Tag: Kraken

Crypto collapse: SEC brings regulatory clarity to Kraken and Celsius, stablecoins for the UK, crypto money laundering

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Most of the deliberation time was spent saying “Wow, that was a lot of crime” “Just so much crime” “Maybe too much crime”

— Allistair Hutton

Regulatory clarity for Kraken

The crypto industry demands regulatory clarity! So the SEC keeps stating the regulations as clearly as it possibly can. Isn’t that nice of them? On November 20, the SEC sued the Kraken crypto exchange.

The causes of action are very similar to those against Coinbase and Bittrex. Kraken deals in crypto securities and acts as an exchange, a broker, a dealer, and a clearing agency, all in the same company and without the proper registrations for each. The particular crypto securities in this case are ADA, ALGO, ATOM, FIL, FLOW, ICP, MANA, MATIC, NEAR, OMG, and SOL.

The SEC also alleges Kraken commingled customer assets with its operating accounts. Kraken’s own auditors said this created “a significant risk of loss” to customers and led to “material errors to Kraken’s financial statements for 2020 and 2021.”

The message the SEC is sending in this series of cases is that it just isn’t going to put up with crypto exchanges doing all the securities jobs in one company anymore, and they need to stop. [SEC press release; complaint, PDF]

The Financial Stability Board, which monitors the global financial system, thinks what the SEC is doing is very good and cool. Its new report “The Financial Stability Implications of Multifunction Crypto-asset Intermediaries” sets out precisely how and why crypto exchanges combining all these functions (an exchange, a broker, a dealer, and a clearing agency) “can exacerbate structural vulnerabilities in those markets.” It uses precisely what happened in the crypto collapse as its example. Risk to the actual economy is limited, says the FSB — though the biggest issue is how the exchanges wrecked the few banks willing to talk to them. [Press release; cover sheet; report, PDF]

It’s not just the SEC cracking down on crypto. The US government is generally sick of crypto nonsense and looking to shut it down. This is what we’ve spent the past year and a half advocating for as loudly as we possibly could.

IOSCO, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, released its final policy recommendations to securities regulators on crypto. In short: regulate the heck out of this stuff for what it clearly is — and don’t accept handwaving about technology. IOSCO will release a second part on DeFi before the end of 2023. [Press release; recommendations, PDF]

SEC trashes Celsius bankruptcy plan 

Judge Martin Glenn approved the Celsius NewCo plan on November 9, giving creditors fresh hope that all the nonsense they’d been trudging through since July 2022, when Celsius initially filed for Chapter 11, was finally coming to an end. But it was not to be. 

The original plan was that NewCo would be managed by Fahrenheit LLC, which won the bidding for Celsius’ assets in May. This business would focus on bitcoin mining and ether staking. [Doc 3972, PDF] 

Creditors would get shares in NewCo, which would trade on NASDAQ. NewCo could issue shares without registration — under an exemption in the bankruptcy code that would allow it to do the initial issuance without filing an S-1 form with the SEC. Creditors would also get back $2 billion in crypto in January 2024. 

But within hours of the court approving the deal, it fell afoul of the SEC — who would not approve the staking and lending portion of the business. [CoinDesk]

The SEC also wanted more details on the company’s assets and accounts for the “predecessor entity,” i.e., Celsius Networks. Unfortunately, Celsius’ pre-bankruptcy accounts are comical trash, somewhat documented in QuickBooks and some Google spreadsheets. This wasn’t quite good enough. [Doc 4050, PDF]

Celsius is now pivoting to “MiningCo,” a mining-only company with US Bitcoin as the manager and a board of directors. Fahrenheit members will not be part of the new entity.

Celsius’ lawyers argue that the “toggle” to mining-only is just fine, and they had this in their back pocket the entire time. Judge Glenn is not convinced: “This is not the deal that creditors voted on,” he said in a November 30 hearing. Celsius may have to seek a new creditor vote to get approval on the revised plan, putting them right back in the mud again. [Reuters, archive]

Blockchain Recovery Consortium (BRIC), who had been selected as a backup bidder in May if the Fahrenheit plan fell through, argued that Celsius should have gone with its backup bid, rather than pushing forward with this stripped-down “MiningCo” plan. 

A hearing on this mess will take place on December 21.

If the MiningCo plan is not approved, Celsius may be forced to liquidate in Chapter 7.

If this new plan does go through, creditors should count the cash and liquid cryptos they get in the settlement as their actual return — and treat their MiningCo shares as lottery tickets.

My beautiful launderette

Spain has arrested Alejandro Cao de Benós, a long-time Western agent of North Korea and founder of the Korean Friendship Association, on behalf of the US, for working with Virgil Griffith. [Reuters] 

Cao de Benós was indicted in April 2022, along with Christopher Emms, a UK citizen, for signing up Griffith to travel to North Korea in April 2019 to give a talk on crypto at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, which the pair organized. Emms, a crypto entrepreneur, is still at large. [DOJ; FBI; FBI] 

We’re guessing the US wants a long discussion with Cao de Benós concerning all of North Korea’s other money laundering as well.

The US is currently working to extradite Cao de Benós from Spain, a process that can take months.

In the US, FinCEN wants to declare crypto mixing to be primarily about money laundering, for no better reason than money laundering is precisely what crypto mixing is primarily about. [FinCEN; Federal Register]

Court to Coin Center over their spirited defense of Tornado Cash: LOL, go away. [Doc 74, PDF]

Following “requests from its wealthy customers,” Ferrari is looking to sell cars to sanctioned Russians (ahem) unspecified entities in a currency-substitute that they have to hand. [Reuters, archive]

Now that’s effective altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried is in a cell, where he belongs. [DOJ statement]

But there was much more to FTX than one crook — or five crooks if you count the guilty pleas of Sam’s former fellow executives. The use case for crypto is crime, and FTX was a money laundering machine. Jacob Silverman and Molly White discuss Sam’s many, many as-yet-unindicted co-conspirators. [The Nation; Molly White]

If you ever need a moment of cheer in your life, imagine how Alex Mashinsky, the criminally charged founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, feels seeing Sam be sent to jail in less than five hours. (The amount of time jurors deliberated.) Mashinsy’s trial is scheduled for September 2024.

Over in the FTX bankruptcy, John Jay Ray is suing the Bybit exchange to recover $953 million. Bybit had a private line into FTX and successfully withdrew $327 million in the run on the exchange just before FTX declared bankruptcy in November 2022. [Complaint, PDF]

Stablecoins for the UK

The more foolishly ambitious parts of the UK government are still talking up crypto. So the Financial Conduct Authority has a new discussion paper on fiat-backed stablecoins for “consumers who wish to pay for their everyday shopping with stablecoins” — a category that does not presently exist. [Discussion paper, PDF]

So far, the plan is to allow UK-issued asset-backed “regulated stablecoins” supervised by the FCA. Overseas-issued “approved stablecoins,” with a UK “payment arranger” taking local responsibility, will come later.

The FCA will be requiring consumer protections, consumer right of redemption, protections in case an issuer fails, coin value stability despite market conditions, and ways to “mitigate the risks and harms that we have observed in the market, and those that arise from existing business practices” — i.e., all the crime.

Anti-money-laundering requirements will apply only on redemption — not on every transaction.

This initiative is not about our friends at Tether or USDC — though the FCA uses them as cautionary tales, particularly with USDC breaking its peg when Silicon Valley Bank went down.

Instead, the FCA seems to be setting a path for non-banks to issue their own asset-backed pounds — a regulated form of wildcat banking, with crypto as the excuse to even contemplate doing this weird thing. Or a privatized CBDC, if you want to be generous. The listed examples don’t even really need a blockchain.

There is nothing a regulated GBP stablecoin would do for ordinary UK consumers that they can’t already do with debit cards. But the FCA says that prospective issuers are already in the wings. Our psychic powers suggest these may be Conservative Party donors, given the present government’s recent track record of blatant kleptocracy.

CoinDesk spoke to Matthew Long, the FCA’s director of payments and digital assets, who confirmed that their intent is not to let rubbish through: “We’ve seen lots of things that we’re really concerned about and at the end of the day, the person this actually affects is the customer.” [CoinDesk]

Submit comments by January 22, 2024.

Bitfinex suffers hardly any data leakage to speak of

The Bitfinex crypto exchange apparently suffered a completely trivial wafer-thin leak of almost no customer information at all sometime in October. They announced this complete non-news at 21:30 UTC on Saturday November 4. [Bitfinex, archive]

How bad do you think Bitfinex’s customer data spill was? Clearly so very insignificant — a mere trifle! — that they couldn’t get away with just saying nothing at all to the very large and important customers with short tempers.

We’re sure it’s fine. “Bitfinex has a very close relationship with law enforcement,” and maybe it’ll get much closer.

More good news for bitcoin

CoinDesk has been sold in an all-cash deal to Bullish, the crypto exchange backed by Peter Thiel via Block.One — and not to the Vessenes consortium that was sniffing around the site in August. Terms were not disclosed. CoinDesk will operate as a totally independent entity, for sure! Bullish says it will inject lots of capital. [Press release; WSJ, archive]

Binance is finally killing its BUSD stablecoin as of December 15, 2023. The remaining BUSD balances will be converted to the totally trustworthy stablecoin FDUSD on December 31. You can redeem BUSD directly at Paxos up to February 2024 — if you can pass their anti-money laundering. [Binance, archive]

Binance had previously been trying to switch to Justin Sun’s TrueUSD. But TrueUSD was having problems in July 2023 — such as billions of pseudo-dollars being minted out of thin air. It turns out TrueUSD was hacked. The company waited a month to announce the hack, giving themselves plenty of time to furiously mint more TUSD tokens and send them to Huobi. [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Protos]

Bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi is winding down at last. Payouts will be between 39.4% and 100%! … so, 39.4%. [Reuters, archive] 

Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, reportedly wants to try going public again in 2024. Circle tried in 2021 to go public through a SPAC offering. But they failed to get SEC approval for the proposed merger with Concord Acquisition, and by early 2023 they had given up. [Bloomberg, archive; WSJ, paywalled]

OpenSea is laying off 50% of its staff, as all the air has been let out of the NFT balloon. When it laid off 20% of its employees last year, around 230 people remained. So now they’re down to about 100 employees. [Twitter, Nitter] 

The trial of crypto trader and alleged exploiter of Mango Markets Avi Eisenberg has been delayed until April 8, 2024. Eisenberg’s lawyers say they need additional time to prepare for the case. He is currently residing at MDC Brooklyn, also the temporary home of Sam Bankman-Fried. [CoinDesk]

Alex de Vries (Digiconomist) has a new report out on bitcoin’s water usage. Each transaction on the bitcoin blockchain uses 16,000 liters of water on average, about 6.2 million times more than a credit card swipe — and enough to fill a backyard swimming pool. [Cell]

We also suggested that someone should become the Digiconomist of AI power usage. It turns out that guy is Digiconomist! De Vries’ article “The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence” was published in Joule in October. [Joule]

When you buy a nice house, make sure the previous owner wasn’t a crypto Ponzi scammer. Basketball player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander bought a house in Toronto previously owned by Aiden Pleterski, the guy who was kidnapped and tortured over three days by an extremely upset investor inquiring as to where his funds had gotten to. Further aggrieved investors are still showing up at the house — and so Gilgeous-Alexander wants to reverse the sale. [NYT, archive]

Image: Kraken founder Jesse Powell in a random tie he found out on a road somewhere.

Posted on by Amy Castor 2

Stalking a charity: Why the FBI raided Kraken founder Jesse Powell’s home

  • By Amy Castor and David Gerard
  • If you like our work, become a patron! Here’s Amy’s Patreon, and here’s David’s. Sign up today!

Jesse Powell, who launched the Kraken crypto exchange in 2013, got a surprise knock on the door in March when the FBI showed up at his $11 million Los Angeles home for an unannounced search — and left with some of his electronics.

Powell’s house was searched because of allegations that he was hacking and cyber-stalking Verge Center for the Arts, a Sacramento non-profit that he founded in 2007 and bankrolled for several years.

In the wake of the FBI search, Powell is now suing Verge for booting him off the board in 2022. [New York Times, archive]

After the crypto bubble popped in May 2022, Powell became notably more vocal in his crank political views. We’re guessing the Verge board was fed up with his antics, and it wasn’t helpful to them in dealing with more normal art supporters.

Powell feels deeply hurt by getting ousted from the board of Verge. He responded by suing Verge to return his donations to the charity and to reinstate him to the board. We’re not sure those two things go together.

How Verge happened

Powell got his start trading Magic: the Gathering game cards as a teenager in the 1990s. That’s how he met his school friend Roger Ver, who later became a huge bitcoin investor and promoter. 

Like a lot of other early bitcoiners, Powell was into video gaming. Many games have their own in-game currencies — often called “gold” — that gamers use to buy and sell digital items, like characters and weapons.  

In 2001, Powell co-founded Lewt, an online company that sold virtual items and currencies related to games like Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo II and World of Warcraft.

How did Lewt work? When Diablo III came out in 2012, Powell wrote on his personal blog that he was “Offering $1,000,000+/yr for reliable, unlimited and exclusive Diablo 3 item and gold supply.” [Forthewin, 2012, archive]

Powell didn’t ask how or where you obtained that supply: “Please take measures to anonymize yourself when contacting me.” 

It’s difficult to overstate how much the majority of gamers hate guys like this. GameFAQs user FindKenshi wrote in May 2012: “The man made hundreds of millions of dollars off of ‘black market’ item sales, and his massive supply came from a never ending stop of exploits, hacks, insiders from Blizzard, and other sources … No wonder hundreds of accounts are getting stolen every day.” [GameFAQs, 2012, archive]

In 2007, Powell took some of the money he earned from selling virtual game items and leased a long-empty former Napa Auto Parts warehouse in Sacramento on the corner of 19th and V. Streets. He invited area artists to apply for free studio space. And so, Verge was born, initially as a commercial enterprise.

In 2010, Verge Center for the Arts was incorporated as a nonprofit. The space moved to a new location at 625 S. Street on the corner of 7th and S. Streets. Verge bought this building in 2014 when it merged with the Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento. [Baartquake, 2009; Verge]

Verge executive director Liv Moe claims responsibility for growing the arts group into a commercial gallery. Today, Verge houses three to four exhibitions per year, offers classes, labs, and workshops for artists, and has over 40 resident artists. [LinkedIn, archive]

Powell’s erratic behavior

Jesse Powell holds many bizarre opinions, which he’s been happy to express for years. A lot of these opinions are quite prevalent in the bitcoin world. 

Powell fully subscribes to the conspiracy-originated “sound money” theories of bitcoin — though at least he doesn’t believe the US is headed for hyperinflation. He is, however, a committed bitcoin moon boy: “when you measure it in terms of dollars, you have to think it’s going to infinity.” [Fortune, 2020; Bloomberg, 2021, video]

Powell also a COVID conspiracy theorist and vaccine denialist. He believes in “natural immunity,” claims there exists an “anti-science Cult of Vaxx eugenics program,” and warns of a “China COVID psyop.” He is outraged at the lack of respect for “alternative treatments,” such as ivermectin — which, to be clear, doesn’t do anything for COVID, and only cranks think so. But Powell assures us that he respects “vaxxed people, some of whom are statists with compromised immune systems.” [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive]

So Powell is nuts — or “eccentric,” since he’s rich. That’s not a major problem as long as he’s not acting-out nuts where people outside the bitcoin world can hear him. But after the crypto market crashed in May 2022, Powell started acting out.

In June 2022, the New York Times — or “Satan,” if you’re a Silicon Valley tech CEO — wrote about workplace issues at Kraken after it got hold of a “culture document” that Powell had written up and distributed to staff. [New York Times, archive]

A later version of the guide was posted publicly — one that, among other changes, no longer explicitly listed the rights to COVID denial and bearing arms that were in the version the New York Times saw. [Kraken, archive]

Powell was doing things at Kraken that would have been disciplinary offenses in any reasonable workplace — particularly in California — if he were not the CEO. As Jesse described the issues he was having with employees: [Twitter, archive]

5/ What are they upset about?

  • * DEI (Silicon Valley’s version)
  • * pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word
  • * whether differences in human sex exist at all
  • * being respected and unoffended
  • * being “harmed” by “violent” words

In a company Slack channel labeled “and you thought 4chan was full of trolls,” the person asking if he could identify as a different race to say slurs in the workplace and who led discussions of whether women were just naturally stupider than men and whether “most American ladies have been brainwashed in modern times” was, of course, Powell himself.

After the New York Times story, Powell tweeted: “Back to dictatorship.” [Twitter, archive]

Three months later, in September 2022, Powell stepped down from his role as CEO of Kraken. Powell was still Kraken’s largest shareholder and became chairman of the board. [Kraken, archive; New York Times, archive]

Nobody had the power to fire Powell, so he would have stepped down voluntarily — likely under pressure. We suspect that someone convinced him that his HR attitude was not going to be good for a business that dealt with highly regulated financial services and was already under investigation for sanctions violations.

Guiding principles: Powell sues Verge

After the FBI raid, Powell sued Verge and Verge’s treasurer and counsel Phil Cunningham in June 2023. Powell alleged that Verge directors conspired against him while continuing to take his money, then pushed him out. His PR company kindly sent us a copy of the complaint, as written up by his attorney, Brandon Fox. [Complaint, PDF]

Powell says that he had provided Verge with years of financial and technical support — and the Verge board turned on him last summer. On June 20, 2022 — shortly after the New York Times story — the board held a secret meeting where they declared Powell’s seat vacant as of October 2019. 

Since Powell didn’t attend board meetings at all — he says he didn’t have to as a founding member — he didn’t learn that he was out until October 2022, when he discovered he had been removed from the board’s distribution list and his name had been wiped from Verge’s public-facing platforms.

Powell put $1.5 million into Verge, according to the complaint. He registered vergeart.com — the domain name Verge used up until June 2022 — and paid for the domain and its hosting fees. He also paid for Verge’s G Suite and Slack accounts.

Verge asked for the domains and accounts back so that “no one individual owns anything important to the org” — which is reasonable and normal, and Verge really should have insisted on this in 2010 when it became a non-profit.

(That said, we fully understand that it can take charities ages to get around to basic things.)

​​After Powell was kicked off the board, Verge set up a new domain, vergecontemporaryart.org, and redirected the vergeart.com domain. Powell said that the vergeart.com was his domain and he objects to Verge putting the redirect in place “without Mr. Powell’s permission or awareness.”

Powell says that Verge founding director Liv Moe, Verge president Gwenna Howard, and Cunningham wanted him gone because “they disagreed with what they believed to be his views on certain social, cultural, and political issues.” Well, yes.

Howard wrote to Powell: “The Board finds your views to be completely contrary to Verge’s Guiding Principles.” These would have been the views revealed in the June 2022 New York Times story. [Guiding principles, archive]

Verge’s guiding principles state that “Verge is committed to becoming a more open and welcoming organization” and seeks to embrace “different ethnicities, skin colors, gender identities and body types, religious beliefs, physical or cognitive challenges, or socio-economic standing.”

Powell says his views do align with Verge’s guiding principles, and that it was actually Moe who violated the principles. His evidence is two tweets from several years back mentioning white people.

Cunningham’s cease and desist to Powell

Powell’s behavior led to Cunningham writing to Powell and Kraken on November 2, 2022 — two months after Powell stepped down as CEO. Powell claims in his suit that Cunningham “defamed him with falsehoods”:

In telling Mr. Powell’s employer that, among other things, Mr. Powell effectively hacked Verge’s domain and accounts, blocked Verge’s access to its accounts and domain, and refused to relinquish control over Verge’s domain and accounts, Mr. Cunningham, individually, and Verge, acting through Mr. Cunningham as its agent, expressed false statements about Mr. Powell and implied that Mr. Powell was unprofessional and dangerous, and that he had committed a crime.

This letter wasn’t some casual personal communication — it was Cunningham writing “in my official capacity as counsel for VERGE Center for the Arts, a California not for profit corporation.” [Letter, PDF]

This was a legal demand to cease and desist hampering the operations of the charity.

Cunningham complains that Powell has blocked Verge from its usual email accounts and interfered with its technology services. He complains of the “substantial cost and delay” that Powell has incurred for Verge.

Jesse didn’t take his ouster lying down — he used the old vergeart.com domain that he still controlled to and put up a website saying that he was still on the board!

VERGE believes you have used its old domain to create an internet copy of the VERGE website and then changed that website to reflect that you are still a member of the board of directors.

Unsurprisingly, Verge considers this behavior may cause them reputational damage — whether Powell owns the registration to vergeart.com or not.

Cunningham cites California precedent that “your control of the domain names is like owning a storage locker and you refuse to give VERGE the key to the locker so it can retrieve its property.”

Cunningham’s key point is:

The business records and email communications associated with VERGE are the personal property of VERGE.

Powell fails to realize this. He paid the bills for the accounts — but the contents belong to the charity, which is its own entity.

What happens now?

Powell wants Verge to pay damages determined by trial and disgorge the money he gave them after he was covertly booted. He also demands to be put back onto the board.

Those two things aren’t going to go together. Powell put his heart and soul into Verge for years — but Verge is a separate corporation from its founder, and its founder’s views have diverged from the charity’s. Powell’s suit repeatedly fails to understand that the charity is not his personal property.

This suit is not sane and balanced behavior. It’s completely sincere, and Powell’s hurt and pain are real — he feels betrayed. But that’s not enough to make a lawsuit a good or viable idea.

At the very least, Jesse should have contacted his lawyer before he held Verge’s daily office work accounts hostage and edited its website.

We would expect the equitable outcome to end up being something like, Powell giving back the domain and email accounts and Verge returning some of his donations. But that may be too reasonable for Powell.

Verge has until August 7 to respond to Powell’s complaint. We look forward to hearing Verge’s side of the story. 

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: Kraken sets out to raise millions, Circle is cutting staff, Bitfinex scores another tiny victory in court

Crypto exchanges are struggling. Revenue growth is not what it was during the bubble of 2017, and regulators are cracking down. You can’t just list any old coin anymore without considering, “Is the SEC going to deem this a security?” And the cost of hiring lawyers, responding to subpoenas, and staying compliant is cutting into profits. So what are exchanges doing? They are laying off staff and/or trying to raise more money, while they hold out hope for the big institutional money that will come any day now.

Kraken and Bnk to the Future

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 12.12.57 AM

Recently, customers of Kraken got an interesting email offering a “rare, but limited opportunity.” Some folks thought the email was spam, but it was real.

Turns out, the San Francisco-based trading platform is partnering with Bnk to the Future as a way to raise funds by selling preferred shares of its stock. You can own a piece of Kraken for as little as $1,000. (In the US, you need to be an accredited investor, though.) 

The exchange hopes to rustle up $15.45 million. (Originally, it wanted to raise $10.2 million, but lifted the goal.) As of this writing, Kraken has raised $6.2 million from 942 investors. The crowdfund runs until June 20.

In December, Kraken tried to raise money at a $4 billion valuation, and it reportedly raised $100 million early this year, which it used to buy Crypto Facilities, a regulated London-based crypto derivatives exchange.  

In 2016, Bitfinex also used Bnk to the Future when it encouraged its customers to exchange their BFX tokens to shares in iFinex, the parent company of Bitfinex and Tether. BFX was the token that Bitfinex gave to its customers in compensation for funds they lost when the exchange was hacked. The exchange sold $57.39 million worth of iFinex shares in this manner, basically converting stolen funds to shares.

Bitfinex customers didn’t have much of an option. BFX tokens were dropping in value, and they wanted to get their money back.

Bitfinex/Tether and the NYAG law suit

Bitfinex joyously declared another small legal victory on May 22, when New York Supreme Court judge Joel M. Cohen granted a motion limiting the scope of the documents Bitfinex and Tether have to hand over to the New York Attorney General’s office.

The day prior, the companies had filed a motion to dismiss the case outright with three new court docs: a proposed order to show cause, a memorandum in support of the motion to dismiss, and an affidavit by their general counsel Stuart Hoegner.

Lawyers for the companies argued the Bitfinex platform does not allow New Yorkers to trade (putting it outside of the NYAG’s jurisdiction), the Martin Act doesn’t apply to them (because tether is not a security or commodity, they said), and the document requests were too onerous. The NYAG has seven days to respond, and the judge scheduled a hearing for the motion to dismiss on June 29. 

According to Hoegner’s affidavit, which I read late one evening, you can’t actually redeem tethers 1:1 unless you bought them directly from Tether, which means if you got them on an exchange somewhere, too bad. You won’t be too surprised to learn then, that I can’t find a single person who claims to have either bought or redeemed tethers via Tether Ltd.

The Block got hold of a court transcript from the Bitfinex court hearing on May 16. “Tether actually did invest in instruments beyond cash and cash equivalents, including bitcoin,” a lawyer for Bitfinex told the court.

Wait, what? Bitcoin? Tether invested in bitcoin?

The entire purpose of tether is to be a stable asset that traders can use to escape market volatility. Yet, Tether is taking its reserves—money that it was supposed to keep an eye on, so that tethers always remained fully backed—and investing it in a highly volatile asset. What if bitcoin crashes? What then of the stablecoin? 

We learn something new about Tether everyday, it seems. According to CoinMarketCap, every 24 hours, the entire $3 billion supply of tethers changes hands 7.5 times, but not really, because most of that volume is fake.

The Block analyst Larry Cermak posted a graph of exchanges that trade tether, and some of the ones with the highest volume are obscure platforms nobody has heard of. “If I were to make an educated guess, at any given time, only a maximum of 15% of the total Tether volume is real,” he tweeted. In other words, it is all wash trading, i.e., trading bots simultaneously buying and selling tether to create the appearance of frenetic activity.

As far as I can tell, tether’s actual value is on par with horse manure—giving true meaning to the word “stablecoin”—just not as good for the roses. 

Circle and Poloniex

Circle, the Boston-based company that bought crypto trading platform Poloniex in February 2018, is laying off 30 people—10 percent of its workforce. The company blames the layoffs on an “increasingly restrictive regulatory climate.”

Last week, I mentioned that Poloniex geofenced nine altcoins, meaning people in the US will no longer be able to trade those coins on the exchange after May 29. Circle said  recent guidance from the SEC was a trigger for the move. I took another look and realized that one of the coins was Decred—a fork of bitcoin. Why Decred?

It’s possible the project’s premine and governance structure look a little to shareholdery, and Circle, which is backed by Goldman Sachs, is not in a position to risk listing any coins on Poloniex that might be construed as securities.

QuadrigaCX

I finally got around to writing up QuadrigaCX Trustee’s Preliminary Report. Ernst & Young basically says the money is all gone. Also, it adds that Quadriga’s financial affairs were a complete mess, and they’ll probably never sort everything out properly.

Remember the photo of 1,004 checks sitting on a stovetop? EY finally deposited those into a disbursement account on April 18. What a surprise for this trader to learn the money was freshly sucked out of his bank account two years later!

Also interesting, Black Banx (formerly WB21), the third-party payment processor allegedly holding $CA12 million in Quadriga funds is now issuing Visa cards without Visa’s consent. Antony Peyton, the finance journalist who had a thug show up on his doorstep last time he wrote about them, has been researching the company.

Cryptopia

New Zealand crypto exchange Cryptopia went belly up on May 14. Turns out, for the last nine months—since before the January hack that put it out of business—Adam Clark, the exchange’s former founder and programmer, has been building a new crypto exchange. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been working on Assetylene since September 2018. So, if you lost your money on Cryptopia, you can try again on Assetylene. I’m sure they’ve got their security issues sorted out by now.

Meanwhile, the funds that were stolen from Cryptopia are on the move. Whale Alert, who has been keeping on eye on the transfers, says funds from Cryptopia recently went to Huobi, where they were likely traded for other coins. Whale Alert also noted 500 ETH going to decentralized exchange EtherDelta.

Elsewhere in cryptoland

Facebook is getting ready to launch its GlobalCoin cryptocurrency payments system in 2020. They probably want to do something like PayPal combined with social media. David Gerard asks: “Why are on earth are they doing this as a cryptocurrency?” As he explains, nothing about putting this on a blockchain makes any sense whatsoever.

Bestmixer.io, one of the largest crypto mixers and tumblers, was shut down by Dutch authorities with the help of Europol and Luxembourg law enforcement. According to Europol’s press release, it was responsible for $200 million in money laundering.

Well, this is a shocker. The SEC has again delayed the VanEck bitcoin ETF proposal. Here is the order. The new deadline for the SEC to make a decision is August 19, and it can delay one more time for a final deadline of October 18, Jake Chervinsky tweeted. It’s been eight years, and the SEC has yet to approve any bitcoin ETFs in the US.  

Bitcoin is set to overtake the existing financial system—or maybe not. In a recent report, the European Central Bank says crypto poses no threat to financial stability in the euro zone. A “very low” number of merchants currently allow buying of goods and services with bitcoin, and there is no “tangible impact on the real economy.”

The IRS is planning to publish new tax guidance for crypto holders and traders. The last time it issued guidance was November 2014, back when it said crypto would be treated as property and you had to report earnings as capital gains.

 # # #

 

 

 

Posted on by Amy Castor 2

News: Craig Wright suing more people, exchanges respond by delisting BSV, and Arwen launches

I am trying to make my news posts shorter with an effort to focus mainly on cryptocurrency exchanges, unless something else comes up that is just fun to write about. If you enjoy my stories, tips are always welcome via Patreon.

At a hearing on April 18, Quadriga’s court-appointed monitor continued its battle with the exchange’s third-party payment processors to get them to hand over transaction records and funds. The court also extended Quadriga’s creditor protection until June 28.

Screen Shot 2019-04-19 at 9.53.58 AM
Dorian Nakamoto, one of those who turned out not to be Craig Wright.

Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi, is suing people who are accusing him of not being Satoshi. (Wright has yet to prove he actually is.) As mentioned in my last newsletter, it all started when Wright sued twitter user Hodlonaut. Wright has now followed with libel suits against Bitcoin podcast host Peter McCormack, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and crypto blog Chepicap. (CoinGeek, a publication financed by Calvin Ayre, Wright’s billionaire backer, has a full story.)

Naturally, the Bitcoin community is up in arms. In response, Binance—an exchange that has been traditionally unselective in the coins it lists—has delisted BSV (stands for Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision), the coin that resulted from the bitcoin fork spearheaded by Wright and Ayre. The move was followed by several other exchanges delisting BSV, including Kraken, ShapeShift and Bittylicious. Blockchain.info removed support for BSV from its wallet.

Kraken’s BSV delisting was in response to a poll it put up on Twitter. This quote from Kraken founder Jesse Powell is priceless. He says:

“In this case, it is a unique case for us, we haven’t delisted any other coins because the founders, people who are promoting it turned out to be total assholes.”

Angela Walch, a law professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law, compared the #DelistBSV movement to Visa and PayPal not processing Wikileaks transactions and expressed surprise the crypto world was cheering it.

Meanwhile Gemini’s Tyler Winklevoss says Gemini never listed BSV in the first place, and Chandler Guo, a Chinese miner who has made a fortune on ICOs and Bitcoin forks, announced that he would do the opposite and list BSV.

Crypto exchanges just aren’t pulling in the gazillions they used to. Binance generated about $78 million in profit last quarter, up 66 percent quarter-over-quarter. But that still falls short of full year 2018, when the exchange made $446 million in profits. Coinbase brought in revenue of $520 million in 2018, down 44 percent year-over-year.

Hacks, inside jobs and irreversible goof-ups are pushing some crypto exchanges to the brink. Coinnest, once South Korea’s third-largest exchanges, is closing. Users have until April 30 to get their funds off the exchange. Coinnest lost $5.3 million in a botched airdrop in January, though it blames its closure on low trading volume.

Elsewhere, on April 10, Bittrex’s application for a BitLicense (required to do business in New York State) was rejected—in part, because Bittrex customers were using fake names, like “Give me my money,” “Elvis Presley” and “Donald Duck” to trade.

Bittrex says the NY Department of Financial Services (DFS) “sent four people who didn’t know anything about blockchain.” DFS responded again, saying the exchange “continues to misstate the facts” and “presents a misleading picture about the denial.”

Binance is about to begin the process of moving its BNB (currently an ERC20 token) off the Ethereum network and onto Binance Chain, its custom blockchain. Interestingly, The Block’s Larry Cermak notes that Binance has quietly changed its white paper to remove a clause about the exchange using 20 percent of its profits to buy back BNB.

Arwen, a self-custody solution that uses on-blockchain escrows and off-blockchain atomic swaps to allow traders to maintain control of their keys while they trade, launched on Singapore’s KuCoin earlier this week. KuCoin raised $20 million in VC funding last year, and it is the first exchange to partner with Arwen, created by a company of the same name based in Boston.

Finally, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is reportedly eyeing a New York license for its crypto exchange Bakkt. The launch date for Bakkt has been delayed for months due to skepticism from the CFTC. The regulator appears most concerned over how tokens will be stored.

 

 

Posted on by Amy Castor 1

News: 51-foot yacht for sale, Bitfinex enables margin trading with Tether, Craig Wright threatens legal action

Spring is in the air! What are your summer plans? If you are considering buying a boat—or maybe even an “almost new” 51-foot Jeanneau with “very, very few hours” for half a million USD—now would be the time!

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The yacht belonged to Quadriga’s now-deceased CEO Gerald Cotten. Here is a video of him putting Canada’s plastic money into a microwave. Here he is tossing Winnie the Pooh into a bonfire. And this is him playing with Pokémon cards.

The latest on QuadrigaCX

I wrote about how Michael Patryn and Cotten appear to have been working together at Midas Gold, a Liberty Reserve exchanger, prior to founding Quadriga. David Z. Morris at Breakermag covered the topic as well. (He credited me, so I’m real pleased about that.)

At a court hearing on April 8, Quadriga was given the go-ahead to shift into bankruptcy. The move will save costs and give Ernst & Young (EY) more power as a trustee. 

“The trustee can also sell QuadrigaCX’s assets and start lawsuits to recover property or damages,” Evan Thomas of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt told Bitcoin Magazine. “The trustee will collect whatever it can recover for eventual distribution to creditors.”

An “Asset Preservation Order” for Jennifer Robertson, Cotten’s widow, was filed on April 11. Law firm Stewart McKelvey is setting up three separate trusts to “collect and preserve” any surplus funds from estate assets, personal assets and corporate assets. Depreciable assets, such as Cotten’s yacht, will be sold.

Per the order, Robertson will continue to receive her drawings from her business Robertson Nova Property Management “in accordance with current levels, for the purposes of satisfying ordinary living expenses.” She will also have access to cash from the “personal assets” account to maintain her properties and to cover legal expenses.

Robertson has 10 days from the court order to provide EY with a list of all her assets—including cash on hand.

A cap on pay for Miller Thomson LLP and Cox & Palmer has been raised from CA$250,000 to CA$400,000. The team will continue to represent Quadriga’s creditors in the bankruptcy.

Quadriga’s third-party payment processors now have 10 business days (as opposed to five previously) from when they receive this court order to deliver the following to EY:

  • VoPay—CA$116,262.17.
  • Alto Bureau de Change—assets and property.
  • 1009926 BC—all records and transaction-related information.
  • POSConnect—access to Quadriga’s online account to George Kinsman, who is a partner at EY.
  • WB21 (now Black Banx)—all records and account statements related to its Quadriga dealings.

The next hearing to discuss issues remaining from the Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act, including those tied to third-party payments processors, is scheduled for April 18.

Other crypto exchanges

Popular US-based crypto exchange Coinbase suspended trading of BTC-USD pairs for two hours on April 11 due to a “technical issue” with its order book. BTC-USD is a critical trading pair due to its volume and its impact on bitcoin price measures.

It appears that somebody dumped a load of BTC into the exchange’s buy orders causing liquidity to dry up. Coinbase doesn’t want that to happen, so likely that is why it wiped the books, cancelling any outstanding buy or sell orders.

Coinbase Pro, Coinbase’s professional exchange, is continuing to expand its altcoin reach. The exchange is listing three more altcoins: EOS (EOS), Augur (REP), and Maker (MKR). Coinbase first committed to listing MKR in December, but according to The Block’s Larry Cermak, due to low volume, Coinbase decided to hold off listing MKR.

Crypto credit cards are back in vogue. Coinbase has launched a Visa debit card. The “Coinbase Card” will allow customers in the U.K. and EU to spend their crypto “as effortlessly as the money in their bank.” The exchange says it will “instantly” convert crypto to fiat when customers complete a transaction using the debit card. PaySafe, a U.K. payment processor, is the issuer of the card. In the past, these crypto Visa cards have been known to suddenly lose access to the Visa network, so fingers crossed.  

Another executive is leaving Coinbase. The firm’s institutional head Dan Romero has announced he is leaving after five years. This is the third executive to depart Coinbase in six months. Director of institutional sales Christine Sandler left last month, and ex-vice president and general manager Adam White quit in October.

Switzerland-based crypto exchange Bitfinex has lifted its $10,000 minimum equity requirement to start trading. This will undoubtedly bring more cash into the exchange. “We simply could not ignore the increasing level of requests for access to trade on Bitfinex from a wider cohort than our traditional customer base,” CEO Jean-Louis van der Velde said in a blog post (archive).

Meanwhile, Bitfinex customers are complaining (here and here) that they are unable to get cash out of the exchange. Now some are saying they are having trouble getting their crypto out of Bitfinex as well. 

Reddit user “dovawiin” says, “Ive been trying repeated attempts for 2 weeks to withdraw funs and it always says processing. Ive submitted multiple tickets with delayed answers. Ive cancelled and attempted again a few time after waiting 48Hours with no results. Im currently trying again and nothing for over 24 hrs. This is ridiculous.”

Bitfinex also enabled margin trading on Tether. Margin pairs include BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT. Tether has already admitted to operating a fractional reserve, so this is basically adding more leverage to what’s already been leveraged. I’m sure it’s fine though—nothing to worry about here.  

Johnathan Silverman, a former employee of Kraken, is suing the crypto platform for allegedly failing to pay him for work he did. Kraken says it got out of New York in 2015. Silverman says the exchange still maintained an over-the-counter trading desk in the state, which requires licensing for crypto businesses. Kraken told Bloomberg, Silverman “is both lying and in breach of his confidentiality agreement.”

Finally, Malta-based Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges by volume, is partnering with blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace to boost its AML procedures.

Other interesting stuff

All hell broke lose on Twitter Friday when news got out that Craig Wright is making legal threats against Twitter user “Hodlonaut,” who has been publicly calling Wright a “fraudster” and a “fake Satoshi.” Wright has never been able to prove that he is Satoshi.  

In a letter shared with Bitcoin Magazine, SCA ONTIER LLP, writing on behalf of Wright, demands that Hodlonaut retract his statements and apologize, or else Wright will sue him for libel. The letter even includes this bizarre prescribed apology:

“I was wrong to allege Craig Wright fraudulently claimed to be Satoshi. I accept he is Satoshi. I am sorry Dr. Wright. I will not repeat this libel.”

Hodlonaut deleted his Twitter account upon receiving the news. And the crypto community formed a giant backlash against Wright. Preston Byrne is assisting Hodlonaut pro-bono, Peter McCormack is selling T-shirts that say, “Craig Wright is a Fraud,” and Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of crypto exchange Binance threatened to delist Bitcoin SV—the token spearheaded by Wright and billionaire backer Calvin Ayre.

Ayre is also demanding apologies related to some photos of him circulating on Twitter with extremely young-looking women. Coin Rivet writes, “We have agreed to pay Mr Ayre substantial damages for libel. We have also agreed to join in a statement to the English High Court in settlement of Mr Ayre’s complaint.”

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) released guidance that includes shutting down Bitcoin mining. “The risk to Bitcoin in the longer term is other governments taking their cue from China—and taking proof of work more seriously as a problem that needs to be dealt with,” writes David Gerard.

Another Bitcoin mining company has gone belly up. Bcause llc filed for Chapter 11 in Illinois. (Steven Palley uploaded the docs on Scribd.) The company is based in Chicago, but its mining rigs are in Virginia Beach. In January 2018, Virginia Beach Development Authority gave the firm a $500,000 grant to build the $65 million facility. Bcause promised to create 100 full-time jobs, with average salaries of $60,000 a year. 

But by January, the price of Bitcoin was already on its way down—so much for all those jobs. At least the neighbors won’t have to suffer the noise anymore.

Last summer, Virginia Beach resident Tommy Byrns, told Wavy News:

“The issue is the noise, the relentless noise … it’s kind of created an atmosphere where we can’t talk to each other in the backyard. You have to go in the house to talk … this was pushed through without any warning into anybody … and now look what we have.” 

Crypto, the movie, is out. Gerard wrote a full review for DeCrypt on his new battery-powered AlphaSmart Neo 2 keyboard—a 1990s flashback that keeps him from shit posting on Twitter. The film was mediocre—but it stars KURT RUSSELL.

 

 

Posted on by Amy Castor 0

News: I’m speaking in Vancouver, Kraken’s obsession with Quadriga, and Patryn may have been trading on BitMEX

Hello new readers! If you enjoy my crypto meanderings and paywall-free Quadriga resources, please subscribe to my Patreon account. I’m an independent writer, and I need your support. You can subscribe for as little as $2 a month.  

I will be giving a presentation on Quadriga at MPWR Crypto Mining Summit in Vancouver, B.C. on March 12 at 4:15 p.m. local time. If you lost money on Quadriga, you can get into the event for free. Simply send an email to community@biresearch.ca.  

I’m obviously insane to have driven to the Quadriga hearing in Halifax on March 5, given the weather conditions. I went with fellow crypto-skeptic Kyle Gibson. We spun off the road twice. It was horrifying. Apparently, my car was burning oil the entire way.  

On the upside, seeing the hearing live at the Nova Scotia Supreme Court was really cool. Also, while in Halifax, I interviewed with Sheona McDonald, who is working on a Quadriga documentary. I hope to see her again in Vancouver, where she is based. 

As far as the hearing goes, the big news is that Quadriga was granted a 45-day stay and the judge gave a thumbs up to the appointment of Peter Wedlake, a senior vice president and partner with Grant Thornton, as a chief restructuring officer (CRO) for the firm.

I was struck by the number of paid professionals sitting before the judge—somewhere between eight and nine, and a few others in the back of the room. What is the hourly rate for a lawyer? And some of them had to fly in, too. 

And now, one more mouth to feed: the CRO. According to court documents, Quadriga needs a CRO for “ongoing direction” related to its affairs during its Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act (CCAA) and in the event of an “anticipated sales process.”  

This talk of selling Quadriga is a recurring theme, so watch for it to come up again. The biggest value in the sell would likely be Quadriga’s user base. A similar effort is being made to revive Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based crypto exchange that went bust in 2014.

The law firms for Quadriga’s affected users have so far heard from 800 creditors—not a lot, when you consider there are 115,000 affected users. But keep in mind there is no formal claims process at the moment.   

How will customer claims be evaluated? Court-appointed monitor Ernst and Young (EY) is working to gain access to the exchange’s platform data in AWS, where all the customer trades are located. (EY had to get a court order at the hearing to do so.) It will be interesting to see what the monitor finds when it cracks that egg—maybe nothing. Other trails have already been wiped clean. Quadriga has no books and six identified bitcoin cold wallets were found empty, except for an inadvertent transfer reported earlier. 

I recently wrote about WB21, the shady third-party payment processor that is holding $12 million CAD ($9 million USD) in Quadriga funds, according to court documents submitted in January. After I published the story, WB21, threatened me with legal action. I responded by posting the documents they sent. Since then, I’ve been getting anonymous threats via social media and email, telling me to stop talking about Quadriga.  

Kyle Torpey wrote how bitcoin users in Canada are being targeted with audits by the Canada Revenue Agency (CDA). It is possible this could deter some affected Quadriga users from registering their claims, particularly if they are worried about anyone finding out about their crypto investments. 

Elsewhere in the news, Kraken is offering a reward for any info leading to the finding of Quadriga’s lost coins. The US-based crypto exchange writes:  

“It is up to our sole discretion which tips warrant a reward, if any. The total of all rewards will not exceed $100,000 USD. Kraken may end this reward program at any point in time. All leads collected by Kraken will be provided to the FBI, RCMP or other law enforcement authorities, who have an active interest in this case.”

Screen Shot 2019-03-10 at 4.11.20 PM.pngKraken’s CEO Jesse Powell has done two podcasts talking about Quadriga. Why is he so interested? If you recall, Kraken acquired Canadian crypto exchange Cavirtex in January 2016, so it has some Canadian customers. A few people I spoke with speculated that Kraken may have an interest in acquiring Quadriga’s user base. Otherwise, $100,000 USD seems like a lot of money to throw around for an exchange that let go of 57 people in September.

After this post went live, Powell sent me a few comments via email. He assured me the only purpose of Kraken’s reward was to help locate more assets for the Quadriga creditors and uncover any potential foul play. I reminded him that EY is already doing its own investigation into the lost funds. As of yet, Quadriga is not a criminal case.

As for acquiring the Quadriga platform and its user base, Powell thinks the platform is worthless and the user base probably significantly overlaps with Kraken’s already. “We would be open to acquiring the client list, but it wouldn’t be for much,” he said.

He also pointed out that “a lot of money” is relative and unrelated to his firm’s earlier layoffs. “Kraken increased its profitability in September,” he said. “Would you think $100,000 USD was a lot for Amazon, who let go a few hundred people last February?”

Lest there be any lingering doubt, Globe and Mail posted convincing evidence linking Quadriga cofounder Michael Patryn to convicted felon Omar Dhanani. The two appear to be one and the same. I think we can lay that one to rest now. 

Meanwhile, The Block wrote about Patryn allegedly trading large positions on BitMEX, an unregulated exchange that lets you bet on whether the price of bitcoin will go up or down. You place all your bets in bitcoin, and you can leverage up to 100x. It’s a great way to risk losing all of your money. (I wrote about BitMEX for The Block last year.) There’s been speculation as to whether Patryn was gambling with Quadriga’s customer funds.

Earlier, Coinbase also brought up the possibility that Quadriga was operating a fractional reserve after the exchange suffered multimillion dollar losses in June 2017 due to a smart contract bug.

Bottom line: anything is possible. Nobody knew what was going on inside Quadriga — and they still don’t. The exchange had no official oversight and as of early-2016, only one person was in charge of that platform and all the money it held, and that was Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s now deceased CEO.  

More information will come out as EY continues with its work. I can only imagine the private conversations occurring between the accountants (and lawyers) as more details in the CCAA process emerge. Welcome to crypto!

Read “How the hell did we get here: a timeline of Quadriga events” for the full story.

Posted on by Amy Castor 1