. The printer has totally stopped. 

Nobody is really clear on why Tether has put its printing presses on hold, but the timing seems to correlate with China’s crackdown on crypto.  

We have three theories for why Tether stopped printing

Theory #1 — Less demand

The China crackdown has created a reduced demand for tethers. When bitcoin’s hash rate dropped precipitously, so did the number of newly minted BTC per day — at one point it was down to 350 new BTC per day, as opposed to the 900 BTC per day the network should be producing.

Binance and OKex have mining pools, so bitcoin miners can mint bitcoin directly to their own exchange accounts. Since there is no way to cash out directly, miners convert BTC to tethers (USDT). And then convert USDT to RMB on unregulated over-the-counter platforms, such as Huobi and CoinCola.

With the exodus of miners from China, there was less demand for tethers. 

Theory #2 — Chinese junk debt

Another theory floating around is that Tether may have been getting Chinese junk debt to issue tethers, and now that is no longer possible due to the risks. 

Tether’s latest composition report showed that 50% of the assets backing USDT were unspecified commercial paper. In the US commercial paper market, that would place Tether among the likes of fund managers like Vanguard and BlackRock, which seems unlikely. (FT)

So maybe it’s holding Chinese paper?

“If Tether is holding Chinese commercial paper, the issuer can default on those debts with impunity. What is Tether going to do? Sue in Chinese courts?,” Tether whistleblower Bitfinexed said in a tweet.

He revealed in a DM that the info comes from a “reliable source.”

Theory #3 — USDC is picking up the slack

While the tether printer stopped, the USDC printer appears to have picked up speed, issuing 10 million USDC since May 8. 

As of July 5, there are 25.5 billion USDC stablecoins in circulation, so maybe USDC is stepping into Tether’s shoes?

In other news, Tether is working hard to shine up its tarnished image. The company is hiring a Reputation Manager, to “advocate for the company in social media spaces, engaging in dialogues and answering questions where appropriate.” 

If you want to fight the FUD spread by salty nocoiners like myself, this job could be for you. (Teether, archive)

Binance vs the world

The UK, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Canada and now the Cayman Islands are all moving against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. I wrote a blog post detailing Binance’s pariah status. 

The bad news keeps getting worse. Following the FCA banning Binance in the UK on June 26, Barclays says it is blocking customers from using their debit and credit cards to make payments to Binance. (They will let you take money out, but they won’t let you put money in.)

Binance “talks a big game on anti-money laundering and know-your-customer” rules, but was “resistant to throwing human resources at compliance issues,” an executive at a payments company that helped connect Binance to the broader financial market before cutting ties with the group, told the (FT)

And worse still — on Tuesday, Binance told its customers that it will temporarily disable deposits via SEPA bank transfers. Binance said the move was due to “events beyond our control.” (FT)

Binance founder CZ says it’s all FUD.

Binance’s organizational structure

Binance has a lot secrets. The company refuses to say where its headquarters is located. And it’s tight-lipped about its organizational structure, too. 

On May 1, Brian Brooks, former Coinbase chief legal officer and former acting head of the Comptroller of the Currency, took over as CEO of Binance.US, replacing Catherine Coley. (WSJ)

In a Coindesk interview in April, he said he reports to the board of directors, yet he wouldn’t name who was on the board. 

Coindesk: “Brian, what is the reporting structure with Binance US. Who do you report to?”

Brooks: “I have a board of directors, which I will be a member of, and I will report to that board.” 

Coindesk: “Who else is on the board?”

Brooks: “The board is obviously the founder of the company and another person. It’s a private company, so we don’t necessarily go into the governance structure…”

Later when Coindesk asks him where Binance.com is located, Brooks dances around that question as well. He did say, however, that Binance keeps its US customer data separate from Binance.com. 

Binance.US also just brought onboard Manuel Alvarez, a former commissioner at the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, as its new chief administrative officer. (Coindesk)

FATF releases 12-month review 

The Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based global anti-money laundering watchdog, published its second 12-month review of its revised standards for virtual assets and virtual asset service providers, or VASPs

VASPs include crypto exchanges, bitcoin ATM operators, wallet custodians, and hedge funds. 

When the FATF published its guidance in 2019, it recommended full AML data collection by VASPs — and Rule 16, also known as the “travel rule.” 

The travel rule requires VASPs to disclose certain customer data and include that data with a funds transfer, so that the info “travels” down the funds transfer chain.  

Of FATF’s 128 reporting jurisdictions, 58 have implemented the revised FATF standards. The other 70 have not. And the majority of jurisdictions have yet to implement the travel rule.

“These gaps in implementation mean that there is not yet a global regime to prevent the misuse of virtual assets and VASPs for money laundering or terrorist financing,” the FATF said. 

The FAFT plans to publish its revised guidance by November 2021 with a focus on accelerating the implementation of the travel rule as a priority. (Forkfast)

Kaseya ransomware  

The REvil ransomware operation is behind a massive attack centering on Kaseya, a company that develops software for managed service providers. MSPs provide outsourced IT services to small and medium-sized businesses that can’t afford their own IT department. 

Between 800 and 1,500 businesses have been compromised by the global ransomware attack, including schools in New Zealand and supermarkets in Sweden. 

The REvil gang has offered to decrypt all victims for $70 million in Monero (XMR), a cryptocurrency that is harder to track than bitcoin. The immediate ransom demand is $45,000 worth of XMR, rising to $90,000 after a week.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, wrote a story for Lawfare breaking down the Kaseya ransomware attack. 

He also wrote an earlier story for Lawfare titled “The Ransomware Problem Is a Bitcoin Problem,” where he explains why getting rid of crypto is a great idea. “The ransomware gangs can’t use normal banking. Even the most blatantly corrupt bank would consider processing ransomware payments as an existential risk.”

El Salvador, bitcoin and Bitcoin Beach

Who is the San Diego surfer who brought bitcoin to El Zonte? A white evangelist named Michael Peterson. I wrote about him and his Bitcoin Beach project at length in a recent blog post. 

Peterson read my story. He says it’s full of “glaring inaccuracies” and “plagiarized pieces of other bad reporting.” When asked to substantiate his defamatory accusations, he never replied back. 

Does he use these same bully tactics to get people in El Zonte to use bitcoin? 

David Gerard wrote up a detailed blog post explaining the latest developments on bitcoin and El Salvador. 

Here are some notes, if you want to catch up quick:

  • Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, has announced a government wallet — the Chivo wallet — that will be available for download in September. (Youtube)
  • The Chivo (slang for “cool”) wallet will hold both USD and bitcoin balances. 
  • Salvadorans who sign up for the mobile app will get $30 in bitcoin, but they have to spend it. They can’t sell their BTC for cash — which makes you wonder if Bukele is simply planning to issue new dollars under the guise of bitcoin. (I also recommend you read Gerard’s piece in Foreign Policy on this topic)
  • The technical details of the Chivo wallet are totally unclear. Is Jack Mallers, the CEO of Zap and the remittance app Strike, going to develop the wallet? We don’t know.  
  • Originally, Mallers said Strike was using tether for remittances. (My blog post.) Now, he says Strike is no longer using tethers, and the folks in El Salvador receiving remittances on his app will receive actual dollars. (What Bitcoin Did)
  • How will this happen? Mallers said in his What Bitcoin Did interview that his company has local banking relationships in ES, but we don’t know what banks, where. 
  • Here is a direct quote from the transcript of the interview: “So, I was like, ‘Well, fuck, I don’t know then how I’m going to pull this off!’ So, what I did is, we built Tether into Strike, which was the equivalent of the Chase bank account in America, and it at least gave us some MBP basic functionality, where I can go and just observe and listen and see how people used it and see if it was helpful. But now, we’re already integrating with the top five banks in the country.”
  • Mallers tends to be long on plans and short on details. When the media reaches out to him with questions — like Decrypt did when they learned Zap is not licensed to operate in most US states — he generally just ignores them. 
  • Despite what Mallers keeps claiming, sending remittances via Western Union from the US  to El Salvador isn’t really that costly, to begin with. Steve Hanke, Nicholas Hanlon, and Mihir Chakravarthi point this out in their paper: “Bukele’s bitcoin blunder.”
  • Jack Maller’s company Zap (the parent company of Strike) got $14.9 million in fresh funding in March from “Venture Series – unknown,” on top of a $3.5 million seed round a year prior. Nobody seems to know who is behind the funding. (Crunchbase)
  • Athena, the company that Bukele ordered 1,000 new bitcoin ATMs from, installed a new bitcoin ATM machine — the country’s third installed machine! — in La Gran Vía shopping center. They had a ribbon-cutting ceremony and everything.
  • Unfortunately, the machine was located in front of an upscale department store owned by the Simán family, Bukele’s arch enemy. Worried that the ATM would draw foot traffic to his rival’s business, Bukele had the machine relocated next to the toilets, where it sits unplugged. (Twitter) 
  • The US State Department named 14 El Salvadorans, many associated with the Bukele regime, as corrupt or undemocratic actors. (US State report)

Robinhood’s planned listing

Robinhood had plans to go public in June, but the SEC has some questions about its cryptocurrency business, according to Bloomberg.

The company also agreed to pay FINRA $70 million to settle allegations that the brokerage caused customers “widespread and significant” harm on multiple different fronts over the past few years.

Specifically, FINRA’s investigation found that millions of customers received false or misleading information from Robinhood on a variety of issues, including how much money customers had in their accounts, whether they could place trades on margin and more.

In its SEC S-1 filing, which dropped on July 1,  Robinhood notes that a “substantial portion of the recent growth in our net revenues earned from cryptocurrency transactions is attributable to transactions in Dogecoin. If demand for transactions in Dogecoin declines and is not replaced by new demand for other cryptocurrencies available for trading on our platform, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.”

Robinhood currently supports seven different cryptos. When you trade crypto on Robinhood, you don’t ever hold the keys to your own crypto. Robinhood itself buys the actual crypto and maintains custody, so you can’t move your coins onto or off the platform. You’re stuck in there.

Bitcoin mining turns NY lake into a hot tub

The Greenidge Generation Bitcoin mining plant, owned by private equity firm Atlas Holdings, sits on the shores of beautiful Seneca Lake in New York. 

The tagline on its website reads, “Green Power for Generations to Come.”  

The firm uses lake water to cool its 8,000 computers used to mine bitcoin within the gas-fired plant. Greenidge’s current permit allows it to take in 139 million gallons of water and discharge 135 million gallons daily, at temperatures as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and 86 degrees in winter.  

Locals want the mining facility gone. They have been staging protests. They claim the plant is polluting the air and heating the lake, thanks to its use of fossil fuels.

“The lake is so warm you feel like you’re in a hot tub,” said one nearby resident. (NBC) (Arstechnica)

RSA Conference’s blockchain moment

Over the weekend, the RSA Conference gave infosec and computer science Twitter a bit of a shock when it suggested replacing the entire internet with — a blockchain. 

The tweet quickly disappeared, but not before being archived. The blockchain is immutable! I wrote about the event in a blog post.

(Updated on July 8 to note that Brian Brooks replaced Catherine Coley as CEO of Binance.US.)

If you like my work, please subscribe to my Patreon account for as little as $5 a month. 

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: Metakovan unmasks himself, FATF goes after DeFi and NFTs, Coinbase pays CFTC $6.5M over wash trades

I’ve been traveling around the U.S., visiting friends on the East and West Coasts and in between, and this is my first newsletter since the end of February.

This week has been a busy one, full of interviews and talking to reporters about nonfungible tokens. Who knew NFTs would become the next tulip mania? I’ve gained nearly a thousand more Twitter followers and several more patrons, which is wonderful because I can certainly use the support.

Peanut exploring a stream in Texas

As I write, Bitcoin is above $57,700, after reaching an all-time-high of $61,742 on March 13. Meanwhile, there are now 39.6 billion tethers in circulation—that’s 4.5 billion new tethers in the last three weeks, all helping to prop up the BTC price.

In my last newsletter, I said I didn’t think BTC would ever see $57,000 again. I was wrong, but I also didn’t expect Tether to keep blatantly printing billions more tethers—each one representing a dollar on an offshore exchange—after the NYAG settlement. It just shows this nonsense can go on a lot longer than any of us imagined.

Some quick updates—at the end of February, I did an all-day film interview for another QuadrigaCX documentary. I can’t tell you any more than this, unfortunately, but yes, more documentaries. (Still waiting for someone to do a Tether documentary and an NFT documentary, but we know those are coming.)

Also, fellow nocoiner David Gerard and I got a full viewing of the upcoming CBC Quadriga documentary. It was over a year ago that we met in Vancouver to film this. However, it feels like the Quadriga story is still unfinished, and will be until we know for certain that’s Gerald Cotten’s body buried in Halifax.

Here is the news. 

Metakovan reveals himself

The art world was beside itself on March 11 when a person going by “Metakovan” bought an NFT by Beeple for $69.3 million in ETH—making it the third most expensive* ever sold by a living artist, behind Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit” and David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”—if you can get past the fact that it was paid for with magic beans.

In a blog post that went viral, I revealed that Metakovan was Vignesh Sundaresan, an Indian crypto entrepreneur who ran Coins-e, a shady, now-defunct Canadian crypto exchange. My post got 20,000 hits the first day. 

Four days later, Sundaresan admitted he was Metakovan in a blog post on the Metapurse website. Metapurse is his crypto investment fund.

We already know who you are. The question is, why were you using a pseudonym in the first place?

He claims that it wasn’t a pseudonym, just an “exosuit.” He did it, he says, because he wanted to prove to the world that people of color can buy high-art, too. He then delved into a rags-to-riches story about how he made it big in crypto. (This is a common bitcoiner fairytale: buy crypto, and you, too, can become fabulously wealthy.)

In an online auction, I’m not sure a pseudonym proves anything. But it does look like maybe you were trying to hide or distract from something, like the questionable past projects you’ve been involved with?

Also, if Metakovan wanted to make a point about social justice, why did he buy an NFT representing a collage full of angry, racist, misogynistic images? That makes no sense.

Art critic Ben Davis spent an entire day digging through Beeple’s magnum opus—a collection of 5,000 images. His findings, written up in an article for Artnet News, aren’t pretty. In one example, Hilary Clinton with a set of gold teeth and the caption: “Senator Clinton’s last-ditch effort to reach black voters.”

That just tells me Metakovan could care less about the art. He only cares that he gets publicity and can make money off the NFT by packaging and reselling it—in the form of B20 tokens—to retail suckers.

If you are wondering where Metakovan got all that ETH to buy the Beeple NFT—he claims he was an early investor in the Ethereum ICO. Anyone who bought into that ICO and hodled, could easily be a millionaire today.

But remember, Metakovan and business partner Twobadour (aka Anand Venkateswaran) also raised 50,000 ETH in an early 2018 ICO for their Lendroid project. LST (stands for Lendroid Support Token) is a dead shitcoin that never got listed on any exchange.

NFTs are garbage

Since I wrote my Metakovan blog post, I’ve been getting pushback from artists who want to believe that NFTs bring value to the art world. They don’t want to hear that NFTs are a scam. It’s sad to see artists getting sucked into the crypto cesspool. 

I wrote another post last week where I explain why NFTs are worthless—and how they have opened the door to fraud and money laundering. The only real value of NFTs is speculative—i.e., what the next sucker is willing to pay you for them. 

Artists want to believe that NFTs are an avenue for them to get paid for their work, but in truth, NFTs are simply pointers, expensive URLs on the blockchain. And if the object they point to moves or disappears, those URLs will forever point to nothing.

Some NFTs contain a hash of the artwork they represent. But as computer scientist Jorge Stolfi explains: Copies of a physical work of art are clearly distinct from the original. They are not the same atoms that the artist himself put on the canvas. In contrast, copies of a digital file are exactly the same bits. There is no ‘original’ of a digital file.

In other words, any copy of a digital artwork will have exactly the same hash, so putting the hash on the blockchain is useless.

FATF takes aim at DeFi/NFTs

The Financial Action Task Force, a global anti-money laundering watchdog, released an update of its Draft Guidance on a Risk-Based Approach to Virtual Assets and Virtual Asset Service Providers.

Decentralized exchanges, the platforms behind decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, are now considered virtual asset service providers—or VASPs.

The DeFi app, or smart contract, is not a VASP, but the owners and operators of the DEX are, which means they are obligated to ensure these platforms meet the same anti-money laundering requirements as other financial institutions.

This is a clear aim at DeFi founders, investors and VC firms. 

The FATF adds that NFTs that can be converted or exchanged for fiat currency or other virtual assets remain in scope.

In their analysis of the new guidance, blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace said that NFTs that can facilitate money laundering and terrorism financing are “virtual assets” as viewed by the FATF.

As I wrote in my NFT explainer piece, NFTs open the door to money laundering—big money coming from mysterious people to buy outrageously overpriced NFTs with cryptocurrency—so its no surprise that the FATF has NFTs on its radar.

Charlie Lee, the mystery Coinbase wash trader?

Coinbase settled with the CFTC for $6.5 million over claims that between January 2015 and September 2018 the exchange “recklessly delivered false, misleading, or inaccurate reports concerning transactions in digital assets.” 

The CFTC also claims a former Coinbase employee was wash trading LTC/BTC pairs on Coinbase’s GDAX platform between August and September 2016. (GDAX, meant for professional traders, was later renamed Coinbase Pro.) Wash trades are illegal because they make it look like there’s a lot of trade volume when there’s not. (Verge, CFTC press release and order)

The order doesn’t mention who the employee is but we know that Charlie Lee, the founder of litecoin, was working as an engineer at Coinbase at the time—and it looks very much like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. 

LTC wasn’t worth more than a few dollars even after it got listed on GDAX in August 2016. The price really took off when litecoin was listed on Coinbase’s retail exchange—called simply “Coinbase”—in May 2017.

Lee left a month later to focus on his litecoin project and then dumped his LTC at the top of the market in December 2017, when LTC saw highs of $360. That was during that last crypto bubble.

Lee got a lot of flak for that. Ironically, he later claimed that he sold because “holding LTC made it a situation where I may do something to pump the value short term. but is bad for the long term success of Litecoin.”

Bizarrely, LTC has never seen the highs in the 2021 bubble that it did in 2017. It’s only at $200 now.

Whistleblower Bitfinexed suspected Lee of wash trading all along. He wrote up his suspicions in a blog post in 2018, which is well worth the read now.

If Coinbase—the leading crypto exchange in the U.S.—allowed a former employee to wash trade up to 99% of the daily volume of a shitcoin, you can bet this is standard practice on all crypto exchanges. 

Coinbase has delayed its public listing to April, according to Bloomberg. Its latest valuation is $68 billion.

Other newsworthy bits

Photographer/writer Andy Day says NFTs are a pyramid scheme. “To many, it’s a means of overthrowing the existing regime; when you look a little closer, you realize that it’s just an extreme manifestation of neoliberalism.” (Fstoppers)

If you still think NFTs are the greatest thing since sliced bread, Monty Python’s John Cleese has a bridge to sell you, specifically a drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT. You can buy it on OpenSea. The highest bid so far is for $35,671. (Previously the top bid was $50,000.) (Decrypt)

Not a month goes by where we don’t hear of another DeFi rug pull. TurtleDex, a DeFi app running on the Binance Smart Chain, drained $2.5 million in crypto from liquidity pools on Ape Swap and Pancake Swap. (Who comes up with these names?) The owners immediately deleted TurtleDex’s telegram, the official website, and the Twitter page. (Decrypt)

USDC, the stablecoin issued by CENTRE, a project backed by Circle and Coinbase, has surpassed 10 billion. (The Block)

BofA published a report called “Bitcoin’s Dirty Little Secrets,” wherein analysts said there is no good reason to own bitcoin “unless you see prices going up.” David Gerard reviews the report in full on his blog.

First Trust Advisors and hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, led by former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, are pushing for a bitcoin ETF in the U.S. The prospectus for the “First Trust SkyBridge Bitcoin ETF Trust” was published on Friday. While a bitcoin ETF opened in February in Canada, U.S. regulators have repeatedly rejected attempts to introduce them, citing concerns about market manipulation.  (The Block)

Want to flush all your money away? Toilet paper company Charmin has an NFT.

*Update on March 22 — Third most expensive, not first.

Posted on by Amy Castor 2