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

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

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

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

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

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

The SEC rap sheet

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

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

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

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

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

The Fed and DFPI rap sheet

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

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

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

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

What happens in the SEN stays in the SEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silvergate and FTX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of these claims were false too.

Whoops, liquidity!

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

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

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

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

Borrowing to cover debts

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean?

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

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

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

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

Posted on July 3, 2024July 3, 2024 by Amy Castor 1

Crypto is going: Coinbase sues FDIC and SEC under FOIA, Epoch Times crypto money laundering, Consumers’ Research vs Tether, FTX/Salame, Terra settles with SEC

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

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A ‘use case’ is a fix for a problem you wish people had — Stephen Farrugia

Amy and David have a new project: Pivot to AI. The elevator pitch is “Web 3 Is Going Great, but it’s AI.” (“oh good, maybe now people will stop asking me to do it lol” — Molly White.) Sign up to subscribe via email on the site!

Coinbase gets out the conspiracy board

Coinbase strikes a blow against “Operation Chokepoint 2.0.” They will crack this conspiracy by … suing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation under the Freedom of Information Act. [Complaint, PDF, archive]

The FDIC sent letters to various banks asking them to stop dealing in crypto. History Associates, representing Coinbase, filed FOIA requests for the letters. The FDIC rejected the requests. History Associates is now appealing the rejection.

The FDIC rejected History Associates’ FOIA claim based on Exemption 4 — trade secrets and confidential commercial information — and Exemption 8 — “contained in or related to examination, operating, or condition reports prepared by, on behalf of, or for the use of an agency responsible for the regulation or supervision of financial institutions.”

Exemption 8 is very broad but has consistently been upheld. Courts have ruled that Congress wrote a broad exemption because they meant it as a broad exemption. [Justice Department]

The complaint contains some facts and a lot of conspiracy theorizing and table pounding: “The Pause Letters are part of a deliberate and concerted effort by the FDIC and other financial regulators to pressure financial institutions into cutting off digital-asset firms from the banking system.”

Given that all four US bank failures in 2023 were crypto-involved, we think: well done, FDIC.

Coinbase and History Associates are also suing the SEC under the FOIA for details of its internal deliberations on whether ETH is a security, which the SEC rejected under Exemption 8. They also want more information on the SEC’s 2018 settlement with the EtherDelta decentralized exchange. [Bloomberg Law, archive]

Bill’s beautiful launderette

Bill Guan, the CFO of the Epoch Times, ran a crypto money laundering operation through the paper’s companies. This apparently supplied over three-quarters of the paper’s revenue in 2020. If you ever wondered how they could afford all those billboards … [Press release; indictment, PDF]

Guan ran the paper’s “Make Money Online” team. The MMO team would buy dirty money from crimes on prepaid debit cards from an unnamed crypto platform for 70 to 80 cents on the dollar. The MMO team would move the money through layered transactions and fraudulent bank accounts into Epoch Times accounts.

Guan lied to banks and crypto exchanges that the money was from subscriptions or even donations from Epoch Times supporters.

The Justice Department has gone out of its way to not name the Epoch Times and stresses that this action has nothing to do with the paper’s “news-gathering” operations — they’re nailing this all on Guan. The indictment notes that other parts of the company even asked Guan what was going on with all the debit card purchases.

Paolo’s beautiful launderette

Consumers’ Research is running a very loud and well-funded advertising and lobbying campaign against our good friends at Tether, saying they’re money launderers and sanctions busters and their backing is questionable. There’s billboards and seven-figure TV ad spend. The ad voiceover speaks of “preece manipulation.” [Tethered To Corruption; press release; YouTube]

It’s not clear who is behind this campaign. Consumers’ Research is a conservative propaganda nonprofit whose funding is laundered through a donor-advised fund — a way for rich people to make controversial donations without having their names attached.

We’ve asked other public critics of Tether and Consumers’ Research doesn’t seem to have contacted any of us at all. The consensus is that it looks like a single guy who is extremely personally pissed off at Tether for unclear reasons. A deal gone very bad, maybe? Bennett Tomlin summarizes what’s known. [Mailchimp]

Consumers’ Research is not wrong about Tether, though. The use case for tethers is still crime and sanctions evasion — in the latest case, Russian commodities firms settling with their Chinese counterparts. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to depend on Tether supplying liquidity. OFAC should probably get onto that. [Bloomberg, archive]

FTX: Salame sliced

When FTX went down, it was incredibly obvious that this was a crime scene. All the FTX executive suite — except Sam Bankman-Fried — pleaded guilty and offered to cooperate with prosecutors in the hope of a lighter sentence.

Ryan Salame was too cool for that. He confessed to a smaller selection of crimes but didn’t agree to cooperate. Salame has now been sentenced to 90 months (seven and a half years) behind bars. After the sentence, Salame gets three years of supervised release. Judge Lewis Kaplan has ordered him to pay $6 million in forfeiture and $5 million in restitution. [Justice Department; Sentencing memorandum, PDF]

Prosecutors had recommended five to seven years. The Probation Office had recommended the maximum sentence of 120 months imprisonment, and evidently, Judge Kaplan was convinced.

The defense asked for no more than 18 months. LOL. [Sentencing memorandum, PDF]

FTX’s ripped-off customers are outraged at getting back only 100% of their stolen assets plus interest. So they’re suing for even more than that. They claim that because they had crypto supposedly on the exchange before the collapse — though in fact they did not, because Sam Bankman-Fried had stolen it — any cryptos recovered by John Jay Ray’s team must surely belong to them personally. [CoinDesk]

LessWrong and Effective Altruism web hosting company Lightcone hosted a “prediction markets” convention that just happened to be filled to the brim with race scientists from the Rationalist sphere and also failed to return donations from FTX to the bankruptcy. Whoops. The effective altruists are now falling over themselves to argue that it’s all okay, race-and-IQ theorists aren’t really racists, and kicking the racists out is bad. Also that Lightcone should probably have answered FTX’s letters about the money. [Guardian, archive; SFGate; Effective Altruism forum; Effective Altruism forum; Twitter, thread, archive]

The war on Terra

Do Kwon and Terraform have agreed on a settlement with the SEC for $4.5 billion and Judge Jed Rakoff has approved it. [Doc 271, PDF; letter, PDF; press release]

Total remedies — disgorgement, interest, and penalties — come to $4,473,828,306, which will become just another claim in Terraform’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Do Kwon must pay $204,320,196 out of his own pocket, which will go to investors.

Do Kwon is still in jail in Montenegro awaiting extradition. We already know that Milojko Spajic, the libertarian-leaning prime minister of Montenegro, was a crypto fan — photo opportunity with Vitalik Buterin and all — but It turns out that he personally bought $75,000 of LUNA in April 2018 and may well be the person keeping Kwon out of the clutches of the US or South Korea. [Bloomberg, archive]

Kwon said in 2023 how crypto “friends” of his had financially supported Spajic’s Europe Now Party. Kwon called it “a very successful investment relationship.”

Regulatory clarity

NYDFS guidance: virtual currency firms licensed in New York (that’s you, Coinbase) need to keep the Department of Financial Services updated on their responsiveness to customer complaints (that’s you, Coinbase). [DFS]

The US Treasury reports on the use of NFTs for “illicit finance.” The uses are not so much sanctions evasion, but more mundane criminal money laundering for frauds and scams. [Press release; Report, PDF]

Kanav Kariya has stepped down as President of Jump Crypto — “the end of an incredible personal journey.” By pure coincidence, this came four days after the CFTC was reported to be probing Jump Crypto’s trading. Jump was one of the heaviest US-based VIP users of Binance, served as a market maker for Terra and FTX, filled crypto orders for Robinhood, and seems to be a part-owner of TrueUSD. [Twitter, archive; Fortune, archive]

85 years old and still running Ponzis? Now that’s a work ethic. [Justice Department]

Still good news for bitcoin

The Gemini crypto exchange has been told by New York to pay back $50 million to Gemini Earn customers. Gemini is also now barred from lending crypto in the state. New York previously got $2 billion back from Genesis, who lost Earn customers’ money in the first place. The two settlements should leave Earn customers made whole! [Press release]

Robinhood is buying the European crypto exchange Bitstamp. [Bloomberg, archive]

Congressman Tom Emmer doesn’t think he can get US crypto legislation through this year. Oh well. [CoinDesk]

Bitcoin ETFs and ETPs have existed outside the US for many years, so the coiner insistence there was massive pent-up demand for a US-based ETF wasn’t such a plausible claim. And so ETPs in Europe have had net outflows every month this year. [FT, archive]

David Rosenthal writes on the bitcoin halving and how it actually worked out. [DSHR]

Watch Jackie Sawicky’s new Proof-Of-Waste Podcast! The first one features Peter Howson, author of Let Them Eat Crypto. [YouTube]

Daniel Kuhn, CoinDesk: well, the world has rejected crypto. But maybe we don’t want the world using crypto! Have you considered that, huh? Anyway, “adoption means following the law (which is often at odds with crypto’s values).” Well, yes. This opinion piece also looks to the philosophical wisdom of Roko Mijic, the creator of the mind-numbingly stupid Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment. [CoinDesk]

Posted on June 27, 2024June 27, 2024 by Amy Castor 3

Crypto collapse: Bankman-Fried trial draws to a close, SafeMoon arrested, fourth US bank failure was crypto

A new crypto collapse update is out! This one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

Sam’s trial is wrapping up. He took the stand, a terrible move, and predictably, prosecutors ate him alive. Now the jurors will decide on his guilt or innocence.

Elsewhere in crypto, Tether is making loans again, Celsius creditors still getting soaked, the proper regulator for crypto is the DOJ, and Twitter is going down the toilet.

Posted on November 2, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

The beautiful mind of Sam Bankman-Fried

Here’s our latest, just before Sam gets up to destroy his life even further. He is testifying in his own defense in his criminal trial today, something his lawyers have likely strongly advised against. But Sam just can’t shut up. What makes him so reckless? Join us, as we take a deep look inside the mind of Sam and uncover what makes him tick. This one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: Sam Bankman-Fried goes to jail, SEC appeals Ripple ruling, Prime Trust bankrupt, the tangled tale of TrueUSD and Tron

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Enjoying our posts? Keep them coming — send us money! Here’s Amy’s Patreon and here’s David’s.
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“i cant wait until we get julain assange out of jail using Crypto. itll make all the pedophile money laundering worth it”
— dril

Go directly to jail

Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail has been revoked for witness tampering — specifically, that he shared ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s private diary with a New York Times reporter. This was the last straw for Judge Lewis Kaplan, who said the documents were “something that someone who has been in a relationship would be unlikely to share with anyone except to hurt and frighten the subject.”

Previously, Sam tried to get in touch via Signal with another witness, former FTX US lawyer Ryne Miller, about getting their stories straight — which nearly saw Sam’s bail revoked that time.

Our hero is currently at MDC Brooklyn — notoriously one of the worst jails in the federal system — but the government has asked that he be remanded at Putnam, where he’ll be allowed more computer access to prepare for his upcoming trial on October 2.

Inner City Press live-tweeted the entire hearing. Sam’s lawyer Mark Cohen immediately filed an appeal. [Twitter, archive; Doc 198, PDF; Notice of Appeal, PDF; Order; PDF]

Prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Sam on August 14. The new indictment contains seven of the thirteen original charges, removing anything that wasn’t explicitly in the Bahamas extradition agreement. Sam’s $100 million of political contributions are now listed as just another way he misspent customer money. The government also filed its motions in limine — pretrial motions on what evidence is admissible and so on. [Indictment, PDF; in limine, PDF; Doc 165, PDF]

Mathew Russell Lee of Inner City Press has been the man on the scene at the SDNY courthouse for Sam’s hearings. As well as live-tweeting hearings, he collects his writeups as Kindle books. His collection on Sam is just out, recounting the saga as he saw it happen from December 2022 to last week. [Amazon UK; Amazon US]

SEC appeals Ripple

The SEC has asked SDNY District Judge Analisa Torres to pause their case against Ripple so they can appeal her questionable decision on XRP sales to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals. The SEC’s grounds for appeal is that there’s now a genuine intra-district judicial dispute over the issue. [Doc 887, PDF]

On July 13, Torres ruled that XRP is a security when it’s sold to sophisticated investors, but it’s not a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges – which is precisely backward from the past ninety years of US securities jurisprudence.

In the same courthouse, District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the SEC lawsuit against Terraform Labs and its cofounder Do Kwon, flatly rejected Torres’ decision and ruled that Terraform’s LUNA and MIR coins may have been securities when sold to retail investors.

John Reed Stark notes: “For SEC lawyers like myself, Judge Jed Rakoff is arguably considered the most respected and experienced securities law jurist not only in the SDNY but perhaps in the entire U.S. federal court system.” [Twitter, archive]

The SEC proposes to file its opening brief on August 18. Ripple would have until September 1 to respond, and the SEC’s reply would be due a week later on September 8. This is quite soon, but Coinbase and Binance are both using the Ripple decision to support their defenses against their own SEC suits.

Prime Trust goes Chapter 11. You had one job!

Crypto custodian Prime Trust filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware on August 14. Prime halted withdrawals in late June after Nevada regulators put the company into receivership as insolvent.

How did Prime fall insolvent? They lost the keys to a pile of the crypto they were supposed to be keeping safe. This happened in December 2021. You had one job, guys!

From December 2021 until March 2022, Nevada says that Prime used customer funds to buy additional crypto. But for a year and a half, Prime just lied and told everyone they still had their crypto.

Prime has between 25,000 and 50,000 creditors and liabilities of up to $500 million. The firm’s top fifty creditors have claims of $145 million — including the largest claim of $55 million. [Business Wire; Stretto]

Knives out at TrueUSD

Archblock, formerly TrustLabs trading as TrustToken, created TUSD, a supposedly asset-backed $3 billion stablecoin. It then sold TrueUSD to Justin Sun’s Tron in late 2020 — but the connection to Tron has always been a bit murky, and TrustLabs has never been upfront about who the coin’s actual owner was.

TrustLabs said the new owner was Techteryx, “an Asia-based consortium” — though TrustLabs/Archblock still managed TUSD until July 2023. [Medium, 2020, archive; Twitter, archive]

Alameda Research was the largest redeemer of TUSD. FTX listed TUSD when they knew that TrustLabs was misrepresenting who owned it.

TrueUSD’s main custodian was Prime Trust — and Prime was also its main fiat on-and-off ramp for the US banking system. Prime Trust was thus Justin Sun’s main link to US banking. At least until Signature, Prime’s main banking partner, collapsed in March.

We wrote previously about how the TUSD coin seems pretty clearly unbacked and was being used by someone in the vicinity of Binance to pump the price of bitcoin earlier this year.

Archblock is now doing a merger to move the company’s domicile from the US to Switzerland, for unclear reasons. [Blockhead]

Daniel Jaiyong (“Jai”) An, co-founder of TrustLabs/Archblock, is not happy with this merger and move. An is suing Archblock and its executives: Rafael Cosman, co-founder and board member; Alex De Lorraine, COO and former board member; and Tom Shields, former chairman of the board.

The complaint was filed pro se on July 14 in Delaware, meaning An did not hire an attorney. He wrote the 58-page complaint himself — and it shows. [DLNews; complaint, PDF]

An was in the midst of negotiating the sale of TrueUSD to Techteryx, whose contact was Justin Sun of Tron. In fact, An describes the sale as being to Tron.

So, yes — TrueUSD is run by Justin Sun, if you ever doubted it.

TrustLabs got $32 million from investors in a 2018 accredited investor ICO under SEC Regulation D for a token called TRU. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, BlockTower Capital, Danhua Capital, Jump Capital,* ZhenFund, Distributed Global, Slow Ventures, GGV Capital, and Stanford-StartX.

_{*Update: Although An mentions Jump Capital in his complaint, Jump Crypto wrote us to say it wasn’t Jump Capital, but Jump Crypto, a division of Jump Trading Group, who made the investment.}

An says that by January 2020, it was clear that the plan in the TRU white paper would never pass SEC muster. He wanted to pay the investors back, as the SEC would surely require – but he says that his cofounder Cosman blocked this. The other shareholders voted An out in July 2020.

TrustLabs finally issued the TRU token in November 2020, repurposed as the native token of their TrueFi lending protocol. An alleges the other executives enriched themselves with TRU tokens — but not him.

An says the company threatened him with legal action if he informed investors what the company was doing. An then filed as a whistleblower with the SEC. He claims the company has retaliated against him for doing so.

Several paragraphs claim past criminal actions by Cosman.

An remains a shareholder in Archblock. He wants the merger blocked and $94.32 million in damages.

Data Finnovation notes that if An’s allegations are true, then FTX knew since 2020 that TrueUSD was owned by Tron — because Tron’s lawyer Can Sun was working on the deal and Can Sun later ended up working for FTX under Daniel Friedberg. Remember that FTX minted nearly all the tethers on Tron in the same time period. [Twitter, archive; Medium, 2022]

Worldcoin wants your eyeballs

Sam Altman is the founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Worldcoin is Altman’s proof-of-eyeball cryptocurrency.

Altman promotes Worldcoin as a way to end poverty — and not just a way for him to collect huge amounts of biometric data. In exchange for giving up your iris scan, you’ll get 25 free Worldcoins (WLD). [CoinDesk]

Worldcoin operators use “orbs” to scan eyeballs. The operators get paid in tethers. [MIT Technology Review, 2022]

Since the Worldcoin project launched on July 24, throngs of people in Kenya have been queuing up to get their eyeballs scanned — lured by free Worldcoin tokens.

The problem is converting WLD into actual spendable money. The Worldcoin app has no direct withdrawal option — so the Kenyan users have to trade their WLD for USDT on Binance or put their trust in random over-the-counter buyers. So Worldcoin has become a honeypot for scammers: [Rest of World]

“There’s no regulation in the space, and the people receiving the free tokens don’t have enough information. What do you expect?” Evrard Otieno, a Nairobi-based crypto trader and software developer, told Rest of World. “It’s just another opportunity for traders to make some money in the market.”

Days after the Worldcoin launch, the Communications Authority of Kenya and the Office of the Data Protection Commission ordered Worldcoin to suspend operations while they reviewed the project’s privacy protections. [Twitter, archive]

Kenyan police then raided the Worldcoin Nairobi warehouse on August 5 and seized the orbs. [KahawaTungu].

Data watchdogs in Britain, France, and Germany are also investigating Worldcoin for similar reasons. [ICO; Reuters]

The WLD token launched at $3.58 but had crashed to a low of $1.76 by August 14. WLD trades only against USDT and mostly on Binance. [CoinDesk; CoinGecko]

Worldcoin’s investors, who have collectively put in $125 million, include the usual suspects — Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. [Crunchbase]

Hex enduction hour

Hex is an ERC-20 token that doesn’t do anything. Hex was promoted widely, even internationally on billboards, by a fellow called Richard Heart (or Richard Schueler to the tax man).

Hex promised stupendous yield rates. You bought Hex with ETH, then you staked the Hex, then you got paid interest in Hex. The website called Hex the “first high-interest blockchain certificate of deposit” that “was built to be the highest appreciating asset that has ever existed in the history of man.”

To “stake” your Hex, you would send it to … the Ethereum genesis address, 0x0. That is, you would throw your Hex into a black hole from which it could never be recovered. The Hex smart contract would then pay you Hex tokens in the future, apparently.

The SEC has finally sued Heart over Hex, PulseChain (a fork of Ethereum), and PulseX (a fork of UniSwap). They allege that Heart raised over $1 billion from these three unregistered securities offerings beginning in 2019. [SEC press release; Complaint, PDF]

The SEC says that Heart misappropriated investor funds to buy luxury sports cars, Rolex watches, and a 555-carat diamond, known as “The Enigma,” which he purchased in February 2022 in a Sotheby’s auction. Sotheby’s accepted ETH for the purchase. Heart was famous for promoting Hex with photos of himself showing off his wealth.

Heart has an unfortunate past of selling email spam software in the 2000s. He even called himself the Spam King. Bennett Haselton of peacefire.org successfully sued Heart in 2002 under Washington anti-spam laws for sending junk emails with deceptive headers. [ZDNet, 2002, archive; Panama Guide, 2007, archive]

David went on Richard Heart’s livestream in early 2020. David talked about books a bit, then Richard went into his sales pitch for Hex. Richard is a very charming and likable fellow, but in that particular way that cautions you not to let a penny of your cash within a mile of him. [YouTube, 2020]

This bank failure is fine, nothing to see here

A fourth US bank fell over this year — Heartland Tri-State Bank of Elkhart in Kansas, a small bank with just $139 million in assets. David Herndon, the Kansas banking commissioner, closed Heartland on July 28 after it became insolvent because it was “apparently the victim of a huge scam.”

Herndon said he didn’t know what the scam was — but he said other banks in the state were not affected. Our psychic powers tell us he has an extremely good idea what happened. The FBI is on the case.

The FDIC had to pay $54 million out of its deposit insurance fund – more than Heartland’s entire $48 million loan portfolio. [FT, free with login]

An employee of the bank said all workers at the bank are still employed, but Shan Hanes, the president and CEO, is no longer there. The bank was handed over to Dream First Bank as a growing concern.

Everyone has been careful to note that the bank fell due to a “huge scam” and definitely not the sort of thing that took out Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank. The “scam” was first mentioned in an August 4 story in American Banker. [Kansas Reflector; FDIC; American Banker]

Still only good news for bitcoin

The SEC is suing Binance. BAM (Binance US) wants to block further discovery and depositions, because they’ve given the SEC so much information toward the consent order they had to be beaten into. BAM demands only four depositions of BAM employees, no depositions of BAM’s CEO or CFO, and no matters outside the consent order. We suspect that Binance doesn’t have some of the perfectly reasonable stuff the SEC has asked for, such as non-existent financial accounts — so Binance is resorting to the Tether defense. John Reed Stark thinks the SEC will largely prevail. [Doc 95, PDF; Twitter, archive]

The SEC sued Bittrex in April for listing securities without registering as an exchange. Bittrex has now settled with the SEC. They will pay $14.4 million disgorgement, $4 million prejudgment interest, and a $5.6 million civil penalty. [Press release]

CoinDesk is laying off 20 people from editorial — 45% of the editorial staff, or 16% of all staff – to prepare for its sale to the Peter Vessenes and Matt Roszak consortium. We’re pretty sure everyone at CoinDesk is furiously updating their resumes right now. [The Block; TechCrunch]

Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, several lobbyists and academics, and venture capital firms a16z and Paradigm have filed amicus briefs urging the SEC to drop its lawsuit against Coinbase. These mostly repeat Coinbase’s arguments. [Doc 48, PDF; Doc 50, PDF; Doc 53, PDF; Doc 55, PDF; Doc 59, PDF; Doc 60, PDF; Doc 62, PDF]

Kai Lentit of “Programmers Are Also Human” on YouTube goes to Web3 Berlin. “Where people without jobs ask people without companies for jobs.” [YouTube]

Posted on August 15, 2023August 16, 2023 by Amy Castor 1

Crypto collapse: The Fed takes on crypto banks, Coinbase earnings call is bad, FTX 2: Ex Harder

Our latest news!

In this week’s edition:

* New Federal Reserve regulations on banks dealing in crypto

* The TassatPay networks — Signet returned

* Coinbase earnings call — crypto trading is dead

* Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail is in danger

* FTX may restart as a new crypto exchange

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

John Jay Ray sues FTX inner circle for $1 billion, prosecutors want Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail revoked

We just posted an update on the latest happenings with FTX. This one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

In recent months, John Jay Ray III and his team have filed a pile of more actions to claw back funds for FTX creditors.

Ray is suing the FTX inner circle for $1 billion in fraudulent transfers. Among their bizarre plans, SBF and the gang wanted to turn the Island of Nauru into a doomsday bunker for effective altruists.

In other news, FTX and Genesis are settling, several media outlets are still battling to keep the court from permanently sealing FTX’s creditor list, and it’s looking like Sam is about to have his bail revoked. The prosecution is fed up with his efforts to “taint the jury pool.” Leaking Caroline’s diary to NYT reporters was the last straw for them.

Image: Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman–Fried, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang

Posted on July 30, 2023July 30, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

FTX: John Jay Ray files second interim report, sues Daniel Friedberg

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

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Me: [turning to guy at gas station] so the polycule was mostly in the dark about the fraud. SBF had back door access
Guy: [pulling out taser from under seat] is that right
— Ed Zitron

“Attorney-1” was a bad boy

John Jay Ray III, the CEO of FTX in bankruptcy, has released a second interim report detailing how FTX skirted bank secrecy laws and commingled funds — and how an FTX lawyer, “Attorney-1,” served as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fix-it and hatchet man. [Report, PDF]

(We covered the first interim report, which came out in April, here.)

“Attorney-1” is very obviously Daniel Friedberg, who was FTX’s compliance officer and Alameda’s general counsel. A day after Ray released the interim report, FTX filed suit against Friedberg, alleging malfeasance in the course of his duties. The complaint details many of the same incidents in the report. [WSJ; redacted complaint, PDF]

In 2008, Friedberg was a colleague of Stuart Hoegner at Ultimate Bet, where the pair helped cover up a multi-million-dollar scandal in which the site cheated its players. Hoegner now works for Tether, a dubious stablecoin issuer.

SBF hiring Friedberg should have been the first clue that FTX.com was a massive fraud.

Friedberg resigned around the time the FTX Group filed for bankruptcy. Weeks later, he met with the FBI, the DOJ, and the SEC and told them he wanted to cooperate with any investigations.

There’s an interesting line in the interim report:

The Debtors have identified on Attorney-1’s hard drive a final copy of the false written testimony that Bankman-Fried provided to Congress.

FTX has access to the hard drive from Friedberg’s computer. Did Friedberg just leave the evidence behind when he quit FTX? Or did he willingly hand over his laptop to FBI agents? This hard drive seems to have had all sorts of interesting documents on it.

Friedberg hasn’t been charged with any crimes as yet — but based on Ray’s report and the ensuing lawsuit, we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a sealed indictment out there waiting for him.

Following the money

FTX owes $8.7 billion in customer funds — over $6.4 billion of which is cash and stablecoins. According to Ray, Friedberg lent a helping hand when FTX executives “used commingled customer and corporate funds for speculative trading, venture investments, and the purchase of luxury properties, as well as for political and other donations designed to enhance their own power and influence.”

Ray details what he found about various FTX accounts and the flows of cash in and out of them. Tracking money flows was “extraordinarily challenging”:

… from the inception of the FTX.com exchange, the FTX Group commingled customer deposits and corporate funds, and misused them with abandon … Commingling and misuse occurred at their direction, and by their design.

Ray and his team have recovered $7 billion in “liquid assets” so far, which is astounding — though we’re not sure how liquid the crypto component of that will be in practice, or how much is unsaleable FTT tokens.

The report does not include FTX in Japan, Cyprus, or Singapore — areas where funds were properly segregated by law. It also does not address FTX.US, which Ray says is still under investigation.

No, no, it’s research

FTX lied to banks — a lot. Alameda Research had “research” in its name so that it could get bank accounts without immediately being flagged for enhanced due diligence as a money services business. FTX couldn’t get banking, so they used Alameda bank accounts to receive customer cash, right from the start.

But banks started asking inconvenient questions. When “Bank-1” — likely either Signature or Silvergate — asked why FTX was sending money to Alameda, an Alameda employee told them that “customers occasionally confuse FTX and Alameda” but that all wires through the account were to settle trades with Alameda.

This was false. In just 2020, one of Alameda’s accounts received more than $250 million in deposits from FTX customers and more than $4 billion from other Alameda accounts that were funded in part by customer deposits, says the report.

When banks started rejecting wires to Alameda accounts, FTX set up North Dimension so it could continue to funnel money to FTX. Friedberg and SBF told “Bank-1” that North Dimension was a crypto trading firm with substantial operations. In fact, it was an empty shell with no employees or operations.

Friedberg also engaged his old law firm to create a fake corporate register for North Dimension for the bank: “Specifically, after Bank-1 asked for a copy of the register, Attorney-1 directed a law firm to create a register.”

Time travel by document

In 2021, FTX Trading Ltd was planning to go public. As part of the paperwork for that, it needed an audited financial statement.

The problem was that from April 2019 when FTX.com first launched until the end of August 2020, FTX.com customers had been sending cash deposits to Alameda bank accounts. FTX needed to cover up the fact that they were just using Alameda to move customer and company funds around without any agreement to do so.

So in January 2021, Friedberg had his old law firm draft a “cash management agreement” to explain why Alameda held FTX cash. Friedberg created from this a fake “Payment Agent Agreement.”

FTX usually signed documents with DocuSign to provide an electronic record. In this case, to avoid a DocuSign timestamp, SBF wet-signed the document on behalf of Alameda and FTX on April 16, 2021 — backdated to 2019 “for the sole purpose of providing it to an external auditor.”

How did Ray’s team know the document was backdated? They found the original document file on Friedberg’s hard drive:

While metadata reflects that Attorney-1 created the Payment Agent Agreement on April 12, 2021, and that the executed version was last modified on April 16, 2021, the agreement purports to have an “Effective Date” of June 1, 2019 —nearly two years earlier.

The IPO never happened — but the fake document did help the FTX companies get more funding from “potential investors in connection with its $400 million Series C financing that closed in January 2022.”

Sam the philanthropist

SBF was famous for his Effective Altruism. He used FTX funds by preference:

The Debtors have been able to identify certain transactions that appear clearly to have been funded in part with commingled customer deposits. These include political and “charitable” donations, venture investments and acquisitions, and the purchase of luxury real estate for senior FTX Group employees in the Bahamas.

Sam’s charitable donations got a bit esoteric. The FTX Foundation gave one guy $300,000 to “Write a book about how to figure out what humans’ utility function is” — a question that LessWrong rationalist philosophy needs to answer so as to construct the perfect superintelligence to rule over us all. And that hopefully won’t turn out to be Roko’s basilisk. [LessWrong, PDF, 2004]

The Foundation gave someone else $400,000 to make YouTube videos to promote LessWrong rationalism and Effective Altruism.

Closer to home, the Foundation gave $20 million to the Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, which was run by Sam’s younger brother Gabe Bankman-Fried.

FTX sues Friedberg

Friedberg’s malfeasance was egregious enough that FTX is suing him for “damages caused by breaches of fiduciary duties, legal malpractice, and other wrongdoing, and to recover fraudulent transfers.”

The suit also alleges Friedberg paid off whistleblowers rather than deal with the compliance issues they raised.

Friedberg worked at FTX from 2017 until its collapse in 2022, the last 22 months of that as general counsel at Alameda and chief compliance officer at FTX. Joe Bankman, SBF’s father, pushed Sam to hire Friedberg and keep him “in the loop … so we have one person on top of everything.”

FTX paid Friedberg millions of dollars in salary and bonuses, and tens of millions in crypto — a $300,000 salary at FTX.US, a $1.4 million signing bonus, an 8% equity stake in FTX.US, and a $3 million payment from Alameda.

Plaintiffs want compensatory damages to be determined at trial, disgorgement of all of Friedberg’s compensation including the cryptos, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees.

Chief noncompliance officer

Friedberg’s putative job as chief compliance officer was to make sure the proper checks and balances were in place to prevent fraud, commingling of funds, and other wrongdoings. Per the complaint, he didn’t do any of that. Instead, “Friedberg actively participated in and facilitated such misconduct.”

Money was funneled to FTX insiders and booked as “personal loans” — which were never repaid, and which there was never any serious discussion of paying — “despite Friedberg’s false statement to the outside accountants that interest was paid quarterly on the loans.” Friedberg was involved in more than $2 billion in such “loans.”

Friedberg also encouraged the use of Signal for corporate messaging, preferably set to make messages disappear.

Ray is still appalled at how bad FTX’s accounting was:

Those entities that did produce financial statements used QuickBooks, Google documents, Slack communications, Excel spreadsheets, and other inadequate means for measuring the level of assets and liabilities held by the FTX Group. Entries in QuickBooks were often made months after transactions occurred, rendering real-time financial reporting and risk management impossible.

Hush money

Friedberg served as SBF’s fixer. He paid off whistleblowers and “retained” whistleblowers’ attorneys — that is, he paid them off too.

In November 2019, FTX and Alameda were hit with a class action lawsuit that accused the companies and their executives of racketeering and market manipulation. [Docket; Decrypt, 2019]

The lawsuit doesn’t name “Plaintiff’s Attorney-1” — but this is clearly Pavel Pogodin, who set up Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement for the sole purpose of filing crypto class actions.

Alameda said at the time: “The troll has no evidence of any wrongdoing, and will not further discover any — because there was no wrongdoing to discover evidence of.” [Medium, 2019]

Nevertheless, Friedberg took the suit seriously enough that he paid Pogodin off. (The details are redacted.) The suit was dismissed in December 2019.

As a California Bar member of flawless repute, Pogodin is happy to be paid not to do anything. He sent a letter in January 2022 threatening further possible action against FTX. Friedberg offered him “$1.6 million and $50,000 paid on a monthly basis.”

In sum, Friedberg arranged for the FTX Group to pay Plaintiffs’ Attorney-1 $3,320,000 through July 2022. Upon information and belief, Plaintiffs’ Attorney-1 provided no actual legal services to the FTX Group after signing the engagement letter.

An FTX.US employee on a $200,000 salary was fired after less than two months. She sent a demand letter in December 2021 claiming that “Alameda [was] nothing more than an extension of FTX, used to bolster investor confidence in FTX projects, and in turn drive up the prices of projects FTX had developed or invested in itself” and let employees insider-trade.

Friedberg gave this employee an “extraordinary settlement” (redacted in the filing) — and made a $12 million deal to retain Whistleblower-1’s attorney. Their only work for FTX was a three-page memo.

In early 2022, an attorney working at FTX for less than three months discovered that Alameda owned North Dimension. He flagged to Friedberg that North Dimension accounts were being used to fund FTX customer withdrawals and that Alameda didn’t have the proper money transmitter licenses.

Friedberg promptly fired him. The complaint details how the attorney was paid a large (redacted) severance package.

Other FTX news

John Ray’s team has so far racked up $200 million in fees — and the fee examiner thinks this is quite reasonable. Gotta pay the undertaker: [Bloomberg; summary report, PDF]

Without question, the fees incurred to date are remarkable, but so is the professionals’ performance. The Fee Examiner has been struck by the creativity, professionalism, and personal sacrifice of the Retained Professionals who sprung into action in November to begin transforming a smoldering heap of wreckage into a functioning Chapter 11 debtor-in-possession.

Over in the criminal case, SBF moved to dismiss 10 of the 13 charges against him. Judge Lewis Kaplan has told SBF to get knotted: “The Court has considered all of the arguments of the parties. To the extent not addressed herein, the arguments are either moot or without merit.” [Doc 136, PDF; Doc 148, PDF; Doc 149, PDF; NYT; Doc 167, PDF]

Sam wants to blame his troubles on Fenwick & West, the law firm used by FTX and Alameda, who apparently told him that all the hamfistedly obvious crimes he did were all totally legal. The DoJ and FTX objected, and Judge Kaplan has again told Sam to get knotted: “Neither Fenwick nor the FTX Debtors are part of the ‘prosecution team,’ and the government has no obligation to produce materials that are not within its possession, custody, or control.” [Bloomberg; Doc 150, PDF; Doc 151, PDF; Doc 151-1, PDF; Doc 156, PDF; Doc 159, PDF; Doc 166, PDF]

Over at Lightcone, who build and run LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum: “Funding is quite tight since the collapse of FTX.” They’re asking the users for $3 million to $6 million over the next year. [LessWrong]

Posted on June 29, 2023July 1, 2023 by Amy Castor 5

Crypto collapse: Bittrex files chapter 11, Binance loses market makers, FTX gets a tax bill, bitcoin gets apes

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

ONE WEIRD TRICK they don’t want you to know: Send us money! Here’s Amy’s Patreon, and here’s David’s. Sign up today!
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Bittrex takes a dive

Bittrex’s US entity, Desolation Holdings LLC, and Bittrex Malta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware on May 8. The move came just weeks after Bittrex shut down its US operations, which was soon after they were sued by the SEC for trading securities without registering as a securities exchange. [Bloomberg; Bittrex; case docket]

The bankruptcy is apparently the fault of the SEC. The first-day declaration cites several SEC actions against other firms — and harps on about a “lack of regulatory clarity.” [Doc 9, PDF; first day declaration, PDF]

Bittrex says the bankruptcy will totally not impact its non-US operations, and funds are safe! Surely Bittrex didn’t do any commingling of company and customer funds like every other crypto exchange in trouble keeps turning out to have done.

The debts are largely fines levied against Bittrex by US government agencies — who are the only named creditors. OFAC is the largest creditor, owed $24.2 million. FinCEN is also a top 50 creditor with a $3.5 million claim. The SEC is listed with an undetermined amount of claims. [Doc 1, PDF]

Bittrex wishes to avail itself of a debtor-in-possession loan of 700 BTC so as to wind down Desolation and Bittrex Malta in an orderly manner and return customers’ funds. The loan will be from themselves — Aquila Holdings Inc, Bittrex’s parent entity, which is not in bankruptcy. [Liquidation plan, PDF]

The precedence of creditors (who gets paid back first) would be: themselves, then the customers, then the US government. That’s novel.

Michel de Cryptadamus notes several other interesting wrinkles. Bittrex’s US gross (not net) revenue for 2022 was $17 million, against the $30 million in government fines. “Several states alleged that BUS was undercapitalized and demanded that BUS immediately surrender its money transmitter licenses in those states.” Bittrex’s complicated corporate structure is reminiscent of FTX. And Bittrex may also be trying to protect the salaries of Bittrex executives from being seized by the SEC. [Twitter, archive]

Michel thinks the whole filing is a massive troll. We concur. The idea seems to be for Bittrex to set up a sacrificial entity to pay back their customers but stiff the US government. We are unconvinced that the government agencies will be inclined to let this one slide.

Good news for Binance

Market makers are leaving Binance US. Jane Street Group in New York and Jump Trading in Chicago — two of the world’s top commodities market makers — are pulling back from crypto in the US as regulators crack down on the industry. Their business in normal commodities is much larger, and they could do without the regulatory heat. [Bloomberg]

The Department of Justice is investigating Binance for possible violations of US sanctions against Russia. There’s already plenty of evidence that Binance has committed sanctions violations. Binance was the final destination for millions in funds from Bitzlato, an exchange shut down for money laundering. Now Dirty Bubble writes that Binance partner Advcash may be facilitating transfers from Russian banks. [Dirty Bubble]

Binance is withdrawing from Canada, owing to a surfeit of regulatory clarity. [Twitter, archive; Reuters]

Bitcoin has been trading at a premium of up to $650 on Binance US. A premium like this is usually an indication that people can’t get their dollars out of the exchange, so they buy bitcoins and move those to another exchange to cash out. [CoinDesk]

We also saw bitcoin trading at a premium on Mt. Gox just before that exchange collapsed in 2014, and the same with QuadrigaCX, which imploded in 2019. Naïve traders who don’t understand what’s happening will often move their BTC to the dying exchange, thinking it’s an arbitrage opportunity.

Trading at a premium is not a good sign, but a worse sign is when people complain they can’t get their crypto off an exchange. Binance US has long had a reputation for demanding arbitrary new KYC documentation when users try to withdraw.

Monkey laundering comes to bitcoin

Binance paused withdrawals twice on Sunday, May 7. The first time was due to a “congestion issue.” Later in the day, Binance paused withdrawals again due to a “large volume of pending transactions.” [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive]

For once, Binance might have been on the level. On May 7, the bitcoin mempool was clogged with 400,000 transactions waiting to be processed, and transaction fees surged.

In bitcoin, the mempool, or memory pool, is where pending transactions pile up before a miner selects the most profitable ones and puts them together as a proposed block. If your transaction stays in the mempool too long, it gets dropped.

The best way to break a blockchain is to try to use it for something. In this case, some idiot worked out how to do NFTs on bitcoin.

“Ordinals” are a new way to create NFTs on bitcoin by linking a JPEG, video, or another image type to a satoshi, the smallest denomination of a bitcoin. Ordinals came out in January, and bitcoin has been filled with monkey pictures since. Bitcoin maxis condemn ordinals as a conspiracy to destroy bitcoin by using the network for a purpose. [Decrypt]

Child genius, adult moron

Sam Bankman-Fried’s defense team is trying to strike 10 of the 13 criminal charges against their client. They argue that the Bahamas did not agree to several of the charges — including one claim that Sam hid millions of dollars in political donations — while other claims didn’t meet the legal requirements of the underlying criminal statutes. [Docket, see filings 137-147]

The facts against SBF are solid. There’s no reason to doubt that Sam did everything the US claims. So the defense seems to be going for unreasonable doubt and hoping they have a dumb enough jury member or two.

Former federal prosecutor Sean Shecter of Lewis Brisbois says SBF’s lawyers want to preserve an appeal, so they have to try everything they can think of, “even if it involves throwing spaghetti against the wall.” He thinks the defense is likely hoping that the government gives up “nuggets of information” in response to the motions. [Law360, paywall]

Prosecutors have until May 29 to respond. Judge Lewis Kaplan will hear oral arguments on June 15.

The IRS has hit the FTX companies with a $44 billion tax bill, with the largest chunk being $20.4 billion for Alameda. It looks like the IRS reclassified all FTX employees from contractors to employees and charged for unpaid employment taxes. [Docket, see filings April 27, 28; IRS Alameda claim, PDF; CoinDesk]

The IRS has not released its calculations in detail, but we’d assume the bill is inflated by fraud (fictitious profits), penalties, and interest. John Jay Ray is sure to fight this. But even if Ray gets that amount substantially reduced, this is still sure to be a huge hit for FTX creditors.

The IRS claims are treated as unsecured — but they will receive priority status as ordinary and necessary business expenses of the bankruptcy estate. So the IRS will come before ordinary unsecured creditors.

The searing light of regulatory clarity

Ishan Wahi will spend two years in prison for insider trading as a former product manager at Coinbase. He previously admitted to passing on confidential information from Coinbase to his brother and friend, who profited from the tips. [WSJ, paywall; DOJ press release]

In Estonia, nearly 400 VASPs (“virtual asset service providers,” the FATF term for companies dealing in crypto) have shut down or had their licenses revoked after the government’s recently enhanced terrorist financing prevention and anti-money laundering laws came into effect in March. [Protos; Estonia Financial Intelligence Unit]

Bakkt has delisted a bunch of tokens from the institutional crypto business they bought from Apex Crypto, including several that the SEC has indicated it considers securities. “Our review process ensures those interests are best served when we contemplate the most up-to-date regulatory guidance.” [CoinDesk]

John Reed Stark thinks an SEC action against Coinbase is imminent. He explains the regulations and how they work in detail and why Coinbase doesn’t stand a chance.

Stark notes also that Coinbase’s “regulatory estoppel” claim — that the SEC approving their S-1 public offering means the SEC must have approved the exchange dealing in securities — is directly contradicted by the mandatory “no approval clause” in the S-1: “Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.” Whoops. [LinkedIn]

Unvaxxed bitcoin is the new bitcoin

QuadrigaCX bankruptcy claimants will get 13% on the dollar. They will be paid out the dollar value of their crypto at the time Quadriga filed for bankruptcy — April 15, 2019, when bitcoin was in the toilet.

It’s amazing that creditors will even get back that much. Most of the Quadriga money was gambled away by cofounder Gerald Cotten and filched by shady payment processors. We’re surprised no criminal charges were filed — but then, most of the money was stolen by a guy who is supposedly dead. [EY notice, PDF; CoinDesk]

Arthur Hayes of BitMEX has been tweeting at Three Arrows Capital co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies because 3AC owes him $6 million following its collapse in June 2022. Rather than returning Hayes’ money, 3AC cofounder Su Zhu has filed a Singapore restraining order to prohibit Hayes from using “threatening, abusive or insulting words” and “making any threatening, abusive or insulting communication, that would cause the Applicant harassment, alarm or distress.” [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; CoinDesk]

Awe that's sweet, is that your way of using symbolism to represent the $6 million you owe me? 1 Oyster = $1 million … https://t.co/ehWJ4wUfXB
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) May 2, 2023

BlockFi users discover that BlockFi owned their coins. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Kaplan ruled that BlockFi users who had money in BlockFi’s interest-bearing accounts gave up ownership of their bitcoins — all they owned was a liability from BlockFi — and all of the $300 million in crypto deposits is now the property of the bankruptcy estate, as is normal. [Bloomberg]

P2P exchange Paxful has resumed operations after it shut down last month amidst a messy dispute between cofounders Ray Youssef and Artur Schaback. The entire operation has been comedy gold. Youssef and Schaback say the exchange is now owned by a custodian — who they never actually name — and the custodian, Schabeck, and Youseff all serve as directors. [Paxful, archive; CoinDesk]

In the crypto bubble, Miami crypto companies boomed with the enthusiastic support of Mayor Francis Suarez. Now there’s empty real estate and lawsuits. “Most of crypto was a pyramid scheme,” said local businessman Ryan Kirkley. Suarez is now trying to lure tech startups into Miami instead. [WSJ, paywalled]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for US President on the gibbering insane Twitter blue check conspiracy theorist ticket, will be making the first appearance of his campaign giving the keynote at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami later this month. So, on brand then. [Twitter; NBC]

A propaganda movie is in the works for bitcoin mining — because consuming a country’s worth of electricity is actually good news for bitcoin. Based on the trailer, the film is amazing, but not in a good way. [Dirty Coin the Movie]

Media stardom

Amy spoke to Bloomberg about the growing ranks of crypto skeptics after the crypto collapse: “There were a handful of us before, screaming into the abyss. Now there’s a lot more.” We’ll just be over here, quietly being right. [Bloomberg]

Posted on May 14, 2023May 14, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

The Block fires a third of staff — Larry Cermak is CEO, Wintermute’s Evgeny Gaevoy joins board

Crypto news site The Block has just waved good-bye to a third of its staff.

Larry Cermak, the site’s former head of research, has been promoted to CEO by the new company board, which features Evgeny Gaevoy of crypto hedge fund Wintermute.

The move comes in the wake of The Block’s FTX funding scandal.

Don’t worry too much about how the rise of Wintermute, and the excuses for it, are disconcertingly parallel to the story of FTX/Alameda — the nigh-magical arbitrage and how Gaevoy is a mathematical genius, much as SBF was.

We beat CoinDesk on this one. Read the full story on David’s site. [David Gerard]

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: New Sam Bankman-Fried charge, Binance fallout, SEC sues exchange over crypto securities, how Signature died

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Send us money! Here’s Amy’s Patreon, and here’s David’s. Your contributions really help us do all of this. Sign up today!
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“who needs an examiner when you can just hand sam an empty sheet of paper and wait”
— haveblue

Sam is a growing boy, he needs his crimes

A new superseding indictment against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried alleges that he paid Chinese officials $40 million in crypto in a bribe to unfreeze $1 billion in crypto on Alameda — which would violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Sam now faces 13 criminal counts. [Superseding indictment, PDF]

On Thursday, March 30, Sam took a trip to New York and pleaded not guilty to his latest five charges. He had to battle his way through a gaggle of reporters just to get in the door. At least it got him out of the house. [Twitter; YouTube; NYT]

In early 2021, China froze $1 billion of cryptos in various Alameda accounts on two of the country’s biggest crypto exchanges (which aren’t named in the indictment). Bankman-Fried “understood that the Accounts had been frozen as part of an ongoing investigation of a particular Alameda trading counterparty.” A bribe was sent from Alameda to a private blockchain address in November 2021. The accounts were unfrozen shortly after, and Alameda got its cryptos back.

Somehow, Daniel Friedberg, FTX’s chief counsel at the time knew nothing of this. Friedberg said in an affidavit dated March 19, 2021, when the FTX Arena naming rights deal was going through, that FTX and its affiliated companies “do not have any ownership or contracts or any other obligations with respect to any governmental agency of the People’s Republic of China, or any governmental agents or political persons.” [Miami-Dade Legislative Item, PDF, p. 54]

Sam will be kept on a very short leash while he’s out on bail. Sam gets a non-smartphone that only does voice and SMS — no internet access — and a locked-down laptop configured to access only certain websites. He can work with his lawyers, order food from DoorDash, and keep up with the sportsball. YouTube is also on the list, so we’re looking forward to the 10-hour video blogs detailing crimes hitherto unknown to humanity. [Order, PDF]

Sam’s father, Joseph Bankman, is paying his son’s lawyer fees with over $10 million that Sam borrowed from Alameda and gave to his father as a present in 2021. We wonder if John Jay Ray is going to come calling to claw this back for the bankruptcy estate. [Forbes]

In the FTX bankruptcy, a group of ad-hoc FTX creditors with $2 billion in claims want to participate in the bankruptcy without revealing their identities. They include “large institutional market makers and asset managers.” This is the precise sort of creditor that the Bankruptcy Act is not intended to protect from public scrutiny. [Doc 1137, PDF]

FTX appears to have been hiding money under the names of employees. The OKX exchange, formerly OKex, has agreed to turn over $157 million in FTX funds. $150 million of that was in an account of a former FTX employee. The ex-employee says the account was opened on behalf of Alameda. He has agreed to forfeit the assets. [Doc 1189, PDF; Doc 1190, PDF]

Binance: This is fine

The CFTC lawsuit against Binance, which we covered in detail on Tuesday, has rattled customers. Within days, the exchange saw outflows of $2 billion, out of a claimed reserve of $63.2 billion, according to Nansen. Currently, 28% of Binance reserves are in Tether and 10% are in BUSD. [WSJ, paywalled; Nansen]

The three large US hedge funds trading on Binance weren’t named in the CFTC complaint — though Radix Trading later came forward and said that they were “Trading Firm A.” Radix insists they did nothing wrong — they ran their apparent conspiracy to violate commodities laws past their in-house legal team, after all. [WSJ, paywalled]

But the CFTC complaint has “already sent chills” across the commodity trading industry — particularly firms who make their money from real commodity trading and only dabble in the toxic waste barrel of crypto. Market makers are wondering if they’re risking their own broker-dealer licenses. [Bloomberg]

Cash withdrawals from Binance US are no longer working via ACH through Signature. Binance says: “ACH deposits and withdrawals for a small subset of our users were disrupted last week and, out of an abundance of caution, remain paused. Our teams are working through this transition and expect to restore functionality within the next 24 hours.” It’s probably fine. Your funds are safe. [Reddit]

You’ll be shocked to hear that Binance kept substantial business links to China for years after its claimed 2017 exit, despite Binance executives repeatedly saying otherwise. [FT]

The Block reported in 2019 that Binance had offices in Shanghai. CZ hit the roof and threatened to sue them, with the explicit aim of outspending them on lawyers … and The Block stood by its story. (Ben Munster, then of Decrypt, helped with the response story, though The Block took out Ben’s harsher additions.) [The Block, 2019; Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; The Block, 2019]

The sale of Voyager Digital to Binance US is on hold. The Department of Justice and the US Trustee appealed the sale on the basis that the order granted inappropriate immunity from prosecution, and asked for a stay. The appeals court has granted the request for a stay while the appeal proceeds. [Doc 1222, PDF; Doc 1223, PDF; Bloomberg]

Be your own Signature Bank

In his statement on the recent bank failures and the federal regulatory response, FDIC Chairman Martin Greunberg explained why Signature failed: the bank was insolvent, contrary to Barney Frank’s claims. [FDIC, PDF]

On March 10, Signature Bank lost 20 percent of its total deposits in a matter of hours, depleting its cash position and leaving it with a negative balance with the Federal Reserve as of close of business. Bank management could not provide accurate data regarding the amount of the deficit, and resolution of the negative balance required a prolonged joint effort among Signature Bank, regulators, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York to pledge collateral and obtain the necessary funding from the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window to cover the negative outflows. This was accomplished with minutes to spare before the Federal Reserve’s wire room closed.

Over the weekend, liquidity risk at the bank rose to a critical level as withdrawal requests mounted, along with uncertainties about meeting those requests, and potentially others in light of the high level of uninsured deposits, raised doubts about the bank’s continued viability.

Ultimately, on Sunday, March 12, the NYSDFS closed Signature Bank and appointed the FDIC as receiver within 48 hours of SVB’s failure.

The FDIC has told crypto clients with deposits at Signature Bank that they have until April 5 to close their accounts and move their money. The FDIC is looking to sell off Signature’s Signet inter-crypto-exchange dark liquidity pool. [Bloomberg]

Frances Coppola explains precisely what happened at Signature. [Coppola Comment]

We noted previously how larger US banks don’t want to go within a mile of crypto. But some smaller banks are still feeling lucky. [WSJ, paywall]

The SEC shuts down Beaxy

The Beaxy crypto exchange shuttered after the SEC filed charges against it for failing to register as a national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency, and over its 2018 ICO. The SEC also charged a market maker operating on Beaxy as an unregistered dealer. [SEC press release; complaint, PDF; CoinDesk]

Beaxy ran a “private sale” ICO for its internal exchange token BXY from May 2018 to June 2019. The SEC is charging Beaxy and its founder Artak Hamazaspyan over the ICO as an unregistered offering of securities to US retail.

That’s the sort of complaint we’re used to seeing from the SEC — but they’re also charging Windy Inc., who ran the Beaxy platform, and Windy’s founders, Nicholas Murphy and Randolph Abbott, over unregistered securities trading on the exchange.

If cryptos being traded are securities — and it’s likely that most are — that leaves even the normal activities of an exchange subject to a vast array of additional regulations.

The SEC is also charging Brian Peterson and Braverock Investments as unregistered dealers for market-making on Beaxy for the BXY and Dragonchain DRGN tokens. The SEC sued Dragonchain in August 2022, alleging that DRGN was an unregistered offering of securities; that case is proceeding. [SEC, 2022; case docket]

Hamazaspyan is also alleged to have misappropriated $900,000 from the ICO for his own use. Murphy and Abbott discovered this in October 2019 and convinced Hamazaspyan to pay back $420,000 to Beaxy and let Windy run Beaxy going forward.

Windy, Murphy, Abbott, Peterson, and Braverock settled, paying a total penalty between them of $228,579. The SEC case against Beaxy and Hamazaspyan over the ICO is proceeding.

Beaxy shut down on Tuesday, March 28, owing to “the uncertain regulatory environment surrounding our business.” We think it’s deadly certain. [Beaxy, archive]

This is the first SEC action over securities trading on an exchange. It’s a likely template for future SEC cases against other crypto exchanges — like, say, Coinbase.

The Coinbase employee convicted in a criminal case of wire fraud by insider trading is fighting an SEC civil case claiming that the insider-traded tokens were securities. [WSJ]

SEC chair Gary Gensler will be testifying before Congress on April 18. The very non-partisan committee announces that “Republicans will hold @GaryGensler accountable for his flagrant disregard for the law, jurisdiction, and the APA.” (The Administrative Procedure Act.) We hope the Blockchain Eight show up. [Twitter]

More good news for decentralization

Judge Larry Alan Burns of the Southern District of California has denied the motion to dismiss of members of the bZx DAO who held governance tokens (BZRX), finding the DAO is plausibly alleged to be a general partnership. [Order, PDF; CoinDesk]

One of the earliest objections to the original DAO in 2016 was that it would be a general partnership, leaving everyone involved jointly and severally liable. (This is why incorporation is a thing.) The same problem was frequently noted in the rise in DAOs in the recent crypto bubble. Nobody involved can claim they had no idea.

Regulatory clarity, European style

The European Banking Authority has a new consultation paper on anti-money laundering (AML) risk factors that national bank regulators should consider. Crypto-asset providers are listed as an area that regulators should examine closely, including if “Distributed Ledger Technology” is “essential to the sector’s business model and operation” or “where services of the subject of assessment are provided using DLT or blockchain technology.” Comments are due by June 29, 2023. [EBA, PDF]

Coming soon in European AML: no anonymous crypto payments in the EU of over 1,000 EUR. Crypto asset managers will be required to verify “their customers’ identity, what they own and who controls the company.” [EP]

Terra-Luna

After he was arrested last week, Do Kwon of Terraform Labs is serving time in a Montenegrin prison. Kwon is likely to stay in jail there for at least a year, while his appeals and extradition hearings proceed. We expect he’ll be sent to South Korea first, and only then to the US. [YNA, in Korean; Protos]

South Korean prosecutors are making another effort to arrest Terraform Labs cofounder Daniel Shin, who left the company in March 2020. [Bloomberg]

MicroStrategy doubles down

As part of winding the bank down, Silvergate struck a deal with MicroStrategy to accept $161 million to repay a $205 million bitcoin-backed loan — taking a $44 million loss. Silvergate had said repeatedly that its bitcoin-backed loans were safe. [WSJ, paywall]

MicroStrategy sold 1.35 million shares of MSTR in Q1 2023, diluting shareholders by over 10% to pay off its Silvergate loan — and bought $150 million more BTC between February 16 and March 23. This is a Hail Mary pass praying for number to go up, which it is quite unlikely to do. [8-K; Twitter]

More good news for bitcoin

Hindenburg Research’s latest short-seller report is on Jack Dorsey’s Block, formerly Square. Cash App’s growth is aimed at targeting the “unbanked” — which mostly means embracing noncompliance to grow its user base. A Cash App employee told Hindenburg, “every criminal has a Square Cash App account.” And this is before Block has even got into crypto in any substantial way. [Hindenburg]

Indicted crypto promoter Guo Wengui used his culture-war social network Gettr to pump cryptos. Wengui was fined a billion dollars by the SEC in 2021 over his crypto offerings. [Washington Post]

The British Virgin Islands has ordered Three Arrows Capital founders Zu Shu and Kyle Davies to attend an examination on May 22 or be in contempt of court. We’re sure they’ll be right on that. [CoinDesk]

Freeing yourself from fiat history

If you click on a lot of old links to theblockcrypto.com, it’ll tell you that The Block has “sunset our News+ product” — their previous paywalled news offering. They didn’t open up those old pages — they’ve just effectively deleted a whole swathe of their journalism from 2018 to 2020!

We discovered this when Amy went looking for one of her old Block pieces on Binance for our article on Tuesday and when David looked for various other Block articles for today’s story.

You’d think a publisher wouldn’t just trash their own search optimization — but in practice, both mainstream and specialist publications destroy their own URLs and content all the time. So it’s pretty likely this was an error. Hopefully a reversible one.

We remember when Decrypt moved their domain from decryptmedia.com to decrypt.co. They saw their Google hits go through the floor and thought they’d been shadowbanned … not realizing they’d done it to themselves. The Block changed its URL to theblock.co around the same time, with similar effects.

In the meantime: ARCHIVE EVERYTHING. Stuff that’s blocked from the Internet Archive saves just fine into archive.is, and archive.is also accepts pages from the Internet Archive, Google cache, and Bing cache and indexes them correctly under the source URL. David uses and recommends the Get Archive extension for Firefox. [Mozilla Add-Ons]

Posted on March 30, 2023March 7, 2024 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: The Great Unbanking continues, Bitcoin pumps, FTX, Voyager, Tether

The latest from David and me! In this edition:

The process of cutting Signature up for its organs
Other banking woes across crypto
FTX foolishness
Tether is pumping
Voyager appeal
and we stick our necks out again and predict the near-term obvious

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: Binance hits reserves, FTX’s Singh sings, miners’ creative accounting, bitcoin markets are thin

This is our second post this weekend! You’ll find our latest on the crypto collapse on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

Also, please support our work via Patreon, if you haven’t already. Our stories are free to read for everyone, but if you want to help us get the word out, become subscribers. Links in post!

In this episode:

More documents have come out on Binance’s “Tai Chi” plan to subvert US regulation.
Binance appears to have been channeling bridged USDC reserves to Cumberland/DRW.
Senators write a scathing letter to Binance, asking for a slew of documents.
We told you bitcoin miners were fiddling accounts!
Nishad Singh, another member of SBF’s inner circle, turns against Sam.
Also, lawyers propose tighter bail restrictions for Sam — a flip phone and virtually no internet access.

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: New Sam Bankman-Fried charges, New York targets CoinEx, Coinbase losses, Voyager, Celsius

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Put your fiat currency into our Patreons in confidence — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s.
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“Sam Bankman-Fried walks into the courtroom. his pants split with a sound like thunder and guns and cocaine spill out all over the floor. he spins around and punches a security officer hard in the face sending him flying. he turns, sits down calmly on his chair and says, to thunderous applause from the fans gathered to hear his famous catchphrase, ‘OK your honour, here’s what I think happened’”
— Hammerite

Mycrimes.txt (2) (FINAL) (USE THIS ONE).docx.pdf

The criminal indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried has been updated, with a superseding indictment on February 23. [Superseding indictment, PDF]

The new charges are clearly informed by the cooperation of Sam’s former co-conspirators — and by his crime confession tours in the press and on Twitter.

The Federal Election Commission is now listed as a victim of Sam’s fraud, with allegations that SBF tried to buy influence over crypto regulation in Washington.

The indictment details all the tricks that Sam (allegedly) pulled to influence both Democrats and Republicans, in concert with other FTX executives — and how he tried to conceal his influence.

Other new allegations include bank fraud. The act of misleading a bank in the course of business is a crime all by itself — such as when you accept money in the name of one entity (Alameda) for another entity (FTX), or when you set up a shell corporation (North Dimension) and lie to your bank (Silvergate) about what that shell does.

Sam also used Alameda to fill a $45 million hole in FTX US. He gave Alameda a $65 billion credit line, which allowed it unlimited access to customer funds on FTX. Customer and company funds were thoroughly commingled.

The indictment doesn’t specify the cause of the hole in FTX US, but Sam has repeatedly claimed that FTX US was solvent.

Sam ultimately controlled both FTX and Alameda, even after claiming to have stepped away from Alameda.

The indictment also lists billions of dollars worth of assets that have been forfeited, including multiple SBF accounts at Binance.

FTX and its subsidiaries was never a legitimate business. It was Sam’s piggy bank.

New York goes after CoinEx

The New York Attorney General’s office is suing the CoinEx crypto exchange. The NYAG alleges that CoinEx sold securities and/or commodities, did not register with the CFTC or SEC, and misrepresented itself as registered. [Press release; Complaint, PDF; Affidavit of OAG Detective Brian Metz, PDF]

CoinEx, which is based in Hong Kong, has responded by barring all US citizens. You have until April 24 to get your cryptos off the exchange. [Twitter]

New York alleges that CoinEx offered to New York customers various cryptos that are securities — AMP, LUNA, RLY, and LBC — while the exchange was not registered to deal in securities.

AMP is the token of Flexa, who want to use it to sell burritos. LBC is the token of video site LBRY, which the SEC recently had a slam-dunk win against in court, finding that it was absolutely the security it clearly was. Luna is the twin coin of TerraUSD, which crashed all of crypto last May.

New York says these tokens are all securities under New York’s Waldstein test: “any form of instrument used for the purpose of financing and promoting enterprises, and which is designed for investment, is a security.” They say the tokens are also securities under the federal Howey test — as LBC was recently shown to be.

It happens to be a violation of New York commercial law to call yourself an “exchange” if you offer trading in securities or commodities and you’re not registered with the CFTC or SEC.

CoinEx also failed to respond in any way to a previous NYAG subpoena — and, per General Business Law §353(1), failure to comply with a subpoena is prima facie proof that the subpoenaed entity “is or has been engaged in fraudulent practice.”

New York wants CoinEx to block New York from its website, pay restitution, disgorgement, and costs, “and provide New York investors with the option to rescind their transactions.”

New York is bringing a “special proceeding” — it wants the court to rule on its filing. “A special proceeding goes right to the merits. The Court is required to make a summary determination upon all the pleadings, papers, and admissions to the extent that no triable issues of fact are raised.”

Why did New York go after CoinEx in particular? This complaint is detailed, but it also looks like a template. We suspect this may be the first of many such complaints against crypto platforms. CoinEx ignoring the subpoena probably annoyed New York a lot too.

The SEC previously called out each of the tokens on CoinEx that the NYAG names as securities:

In a July 2022 insider trading complaint against Coinbase, the SEC said AMP and RLY were securities. [Complaint, pdf]
In Feb 2023, the SEC said LUNA was a security [Complaint, pdf]
In November 2022, the SEC won in court against LBRY on whether its LBC token was an unregistered security offering. [SEC]

Binance US has delisted AMP. But Coinbase still lists AMP and RLY. Gary Gensler has been saying for a while that he thinks nearly all crypto tokens are securities and that Coinbase should register with the SEC.

Coinbase posts another loss

Coinbase’s Q4 earnings report is out, as part of its 10-K annual report for the year ending December 31, 2022. Trading volumes are down even further, and they’re still losing money. [10-K]

As a public company, Coinbase has to put on a happy face for investors — but they’ve been bleeding money for a year now. Net loss for 2022 was $2.625 billion, per GAAP. The COIN stock price has gone down 70% in the past 12 months.

Coinbase would prefer you to look at non-GAAP “adjusted EBITDA,” which comes out to a loss of only $371.4 million. Their “adjusted EBITDA” excludes stock-based compensation expenses in particular. Yes, we’re sure your numbers look better if you exclude the bit where you have to pay your employees.

Coinbase makes its money from (1) BTC and ETH trading, and (2) their share of the interest on the USDC reserve. Also, the majority of their volume comes from a few large customers. So Coinbase would extremely much like to diversify.

CFO Alesia Haas said in the investor earnings call: “Our fourth quarter net revenue increased 5% quarter-over-quarter to $605 million. This was driven by strong growth in our subscription and services revenue.” She means that Q4 revenue was only up because of interest on USDC. [Coinbase, PDF]

Coinbase wants to list every token going — even as many of the hottest tokens are blitheringly obviously securities under the Howey test. Coinbase has spent the past several years helping their very good venture capital friends such as a16z dump their bags on retail.

Coinbase goes on at length about the amazing ambiguity in what constitutes a security under US law. Who can even know what might be deemed a security tomorrow? It is a mystery.

Sure, the Howey test is simple and broad, and sure the SEC has won every case it’s ever brought where it claimed a given crypto was a security. But do you feel lucky?

The 10-K even includes a list of tokens Coinbase trades that the SEC has already said are securities! Coinbase questions whether these tokens are really securities, and confidently asserts that “Despite the SEC being the principal federal securities law regulator in the United States, whether or not an asset is a security under federal securities laws is ultimately determined by a federal court.”

This is true. But it’s also true that the SEC has won every single time. And the consent orders in these cases — because almost nobody was stupid enough to take their case to trial — note that the tokens in question were always offerings of securities. It wasn’t a court finding that made the token a security.

But Coinbase is desperate to diversify and makes it clear that they really want to risk their backsides on this business line of maybe-securities that don’t even make them a lot of money.

The SEC shut down Coinbase’s Earn staking product in 2022 before it could be launched. Haas explained in the analyst call why Coinbase thinks its staking product isn’t a security: “we are passing on rewards directly from the protocol. We are not establishing an APY, we are not establishing the reward rate. That is established at the protocol level. And then we are passing that through and collecting a fixed commission on that amount.” We guess we’ll see if the SEC concurs. [Coinbase, PDF]

Coinbase literally lists Satoshi Nakamoto as a risk factor for its business:

“the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins”

The FTX fallout continues

FTX Japan K.K. users are getting back 100% of their cryptos. Users in other jurisdictions are likely to get cents on the dollar, if that. This is because the US crypto lobby viciously fought any sensible regulation for years — but Japan locked crypto down hard after Mt. Gox exploded in 2014. Taste the freedom! [Bloomberg]

Galois Capital, a real-money hedge fund that thought they’d get into some crypto, shuts its doors after losing $40 million, half its assets, in the collapse of FTX. Whoops! [Twitter, FT, archive]

The Bank for International Settlements — the central bank for central banks — reports that the fall of FTX didn’t have much impact on the rest of the financial world: [BIS bulletin, PDF, Coindesk]

“Nevertheless, despite crypto’s large user base and the substantial losses to many investors, the market turmoil in 2022 had little discernible impact on broader financial conditions outside the crypto universe, underlining the largely self-referential nature of crypto as an asset class.”

Regulatory clarity

Caitlin Long’s Custodia Bank was refused an account at the Kansas Fed. Custodia appealed the decision. The Federal Reserve Board has looked at Custodia’s appeal and told them to go away. [Federal Reserve]

We’ve mentioned previously that the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) is introducing new rules for crypto exchange registration in the wake of the collapse of FTX. The new regulations, which will apply in all provinces, have been released:

Customer cryptos will need to be segregated into an address per customer.
Exchanges cannot pledge or rehypothecate customer cryptos. Margin trading is forbidden.
Proprietary tokens — in-house supermarket loyalty card points, in the manner of FTT or BNB — require prior written consent and can’t be counted as an asset in your accounts.
No stablecoin dealing without prior written consent.

These apply to any exchange with Canadian customers, including non-Canadian exchanges. [Press release; OSC, PDF]

The Financial Action Task Force, the multi-country advisory group set up to combat money laundering, is not happy that its rules on crypto traceability, such as the travel rule, have not been implemented sufficiently widely. At the FATF Plenary on February 22-24, “delegates further agreed on an action plan to drive timely global implementation of FATF standards relating to virtual assets.” [FATF]

The International Monetary Fund has put out a paper, “Elements of Effective Policies for Crypto Assets,” with guidelines that any country that ever might want to hit up the IMF for a loan would be well advised to follow — “amid the failure of various exchanges and other actors within the crypto ecosystem, as well as the collapse of certain crypto assets. Doing nothing is untenable as crypto assets may continue to evolve despite the current downturn.” [Press release; paper, PDF]

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission is consulting on licensing requirements for crypto exchanges to be allowed to sell to retail customers. Hong Kong wants safe custody of customer cryptos — they’re not demanding third-party custodians, an arms-length subsidiary will be sufficient — KYC, cybersecurity, accounting and auditing, risk management, AML, and prevention of market misconduct. So, the very basic requirements of being a financial institution. Responses should be in by March 31. [SFC; SFC, PDF]

In the US, the SEC got a lot of stick for not going after crypto harder in the bubble. Then it came out that the Blockchain Eight group of representatives had written to Gary Gensler telling him to back off. Now the legislature has demanded action, and Gensler is delivering. Here’s how the Blockchain Eight got the opposite of what they wanted. [The American Prospect]

“Gensler also made clear that he has been grappling with the same question as many of the rest of us: What, exactly, is the point of crypto?” [Intelligencer]

John Naughton on the latest UK Treasury crypto consultation paper. “The second lesson is that permissionless blockchains can never be allowed within the financial services sector.” [Guardian]

Voyager Digital

97% of Voyager creditors have voted for Binance to buy Voyager Digital! We think it’s unlikely that regulators will let the deal go through, and Binance US doesn’t have the money to cover all those liabilities to Voyager customers — but hey, who knows? [CoinDesk]

FTX in Chapter 11 is suing Voyager Digital in Chapter 11 for the return of a loan that Alameda paid back to Voyager just before it went into bankruptcy protection. FTX, Voyager and both companies’ Unsecured Creditors’ Committees have come to a settlement! An ad-hoc group of Voyager creditors objects to the deal. [Doc 1048, PDF; Doc 1084, PDF]

The Voyager UCC has subpoenaed the ex-top brass of FTX for depositions — Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Trabucco, and Daniel Friedberg. The notices to the court don’t detail what the UCC wants to ask — just that they are asking. Voyager’s link to FTX is the huge pile of FTT that the company counted as part of its assets. [e.g., Doc 1018, PDF]

SBF’s lawyers have already moved that the subpoena was deficient because it was handed to Sam’s mom Barbara Fried and not into Sam’s own hands personally. [Doc, PDF]

Celsius Network and your pension

Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec (CDPQ) was the pension fund that invested USD$150 million into equity in Celsius Network. Executive vice-president and CTO Alexandre Synnett, who was the executive involved in the Celsius investment, “left the organization on his own volition about two weeks ago,” said CEO Charles Emond in the 2022 earnings call. CDPQ will not be touching crypto going forward. [BetaKit; The Logic, paywalled]

Other good news for bitcoin

Bitcoin miners are diversifying because mining is sucking as a business. Riot Blockchain has changed its name to Riot Platforms. [Coindesk]

Crypto firm Phoenix Community Capital and its founder Luke Sullivan, with links to various UK parliamentary groups, appears to have vanished. Some of the firm’s assets and its name appear to have been sold to a new company run by an individual called “Dan,” who has told investors it has no obligation towards them. [Guardian]

Data Finnovation, who took out BUSD, now looks into weird bridging on Tether. [Medium]

Image: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is being patted down with a makeup sponge as a big green screen looms behind him. Fortune

Posted on February 26, 2023May 5, 2024 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: FTX family subpoenas, SBF witness tampering, Celsius bids revealed, more crypto banking woes

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

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FTX: It’s a family affair

FTX’s lawyers have questions. Specifically, they have questions for Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabriel and his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.

Joseph advised FTX. He recruited its first lawyers and joined FTX staff in meetings on Capitol Hill. When visiting the FTX offices in the Bahamas, he and Barbara stayed in a $16.4 million house with its title in their names. Barbara founded a political action committee called Mind the Gap, which received donations from FTX.

Gabriel launched Guarding Against Pandemics, an organization funded by Sam. Gabriel purchased a multimillion-dollar property in Washington D.C., which John Jay Ray III’s current FTX team believe was purchased using FTX customer funds.

Every member of Sam’s family had some involvement in FTX — and they aren’t responding to requests for documents. So Ray’s team and the Unsecured Creditors’ Committee (UCC) want to subpoena Joseph, Barbara and Gabriel under rule 2004. [Doc 579, PDF; Bloomberg]

We’ve detailed rule 2004 previously. Federal Rule of Bankruptcy 2004 allows tremendously broad discovery and deposition. A witness is not always entitled to attorney representation or cross-examination and has only a limited right to object to questions. 2004 exams are sometimes referred to as “fishing expeditions” — because they need to be.

Included in the same 2004 motion, Ray is also asking the court’s permission to subpoena Sam and several other FTX insiders, including FTX cofounders Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, and former FTX COO Constance Wang. Along with SBF’s family, they have not been very responsive:

“Mr. Wang and Ms. Ellison expressly declined to provide the requested information, and Ms. Fried has ignored the Requests altogether. The Debtors have not received meaningful engagement or any response from Mr. Singh or Mr. Gabriel Bankman-Fried.”

Ray’s team are investigating the FTX hack on November 11-12, which saw $300 million in crypto siphoned off the exchange while crypto Twitter watched in horror. They’ve requested an order pursuant to Rule 2004 here too — under seal, because the information in the motion could “reveal or lead to evidence that will reveal the identity and activities of the perpetrator(s).” It sounds like they already have a very good idea who was behind the hack. [Doc 581, PDF]

A mostly-unredacted list of FTX creditors is now available. It includes investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan; media companies, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal; commercial airliners, including American, United, Southwest, and Spirit; as well as several large tech players, including Netflix, Apple, and Meta. Individual customers’ names remain withheld. [Doc 574, PDF]

FTX objects to the US Trustee’s request to appoint an independent examiner. They argue an examiner would duplicate work that’s already underway by FTX, the UCC, law enforcement, and regulators. “Indeed, if history is a guide, the cost could near or exceed $100 million.” They point out that “it is difficult to imagine an examiner candidate whose qualifications exceed those of Mr. Ray.” Which is a good point. The UCC concurs. [Doc 573, PDF; Doc 571, PDF]

What’s a little witness tampering between friends?

SBF is playing fast and loose with potential witnesses in his criminal trial. He contacted “Witness-1,” the “current General Counsel of FTX US” (Ryne Miller) to work out a story with. We doubt Miller would want anything to do with such a scheme. But this was enough for the government to ask Judge Lewis Kaplan to modify Sam’s bail: [DOJ letter to judge, PDF]

“Specifically, the Government respectfully requests that the Court impose the following conditions: (1) the defendant shall not contact or communicate with current or former employees of FTX or Alameda (other than immediate family members) except in the presence of counsel, unless the Government or Court exempts an individual from this no-contact rule; and (2) the defendant shall not use any encrypted or ephemeral call or messaging application, including but not limited to Signal.”

SBF’s lawyers responded by pounding the table. Judge Kaplan has told both sides to chill. The government should get its reply in, with substantiation of its claims, by February 2. [letter, PDF; order, PDF]

Dirty Bubble has found another link between FTX and the fraud-riddled binary options industry. In September 2021, FTX purchased the ZUBR derivatives exchange for $11 million. The exchange was registered in Gibraltar. By the time Gibraltar rescinded ZUBR’s license, the exchange had no active customers. The exchange was a collaboration ~~between Belarusian binary options and crypto “billionaire” Viktor Prokopenya and his former business partner~~ Said Gutseriev, the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs. [Dirty Bubble]

(Update, March 15, 2023: Viktor Prokopenya tells us he “never had any commercial interest or other involvement in ZUBR.” Dirty Bubble has updated his story to note that FTX purchased ZUBR directly from Prokopenya’s business partner Said Gutseriev. Dirty also notes interesting connections between ZUBR and Prokopenya’s other entities in his story.)

Would it surprise you to learn that FTX made political donations to George Santos? [SFGate]

Celsius Network: Let’s make more magic beans!

Celsius has rejected the Binance US bid for Celsius assets, and four other bids. In the January 23 hearing, Ross Kwasteniet of Kirkland & Ellis, speaking for Celsius, said the bids “have not been compelling.”

Instead, Celsius have concocted a plan to reorganize into a publicly traded company and issue a new “Asset Share Token” to creditors. Those following the Celsius disaster will recognise this as Alex Mashinsky’s very dumb and bad Kelvin Plan from September 2022.

Creditors weren’t told about the other bids. As it happened, Tiffany Fong — Celsius creditor and YouTuber — got all the bids in a leak in December. Bidders included Binance US, Bank To The Future (Simon Dixon), Galaxy Digital, Cumberland DRW, and NovaWulf. Fong posted full text of the leaked bids. [Substack; Youtube]

Binance US: buy just the crypto, assume liabilities (with a haircut); excludes FTT, CEL, and other illiquid trash tokens. Pay $15 million cash.
Bank to the Future: crypto returned to customers pro rata. Other Celsius assets to special-purpose vehicles, customers get an ownership share. Cash to be raised through rights offering to creditors.
Galaxy Digital: Acquire illiquid assets and staked ETH. Pay $66.8 million cash.
Cumberland DRW: Purchase certain tokens and portfolio of alternative investments, excluding CEL. $1.8 billion total payment, includes various haircuts.
NovaWulf: Transfer substantially all assets and businesses to SEC-compliant NewCo, 100% owned by the creditors. Issue revenue share tokens. NovaWulf to pay $60-120 million, mostly in tokens. This is also a version of the Kelvin plan.

Many ad hoc creditors were disappointed that the Binance bid was rejected — but it shouldn’t be surprising, given the issues that Binance is already having with its bid for Voyager.

Frankly, we don’t think the other bids look all that great either — they’re fanciful coiner dreams that first assume the crypto market is healthy, which it isn’t.

We think Celsius should have just liquidated in July rather than taking several months and handing millions of dollars to bankruptcy professionals to get to the same place.

Banks

Silvergate is short on cash, so it’s suspended dividend payments on its preferred stock. [Business Wire]

The stock in question (NYSE:SI) is going down the toilet. It’s crashed from $220 in November 2021 to below $14 in January 2023. Signature Bank (NASDAQ: SBNY) has gone from $365 to $127 over the past year.

Moonstone Bank says that “recent events” — FTX tried to use them as a financial laundromat — and “the changing regulatory environment around crypto businesses” — the regulators are on the warpath — have prompted it to ditch the “innovation-driven business model” it adopted in recent years. [WSJ, paywall]

Federal bank regulators are not keen on dodgy crypto banks authorized by captured Wyoming state regulators. Custodia Bank can’t get a Fed account: [Federal Reserve]

“The Board has concluded that the firm’s application as submitted is inconsistent with the required factors under the law. Custodia is a special purpose depository institution, chartered by the state of Wyoming, which does not have federal deposit insurance. The firm proposed to engage in novel and untested crypto activities that include issuing a crypto asset on open, public and/or decentralized networks.”

Crypto.com’s old gateway for GBP and EUR was Transactive Systems of Lithuania. Transactive has been cut off by the Bank of Lithuania, after it found “significant violations and shortcomings of the Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing.” Transactive had apparently been giving accounts to a long list of low-quality institutions in low-quality jurisdictions. Transactive can no longer serve financial institutions, forex, or crypto clients. They also got cut off from the UK Faster Payments system. Your EUR and GBP sent to Crypto.com via Transactive are probably now stuck. [Twitter; Offshore CorpTalk; Bank of Lithuania, in Lithuanian]

Before Crypto.com got kicked off Silvergate, it used to get US dollar deposits via an oddly roundabout method: customers would send USD to Circle’s account at Silvergate, and Circle would mint that much USDC and send the USDC to Crypto.com. It is possible this was not in full compliance with KYC and AML regulations. [Twitter; crypto.com, archive]

Other happy little accidents

London-based crypto exchange Luno, a subsidiary of DCG, is laying off 35% of its staff. About 330 employees will be let go from the firm, which has offices in Africa, Asia, and Europe. [WSJ, paywall; archive]

DeFi volumes are right down. The amount of money (or “money”) involved has been flat for months, and — most importantly — you can’t get the ridiculous yields you could in the bubble. Oh no! Anyway. [Bloomberg]

Happy Penis Day, to those who celebrate

It was five years ago today, January 28, 2018, that the Prodeum initial coin offering took everyone’s money and disappeared, leaving behind only a new jargon term for “exit scam” or “rugpull.” You get a penis! And you get a penis! And you get a penis! Everybody gets a penis! [The Next Web, 2018]

Image: Sam Bankman-Sopranino and family.

Posted on January 28, 2023March 16, 2023 by Amy Castor 2

Crypto collapse: Genesis bankrupt, CoinDesk for sale, Bankman-Fried attacks FTX lawyers, Bitzlato busted

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

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I think we made some tremendous progress in the six months before I left.
— Jeffrey Skilling, Enron

Media stardom

Amy’s first piece for Foreign Policy is out now! “The Crypto Dominoes Are Still Falling: The bankruptcy of Genesis shows the need for regulators to have teeth.” She advises that regulators be given the power to act much more quickly against obvious nonsense. [Foreign Policy, paywalled]

Genesis goes down — DCG is fine, fine

The lending arm of Genesis finally filed for chapter 11 in the Southern District of New York on January 19. This has been expected for months, as they froze withdrawals in November. [Amended Petition, PDF; docket on Kroll; press release; Bloomberg; Michael Lito declaration, PDF]

The corporate entities that filed were Global Holdco and its lending subsidiaries Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific, which managed Genesis lending for Three Arrows Capital. Genesis’ derivatives, spot trading, broker-dealer, and custody businesses were not part of the bankruptcy.

Genesis owes its top 50 creditors — mostly unnamed on the petition — over $3.4 billion. Gemini Earn clients are collectively owed $765.9 million. Other big claims include a $78 million loan payable from Donut (a “high-yield” DeFi platform — “high yield” is a euphemism for “Ponzi”) and a VanEck fund with a $53.1 million loan payable. [Reuters]

But fear not! Genesis has a plan to exit the bankruptcy by May 19. It will try to sell its assets at auction within three months. [Chapter 11 Plan, PDF]

The settlement proposal is written in a confusing and opaque manner — but DCG controls the bankrupt entities utterly. DCG is trying to declare its left hand solvent and its right hand bankrupt, and stick the creditors with the losses.

Page 50 of the chapter 11 plan (page 54 of the PDF) sets out the street corner shell game. Claims are shuffled between the bankrupt Genesis entities and the non-bankrupt DCG entities such that heads DCG wins, and tails the creditors lose. Any Gemini Earn creditor who accepts this settlement relinquishes all claims against DCG, Gemini, and the Winklevoss twins personally.

We think DCG screwed up by covering for Genesis in July 2022, when it took on the claim to 3AC and issued Genesis a $1.1 billion promissory note in return. It’s clear that nobody at Genesis could refuse the offer — that this was entirely in the control of DCG. Also, the 3AC loan was secured in part by shares of GBTC, as issued by DCG’s Grayscale. Genesis should have declared bankruptcy then.

In addition to the $1.1 billion note, DCG owes Genesis another $575 million, in cash and cryptos. The Genesis bankruptcy is all about shielding DCG from liability.

“This SHOULD be criminal,” Nicholas Weaver said. “You sell a billion dollars worth of unregistered investments (it is called ‘securities fraud’), they go sour, your victims should be able to go after you. But this is all designed to basically be a perfect crime: a billion dollar theft, in plain sight, and with legal protection.” He advises the unsecured creditors’ committee to reject the offer. [Mastodon]

Gemini Earn claims against Genesis are part of the bankruptcy. It’s unlikely the customers will get all their money back in chapter 11. The question is: will Gemini make Earn depositors whole, or will the Winklevosses argue that Earn depositors are creditors of Genesis?

Cameron Winklevoss is still fighting to get Genesis to pay up. He threatened to sue DCG over the bankruptcy: “Unless Barry and DCG come to their senses and make a fair offer to creditors, we will be filing a lawsuit against Barry and DCG imminently.” [Twitter]

As we noted previously, the SEC case against Gemini Earn makes Gemini and Genesis jointly and severally liable to pay back customers in full, should the SEC win or the defendants settle. And Gemini has the funds and isn’t bankrupt. So Cameron really wants DCG to pay.

Who wants to buy CoinDesk?

DCG’s crypto news site CoinDesk is exploring a partial or full sale. CEO Kevin Worth says that CoinDesk has received multiple unsolicited offers of over $200 million. We raised an eyebrow at this claim, but hey. We doubt the offers were in actual cash dollars, though. [WSJ]

CoinDesk claims it received $50 million in revenue in 2022. It’s unclear where from. Its main income source was events — which are not so huge in the crypto winter. There are a few ads on the site. Staff expansions in the past year, particularly at CoinDesk TV, won’t have been cheap.

CoinDesk has been propped up by DCG since 2016 when Barry Silbert bought the site for $500,000. We understand that CoinDesk was about to go broke when Silbert dived in and rescued it. CoinDesk was still a small crypto blog then, but Silbert took it into the big time just in time for the 2017 bubble.

CoinDesk’s job is to be a PR machine for Silbert’s empire — often quite explicitly. [CoinDesk memo, archive] The only reason to buy CoinDesk would be to make it your PR machine.

3AC and CoinFLEX — a remarkable team

Three Arrows Capital founders Zhu Su and Kyle Davies are looking to raise $25 million for a new crypto claims exchange. That is, an exchange for claims against bankrupt crypto companies. 3AC are, of course, experts in going bankrupt in a really big way.

Zhu and Davies were going to name their new thing GTX — a take on FTX because G comes after F. They claimed this was just a temporary name after everyone made fun of them.

The pair are working alongside CoinFLEX founders Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam. CoinFLEX filed for restructuring in the Seychelles in June after it suffered $84 million in losses from a large individual customer — Roger Ver.

GTX will run on CoinFLEX’s software and a legal team will oversee the onboarding of claims for all the recent crypto bankruptcies —including Celsius, Voyager, FTX, and Mt. Gox. Creditors who transfer their claims to GTX will receive credit in a token called USDG. [The Block]

In its pitch deck, GTX estimated there was a $20 billion market for crypto claims, based on the notional value of those claims. “We can dominate the crypto claims market within 2-3 months of go-live.” [WSJ, paywalled; FT, paywalled; pitch deck, archive, PDF]

The pitch deck ends with a splash detailing 3AC and CoinFLEX’s extensive crypto market successes. This fails to mention that both companies went broke — and that 3AC went broke so hard they took out much of crypto all by themselves.

GTX gets full points for audacity, and here’s to Zhu and Davies going to jail.

FTX: Judge says Sullivan & Cromwell can stay

Amy and Molly White live-tweeted the FTX hearing on Friday, January 20. It was about FTX’s applications to retain various bankruptcy professionals, mainly Sullivan & Cromwell. [Twitter; Twitter, Agenda, PDF]

Judge John Dorsey ruled FTX could continue using Sullivan & Cromwell, despite claims the law firm was too conflicted. [Order, PDF; Motion, PDF]

The US Trustee and the UCC had originally objected to S&C on the grounds the firm failed to make relevant disclosures regarding its prior dealings with FTX. But leading up to the hearing, the parties worked things out, and now the UST and UCC are on board. The only remaining objections came from FTX creditor Warren Winter, with a joinder from FTX creditor Richard Brummond. [Objection, PDF; Joinder, PDF]

In support of Winter’s objection, former FTX (and Ultimate Poker!) lawyer Daniel Friedberg filed a hilariously terrible declaration. Friedberg describes how shocked he was to learn that $8 billion of FTX customer money was missing. After reviewing his “ethical obligations” — a bodily organ hitherto unknown to Mr. Friedberg — he resigned. He tries to imply that S&C took FTX into bankruptcy so they could loot the corpse, helped from the inside by S&C’s former law partner, Ryne Miller. [Declaration, PDF]

Because Friedman filed his declaration late, White followed with an emergency motion to adjourn the hearing, so the court would have more time to chew on it. [Motion, PDF]

S&C’s James Bromely said Sam Bankman-Fried was behind all of this troublemaking. Friedberg’s declaration came hot on the heels of social media posts by SBF attacking the law firm. SBF is living in his parent’s home with an ankle bracelet and Friedberg has been questioned by the FBI. The pair were part of the inner circle that brought down FTX, said Bromely:

“If you are Mr. Bankman Fried or Mr. Friedberg, there is a concern about what is going on and what could happen to them. They can’t throw stones at the US attorney’s office. But they can throw stones at the Debtor’s counsel who are providing information to the prosecutors and the regulators, which is exactly what is happening.”

As far as Friedberg goes, Bromely added: “He’s got a checkered past. It takes a lot of guts for him to put something in writing that says, ‘I was the chief compliance officer at FTX.’”

Judge Dorsey dismissed everything in the Friedberg declaration saying, “It’s full of hearsay, innuendo, speculation, and rumor… certainly not something I would allow to be introduced into evidence in any event.”

FTX CEO John Jay Ray III said in his declaration S&C are not the villains. The villains are being pursued by criminal authorities. [Ray declaration, PDF]

We concur that S&C may be conflicted. But they’re competent to do the job, they’ve already spent 70 days on the case, which new counsel would have to do over, and it’s not like someone else would be cheaper.

The Trustee also wants to appoint an examiner in the case. The examiner motion will be heard on February 6.

FTX: mycrimes.blog

A new mycrimes.blog just dropped, with more drafts from Sam’s forthcoming book* If Caroline and CZ and John Ray and Sullivan & Cromwell Did It. SBF claims that FTX US was solvent when he passed it off to the lawyers, Sullivan & Cromwell. John Jay Ray III responds: “This is the problem, he thinks everything is one big honey pot.” [Substack; WSJ]

FTX secretly channeled a $50 million loan to Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, in a deal struck with Deltec chair Jean Chalopin. “Deltec is emerging as a central figure in the scrum of lawyers, banks and unwitting associates FTX pulled into its orbit.” Our regular readers will recognize Deltec as the known banker for Tether, who have occasionally claimed to hold more dollars for Tether than are documented in the entire Bahamas banking system. [Forbes, paywall]

It was obvious to executives and software developers at FTX that financial arrangements between FTX and Alameda were somewhat odd as early as 2020. FTX employees have been leaking documents to the New York Times. [NYT]

CFTC commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero gave a speech on FTX’s failure and the nature of public trust in crypto firms. She goes in hard, particularly after the professional gatekeepers: “lawyers, accountants, auditors, compliance professionals and other gatekeepers for crypto firms failed customers in their essential duties.” Venture capitalists and pension funds too. She wants Congress to give the CFTC more power over crypto exchanges. [CFTC]

Romero also went after FTX’s venture capital backers on Bloomberg TV: “What kind of due diligence did they conduct? Why did they turn a blind eye to what should have been really flashing red lights?” [Bloomberg]

_{* c’mon, you know he will}

Bitzlato: Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’em

Everyone heard about the huge Fed announcement of an international cryptocurrency bust and went … who the hell is Bitzlato? Some tiny Hong Kong exchange run by some Russian living in Shenzhen? [Press release; order, PDF; affidavit, PDF]

Bitzlato, formerly called ChangeBot, was a small exchange with a peer-to-peer service, similar to LocalBitcoins. Its user base was Russian crooks doing crooked things with fake accounts. Users with valid Know-Your-Customer info would create “drop” accounts which they would then sell to crooks. So Bitzlato could say it had KYC, even if it didn’t do anything.

Bitzlato was not systemic to the crypto economy. But it was important to the Russia-based ransomware economy, and it was the exchange of choice for users of the Hydra darknet market that was busted in April 2022.

The Feds basically enacted Nicholas Weaver and Bruce Schneier’s 2021 plan to take out ransomware: hit the very few exchanges willing to touch such tainted coins. [Slate, 2021]

The fun part of the FBI affidavit is the tales of Bitzlato’s criminal customer service, page 10 onwards:

•‌ On or about December 27, 2017, a user with the username “Dude Weed” wrote to Bitzlato’s customer service portal, stating: “I have a bitcoin wallet in my account on the Hydra site. I also have a wallet here … How do I recharge a Hydra wallet”? The user also provided transaction details. Based on my training and experience, this query reflects the user’s desire to send funds from Bitzlato to Hydra. A Bitzlato representative responded: “Hello dude weed,” apologized for the delay in the transaction, and stated that “The transaction successfully went online.” The Bitzlato representative provided a link to an online blockchain explorer, reflecting a completed Bitcoin transaction whose total amount was then equivalent to approximately $14,600.

•‌ On December 17, 2020, a Bitzlato representative asked a user to provide his identity documents. The user protested, writing, “I don’t quite understand why you need a photo of this card? It’s not mine[.]” In further conversations, the user clarified that “everyone on the site trades with other people’s cards … they often discuss so-called ‘drops.’” The user commented that he had been told to create an account using credentials supplied by an online cryptocurrency training course that he had found on Instagram. The Bitzlato representative asked the user to provide his true identity documents and, rather than terminate that user, said the user could keep trading on Bitzlato.

Image: Cameron Winklevoss on Instagram

Posted on January 21, 2023January 26, 2023 by Amy Castor 1

Crypto collapse: DCG’s problem is Grayscale, FTX Bahamas agreement, DeFi trading arrest, Silvergate Bank, Huobi, Binance

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Sometimes months happen in weeks, and it’s been six months of that sort of week. So please contribute to our Patreons — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s.
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
— Sir Walter Scott, 1808

DCG: Congratulations, you played yourself

The Department of Justice’s Eastern District of New York and the SEC are looking into money flows between Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group and its lending subsidiary Genesis, and what investors were told about the transfers. [Bloomberg]

DCG has been playing all the same games as the rest of crypto — trying to create the illusion of money where there is no money, to keep the party going a little bit longer.

Genesis should have declared insolvency in June when Three Arrows Capital (3AC) blew a $2.4 billion hole in its accounts — but DCG purchased 3AC’s defaulted loan from Genesis and financed the purchase with a promissory note of $1.1 billion, to be paid back over 10 years.

That is: DCG and Genesis counted an internal IOU as money, to claim Genesis was still solvent.

The catch with the promissory note is that if the 10-year loan is “callable” — meaning DCG would have to pay Genesis the full amount immediately in the event of a liquidation or bankruptcy — then it could give Genesis creditors a claim on DCG itself, and take all of DCG down with it.

“The Promissory Note is like a noose wrapped tight around the neck of DCG. If Genesis goes over the cliff, it drags DCG with it,” said Ram Ahluwalia, the co-founder of Lumida, an investment advisory firm that focuses on crypto. [Twitter]

In a letter to shareholders in November, Silbert disclosed that DCG borrowed another $575 million from Genesis — due in May 2023. The funds were used for “investment opportunities” and buying back shares of DCG stock from outside investors. [Twitter]

A creditor committee that includes crypto exchange Gemini presented Genesis and DCG with a plan to recover the assets. Silbert had until January 8 to respond. Cameron Winklevoss threatened that “time is running out.” [Twitter; Twitter]

We think Gemini will try to force Genesis into involuntary chapter 11 — they just need three creditors to file a petition with the bankruptcy court. The judge then holds a hearing and decides if the matter will go through. [11 U.S. Code, section 303]

Gemini Earn, Genesis, GBTC, and 3AC

As is usual in crypto, DCG screwed itself by greed. DCG also owns Grayscale, which operates the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) — DCG’s cash cow. Grayscale collects a whopping 2% annual fee on its assets under management — currently, 633,000 BTC.

GBTC traded above the face value of the bitcoins in the fund up to early 2021 — then it dropped below net asset value (NAV).

Genesis took the crypto it got from Gemini Earn customers and lent those funds out to institutional investors and crypto hedge funds — such as Three Arrows Capital.

3AC was one of the biggest investors in GBTC, taking advantage of a lucrative arbitrage opportunity. They would borrow bitcoins from Genesis and swap those for GBTC shares at NAV from Grayscale. After a six-month lockup, 3AC could dump the shares on retail for a handsome profit. Rinse and repeat, and when GBTC was trading at 20% above NAV, they could make a 40% profit a year that way

This GBTC arb played a big role in keeping the price of bitcoin above water in 2020, setting the stage for the 2021 bitcoin bubble.

At the end of 2020, 3AC was the largest holder of GBTC with a position worth $1 billion at the time. After February 2021, the GBTC premium dried up, and GBTC began trading on secondary markets at a steep discount to NAV.

3AC had hoped the discount would be reversed when the SEC approved Grayscale converting its bitcoin trust to an ETF. But the SEC rejected the application, and the GBTC discount continued to widen. [Bloomberg]

When 3AC defaulted on its $2.4 billion loan to Genesis, Genesis seized the collateral backing the loan, including 17.4 million shares of GBTC, and filed a $1.1 billion claim against 3AC — a claim that is now on DCG’s books. [Coindesk; Affidavit Russell Crumpler, PDF]

Class action against Gemini Earn

Gemini partnered with Genesis for their Earn program. After Genesis lost $175 million in FTX in November, it froze withdrawals. Gemini Earn froze withdrawals in turn. Now Gemini Earn customers are out $900 million.

In an effort to get those funds back, three Gemini Earn customers are seeking class arbitration against Genesis and DCG.

Gemini and Genesis had a “master digital asset loan agreement,” which Gemini Earn customers entered into — when you became an Earn customer, you agreed you were lending money to Genesis.

The complaint alleges that Genesis breached this agreement by hiding its insolvency through a “sham transaction,” whereby DCG “bought” the right to collect a $2.3 billion debt owed to Genesis by 3AC with the aforementioned $1.1 billion promissory note. The plaintiffs also claim that the Genesis loan agreement created an unregistered sale of securities. [Press release; Complaint, PDF; Master Digital Asset Loan Agreement]

The master loan agreement states that: “Each Party represents and warrants that it is not insolvent and is not subject to any bankruptcy or insolvency proceedings under any applicable laws.”

This is why Silbert keeps insisting that Genesis has a liquidity issue and not a solvency issue — even as those are functionally identical in crypto. If Genesis was found to be insolvent and took customer funds in, it would be in violation of that contract. (As well as promptly calling that promissory note from DCG.)

Amidst all of this, Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary and World Bank Chief Economist, has quietly left DCG — going so far as to remove all mention of DCG from his own website. Summers joined DCG as a senior advisor in 2016, a year after the company’s founding. [Protos]

Silvergate Bank

Moody’s has downgraded Silvergate Bank’s long-term deposit rating to Ba1 from Baa2 after the crypto bank announced that its customers — who are almost entirely crypto firms now — withdrew $8 billion in deposits in Q4 2022: [Moody’s]

The negative outlook reflects Moody’s view that the bank’s profitability over the near term will be weak along with the risk of further declines in deposits from crypto currency centric firms further pressuring profitability. In addition, the negative outlook reflects the increasing regulatory and legal risks that the firm is currently facing.

Silvergate’s other customers are worried about the bank’s solvency and about the regulatory heat coming its way. Silvergate was key to FTX/Alameda having access to actual money — they helped funnel money to FTX from accounts in the name of Alameda and of Alameda’s dubious subsidiary, North Dimensions.

If Silvergate are found to be complicit in FTX’s fraud, they will be fined. But if there was money laundering and sanctions busting, they could be shut down. They will at the very least be fined. We would guess some individuals will also get a bar from being bankers. Here’s a list of enforcement actions on Federal Reserve member banks. [Federal Reserve]

Silvergate’s 8-K SEC filings this year are full of bad news. We noted Silvergate’s layoffs and writing off its Diem investment last time. [SEC 8-K; SEC 8-K; SEC 10-Q]

FTX

After a series of knock-down-drag-out filings — and the hilarious revelations of how FTX Digital Markets (FTX DM) was functionally Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas partying fund — the US and Bahamas bankruptcies are working together now. John Jay Ray III and his team met in Miami with the joint provisional liquidators (JPLs) handling the FTX DM liquidation, and they’ve reached an agreement. [press release; agreement, PDF]

The Bahamas JPLs will handle everything to do with FTX DM, and the US administrators will handle everything to do with all the other FTX companies. The JPLs will handle the Bahamas real estate and the cryptos being held by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas. (This doesn’t mean that the Bahamas will handle the disbursement of the crypto they have under their control — only that FTX is fine with them holding the funds for now.) The parties will share information. FTX DM’s chapter 15 foreign entity bankruptcy in the SDNY will continue.

We suspect it was clear the US side would win in court, and the Bahamas liquidators realized they weren’t being paid enough to damage their reputations this way. The agreement is subject to approval by the courts in the US and the Bahamas, but it would be surprising for them not to allow it.

The Department of Justice has put out a call for victims of “Samuel Bankman-Fried, a/k/a ‘SBF.’” That’s his rapper name now. [Justice]

Huobi’s real-time meltdown

Huobi has always been a dodgy crypto exchange — even before it was run by Justin Sun from Tron. Huobi has $2.6 billion in reserves, and 40% of that is its own HT token. If you don’t count its own internal supermarket loyalty card points, Huobi is insolvent. [Twitter]

Huobi is desperately searching its pockets for spare change. On December 30, Wu Blockchain reported that Huobi was canceling year-end bonuses and planning to slash half its staff of 1,200 people and cut the salaries of senior employees. Sun denied the rumors. [Twitter; South China Morning Post; Twitter]

Other unofficial reports from small accounts on Twitter said that Huobi was offering to pay its employees in stablecoins — USDC and tethers — instead of actual-money yuan. If they objected, they would lose their jobs. [Twitter]

Employees revolted at being paid in magic beans — so Sun cut off internal communications. On January 4, Bitrun said that “all communication and feedback channels with employees” had been blocked. [Twitter]

Here’s the unofficial details on how Huobi is treating its employees. Those who quit because they’re getting paid in tethers get no severance pay either. This is what a doomed company does. [Twitter]

After initially denying Huobi was cutting staff, Sun finally admitted that Huobi was indeed laying off 20% of its employees in the first quarter of 2023 — after rumors swirled that half of all employees would be let go. [FT]

Huobi users rushed to get their funds off of the exchange. Blockchain analytics platform Nansen noted a wave of withdrawals on January 5 and 6. Following the withdrawals, Peckshield reported a wallet associated with Tron moved $100 million in stablecoins — USDC and tethers — into Huobi. [Twitter, Twitter]

In a lengthy Twitter thread, Sun assures you that your funds are totally safe. We fully expect the exchange to blow up at any moment. [Twitter]

Binance

US prosecutors for the Western District of Washington in Seattle are sending subpoenas to hedge funds for records of their dealings with Binance. John Ghose, formerly a Justice Department prosecutor who specialized in crypto and now a lawyer at compliance vendor VeraSafe, thinks this is about money laundering. [Washington Post]

We noted previously that “BUSD” on Binance is not the BUSD issued by Paxos, which claims to be backed by actual dollars in Silvergate Bank. Binance “BUSD” is a stablecoin-of-a stablecoin, maintained internally. This is the sort of arrangement that’s fine until it isn’t.

It turns out that Binance has been issuing uncollateralised “BUSD” on its own BNB blockchain. Data Finnovation looked at the Ethereum and BNB blockchains and saw that Binance has a history of minting fake “BUSD” internally on BNB. At some points in 2021, there were $500 million to $1 billion of fake dollars circulating on BNB. They’re caught up now, though — so that’s all fine, right? [Medium]

Dirty Bubble thinks Binance US isn’t meaningfully separate from Binance.com, if you look at how the cryptos flow. But that shouldn’t be news to anyone here. [Dirty Bubble]

Reuters is still on the Binance beat. Here’s a special report on Binance’s accounts, as far as can be told. Reuters calls Binance’s books a “black box.” Private companies don’t have to disclose their financials, especially if they’re operating outside all effective regulation — but even Binance’s former CFO, Wei Zhou, didn’t have full access to the company’s accounting records in the three years he was there. We’ve noted previously how regulators have a heck of a time getting the most basic information out of Binance. [Reuters]

John Hyatt from Forbes notes how Binance is spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars sponsoring Politico’s Playbook newsletter to reach politicians and bureaucrats. Worked great for FTX! [Twitter thread]

DeFi: Go directly to jail

Discussions of crime on the blockchain hardly ever point out that almost all of what goes on in DeFi was always just straight-up illegal under US law.

Pretty much every token was always an unregistered security. The sort of market manipulations that are standard practice in the DeFi trash fire have been illegal under Dodd-Frank since 2010. And that’s before we get to the rugpulls, hacks, and “hacks.”

The authorities are finally moving in. Every DeFi trader should consider themselves on notice.

Hotshot DeFi trader Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico on December 27 on a Department of Justice (Southern District of New York) indictment for commodities fraud and commodities manipulation in the $110 million trade that took out Mango Markets. [indictment, PDF; case docket]

Mango Markets is a decentralized exchange that runs on Solana. Users can lend, borrow, swap, and trade on margin. The exchange is overseen by a DAO, made up of people who hold MNGO — the native token of the exchange.

On October 11, someone drained the project of $110 million by manipulating the platform’s price oracle. After others had traced it to him, Avi Eisenberg came forward and explained the trade.

Eisenberg sold MNGO perpetual futures from one account he controlled to another account also under his control. He then bought large amounts of MNGO, which had the effect of increasing the value of his large holding of MNGO perpetuals. He then borrowed against these holdings and withdrew $110 million in assorted cryptocurrencies.

This also rendered the Mango platform insolvent. Eisenberg himself explained that the insurance fund in place was “insufficient to cover all liquidations.” He gave back some of his trading profits. [Twitter; Bloomberg]

Eisenberg tweeted: [Twitter, archive]

I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are.

Eisenberg’s lawyer will likely explain his client’s erroneous legal reasoning to him.

Eisenberg wasn’t just arrested, he was denied bail as a flight risk — he has significant ties outside the US, he already left the US for two months just after the alleged offense, he likely has crypto stashed away somewhere, the charge carries a heavy penalty, and his background could not be checked. (Compare Sam Bankman-Fried’s release on bail.) [Order of detention pending trial, PDF]

It’s not clear why prosecutors went after Eisenberg in particular. We’d guess the CFTC and DoJ were looking for someone to make an example of. The bit where Eisenberg tweeted a complete confession probably helped, much as SBF’s confession tour of the press helped get him indicted.

What Eisenberg did to Mango was not remarkable at all. DeFi traders pull this nonsense all the time. Perhaps you don’t think DeFi trading shenanigans should be crimes, and that’s nice for you that you think that.

As Avi tweeted on October 19: “What are you gonna do, arrest me?” [Twitter, archive]

Posted on January 8, 2023January 16, 2023 by Amy Castor 1

FTX Bahamas vs. John Jay Ray, Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty, DoJ seizes FTX assets

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Our work is funded via our Patreons — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s.
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i wonder how many times someone’s managed to hack in to a bitcoin exchange and found there wasn’t any money there and just left
— Boxturret, SomethingAwful

FTX vs the Bahamas

There’s a turf war going on between the FTX Digital Markets (FTX DM) liquidation in the Bahamas and the FTX Trading Ltd bankruptcy proceedings in the U.S. We wrote about it earlier, along with some of the fishy stuff going on in the Bahamas.

The Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) filed their liquidation for FTX DM, a small subsidiary of FTX Trading, just one day before John Jay Ray III filed for Chapter 11 on behalf of FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried helped the SCB get in before Ray by waiting until the wee hours of November 11 to hand control over to Ray. Now the SCB feels it is entitled to FTX assets so that the liquidators can distribute them to creditors of FTX DM — whoever those might eventually turn out to be. [PwC]

The Bahamas side seems to be working on the theory that FTX DM was the operating center of the FTX companies. But FTX DM wasn’t even incorporated until July 22, 2021. It lay dormant for nearly a year and didn’t start operating in any manner until May 13, 2022. Note that’s a few days after the Terra-Luna collapse — FTX and Alameda were already utterly screwed by the time FTX DM was used for anything, suggesting that that may have been part of SBF’s reason to activate it.

The SCB pissed off Ray even further when, on December 29, they valued the FTX funds they seized late in the night on November 11 — in violation of the Chapter 11 stay — at $3.5 billion. This is mostly a pile of FTT tokens, whose market value is way less than $3.5 billion. FTX says the assets were worth just $296 million — “assuming the entire amount of FTT could be sold at spot prices at the time.” [SCB press release, PDF; FTX press release]

Christina Rolle, SCB executive director, said the Commission sought control of the crypto held by FTX after SBF and FTX cofounder Gary Wang told them about “hacking attempts overnight” — a perfect justification to seize the assets. Her affidavit, filed with the Supreme Court of the Bahamas, confirmed that SBF and Wang were behind the transfers on November 11 and 12. [Affidavit of Christina R. Rolle, PDF]

U.S. Federal prosecutors are looking into the $370 million hack — or “hack.” [Bloomberg]

Rolle also said that Tether gave the SCB 46 million tethers (USDT). SCB had asked Tether to freeze some USDT held by FTX DM or FTX Trading Ltd (it’s not clear which entity), then create 46 million fresh USDT and send it to SCB:

76. Additionally, the Commission sent instructions for the transfer of approximately US $46 million Tether tokens to a secured wallet under the control of the Commission. These Tether tokens were not transferred to the Commission’s wallet but, after a meeting with Tether representatives, the Commission agreed that Tether, in light of the Chapter 11 proceedings, would maintain a freeze over the Tether tokens until ownership of the tokens is resolved.

This sounded odd to us — a “meeting with Tether representatives”? Coincidentally, the Bahamas Attorney General, Ryan Pinder, used to work for Deltec Bank, the bank associated with Tether.

The SCB then put out a press release on January 3 accusing Ray of “material misstatements” and having a “cavalier attitude to the truth.” They claim Ray is “promoting mistrust of public institutions in the Bahamas.” Well, yes, he is. [LinkedIn]

The joint provisional liquidators (JPLs) handling the FTX DM liquidation in the Bahamas have been pushing for access to substantial amounts of FTX data. Ray and his lawyers are working to make sure that never happens. Ray’s team has submitted piles of evidence pointing to the Bahamas government acting in bad faith.

FTX has filed an incendiary objection to the JPLs’ motion to compel the turnover of electronic records. This is a 37-page must-read rant: [FTX objection, PDF]

10. Finally, the stunning press release issued late yesterday, on December 29, 2022, by the Commission, along with certain related materials, is a game changer. The press release (and the supporting affidavit of the Executive Director of the Commission) boldly admits that the Commission violated the automatic stay in taking certain of the Debtors’ digital assets and then recklessly values the assets taken at $3.5 billion. As described in more detail below, yesterday’s disclosures demonstrate conclusively that the JPLs and the Commission are cooperating closely to do an end run around this Court and chapter 11. In a situation where maximizing recoveries for creditors should be the primary goal of all concerned, one can only wonder why.

We expect Ray isn’t wondering at all. He believes that “an elaborate and intentional game is being played” by the JPLs, the SCB, and the Bahamas government. As FTX says in their objection: “The fact that the founders left the Debtors more closely resembling a crime scene than an operating business cannot be ignored.”

FTX lawyer James Bromely filed a 675-page declaration, presenting exhibits to support their case. FTX financial advisor Edgar Mosley at Alvarez & Marsal also filed a 185-page declaration loaded with exhibits. [Bromely declaration, PDF; Mosley declaration, PDF]

The Mosley declaration details what business FTX Digital Markets actually did. FTX DM seems to have been Sam’s local partying fund:

17. The Debtors’ records reflect that $15.4 million for “Hotels & Accommodation” was paid primarily to three hotels in The Bahamas: the Albany ($5.8 million), the Grand Hyatt ($3.6 million), and the Rosewood ($807,000). The $6.9 million for “Meals & Entertainment” was paid primarily to Hyatt Services Caribbean ($1.4 million), Six Stars Catering ($974,000), and to three other catering and delivery services ($2.3 million in total).

18. The Debtors’ records reflect that in the first three quarters of 2022, FTX DM had total operating expenses of approximately $73 million, including over $40 million labeled “other expenses.”

19. The Debtors’ records reflect that FTX DM’s 2022 income statements show that FTX DM made no disbursements in connection with transaction, engineering or product expenses.

The newly formed Unsecured Creditors’ Committee in the U.S. chapter 11 also objects to the Bahamas motion. “These requests are sweeping and appear to be based on the faulty theory advanced by the JPLs that FTX DM was actually the nerve center of the FTX enterprise.” [Committee objection, PDF]

Just seizing some assets, don’t mind us

There was a scheduling conference in the Delaware FTX bankruptcy hearing on January 4. This wasn’t expected to be interesting — but Department of Justice Attorney Seth Shapiro made a surprise appearance over Zoom to let Judge Michael Dorsey know that the DoJ has been seizing assets.

SBF held a 7.6% stake in day trading brokerage Robinhood. He admitted to borrowing from Alameda in April and May to purchase the shares, in an Antigua court affidavit shortly before his arrest. [CoinDesk; affidavit, PDF]

SBF pledged the Robinhood shares to multiple companies as loan collateral. Who was getting the shares in the bankruptcy was a point of some contention. Now the DoJ has seized the shares.

Various bank accounts connected to the FTX Digital Markets (Bahamas) case and the JPLs motions for provisional relief, and the money in them, have also been seized. “We didn’t just want the court to read that in the papers filed by Silvergate and Moonstone” (FTX’s banks), said Shapiro. The DoJ also seized some cryptocurrency, though Shapiro didn’t say who from — the banks? The DoJ is working things out with the parties.

Shapiro told Judge Dorsey that the bank accounts had been seized with a view to “a criminal or asset forfeiture proceeding at some point down the line, in the Southern District of New York, to which entities could file claims.”

Shapiro said: “We either believe that these assets are not the property of the bankruptcy estate or that they fall within the exceptions under sections 362(b)(1) and/or (b)(4) of the bankruptcy code.” 362(b) is about criminal proceedings. [LII]

The Bahamas JPLs, who were also hoping for the contents of these bank accounts, are in touch with the DoJ.

**Sam did nothing* wrong**

Sam Bankman-Fried stood before U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on January 3 and pleaded not guilty to all eight counts against him. SBF actually flew to New York for his arraignment and had to squeeze through a mob of reporters to enter the courthouse. The judge set a tentative trial date of October 2. [Twitter; Twitter thread; NYT]

SBF has arrived at the courtroom, per Bloomberg. pic.twitter.com/JzB1KOhRql
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 3, 2023

Sam thinks he’s too smart, rich, and pretty to go to jail. He just needs to explain things properly to the people in charge, and it’ll all be fine.

SBF’s not-guilty plea doesn’t necessarily mean a trial will happen. SBF and his lawyer Mark Cohen are likely just buying time so they can negotiate a better deal with the prosecutors. We very much doubt the case will go to trial, or that Sam’s parents would be able to foot the legal bill if it did.

More funds mysteriously moved out of Alameda wallets on December 27, mainly illiquid altcoins being swapped for ETH and BTC. Over $1 million in funds were sent through crypto mixers, according to crypto intelligence firm Arkham. [Twitter; Decrypt]

This isn’t the work of a liquidator. Sam says it wasn’t him, even though Sam, FTX co-founder Gary Wang, and FTX director of engineering Nishad Singh were the only ones who had access to the keys. Reddit user Settless notes that SBF had previously claimed to own these addresses: “The pattern is similar — the wallet receives funds and swaps them via no-KYC exchange to launder the funds.” [Twitter; Reddit]

The U.S. isn’t happy about this movement of crypto. During SBF’s arraignment in Manhattan, the prosecutors asked the court to add a new condition to the bond: that Sam be prohibited from accessing or transferring any FTX or Alameda assets. Judge Kaplan agreed.

Molly Crane-Newman from the NY Daily News said: “SBF became animated when prosecutors successfully requested that the judge prohibit him from accessing or transferring FTX assets — furiously writing notes to his attorneys on a legal pad and pointing to them with a biro.” [Twitter]

The judge also agreed to the redaction of names and addresses of Sam’s two additional bail signers — who he may not have actually found yet. The press has until January 12 to file any objections to this. Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press has already filed an application to unseal the names. [Motion, PDF; Twitter; Application to Unseal]

Two of SBF’s associates, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have already pleaded guilty in the hopes of getting a lesser sentence. John Reed Stark ordered and posted their plea agreements and hearing transcripts. [LinkedIn; Ellison plea, PDF; Ellison agreement, PDF; Wang plea, PDF; Wang agreement, PDF]

_{* except all the things he may possibly, hypothetically, have done wrong}

Other perfectly normal happenings in FTX

North Dimension, the company that FTX customers were unknowingly sending their actual U.S. dollars to, was a fake online electronics retailer. North Dimension has two accounts at Silvergate Bank. [archived website; NBC News]

The assorted shenanigans with FTX likely explain why Silvergate Bank (NASDAQ: SI) has 54% of its shares sold short. Smart investors know how this will end. [Fintel]

John Reed Stark discusses FTX investors getting hosed on CNBC Squawkbox. [YouTube]

“Beyond Blame: The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame” — by Barbara H. Fried. Now, you might say that if Sam’s circumstances are to blame for his apparent crimes, then Barbara happens to be one of those circumstances. [Boston Review, 2013]

Someone made an NFT with actual artistic value. We’ve used it as the feature image for this article. [OpenSea]

Posted on January 4, 2023January 4, 2023 by Amy Castor 0

FTX updates: How Sam Bankman-Fried got bail, and more

By Amy Castor and David Gerard

Our work is funded via our Patreons — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s.
Our patrons can also get a couple of “Bitcoin: It Can’t Be That Stupid” stickers just by messaging one of us and asking.
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The entire industry is Wile E Coyote and they don’t want to look down because if they don’t look down gravity won’t acknowledge they are standing on the clear blue sky.
Patrick McKenzie

How SBF got out on bail

How did Sam Bankman-Fried get out on $250 million bail with only his parent’s $4 million Palo Alto house put up as security? A lot of people — including lawyers! — are confused by this.

The short answer is that federal court, unlike state courts, defaults to the presumption of release.

Sam was released to stay with his parents on his own personal recognizance — which is little more than a promise that he’ll show up in court again. There’s no financial obligation. The terms of Sam’s bond initially required the signatures of Sam and his parents — Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman — for his initial release on December 22. [Bail disposition, PDF; Appearance bond, PDF]

The idea of bail is to make sure that the accused will show up in court. In the federal court system, the Bail Reform Act of 1984 says that unless someone is a flight risk, they should get bail — and the court has great leeway in setting conditions.

The judge was reasonably sure that SBF wasn’t a flight risk. This was his first arrest, he wasn’t accused of a violent crime, he was a publicly-known person, and he complied with extradition. He did have to give up his passport, though. He can’t leave Palo Alto other than to show up in court in New York.

Bail works completely differently for federal white-collar defendants than for poor people accused of crimes in a state court — where bail can be arbitrary without regard to ability to pay, and is often punitive and used to try to coerce the defendant into pleading guilty. This is the sort of bail most people will have heard about, and that seems to be the source of the confusion.

Compare Reggie Fowler, Bitfinex/Tether’s money man in the U.S. The government pushed hard to have Fowler held as a flight risk. But the judge let Fowler out on a $5 million personal recognizance bond, and he hasn’t flown yet — though his sentencing has been delayed to March. In SBF’s case, federal prosecutors weren’t even pushing to hold him.

Many are also wondering why SBF’s parents did not have to come up with 10% of the bail, or $25 million, for the bond. This is also a misconception about state versus federal bail — where the convention is that you can pay a bail bondsman a nonrefundable 10% of your bail and he’ll put up the rest. Again, this is not at all a requirement at the federal level.

While Sam and his parents didn’t have to put any money down, it’s another story if Sam disappears. Sam’s parents’ home could be seized and the government could hold the bond co-signers liable for the full amount of the bond — which Sam’s parents obviously won’t be able to pay.

In SBF’s bail is a provision that by January 5, he has to find two wealthy friends, one of whom must be a non-family member, to put up surety — they need to sign bonds in lesser amounts “to be agreed to.” But if Sam can’t find anyone else to sign, it’s not clear how concerned the court will be, as long as Sam doesn’t flee and doesn’t violate other bail conditions. Sam’s parents have until January 12 to post the equity interest in their home.

The house is technically owned by Stanford University — the original Stanford land grant said that the land could not be sold. Professors buy a multi-decade lease on houses on campus, and Bankman and Fried put up their interest in that lease as security for the bail. This does not mean that Stanford is putting up Sam’s bail, as some have been claiming.

Ken White, better known as Popehat, a criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, was surprised that the court agreed to let Sam out on bail. Is the prospect of bankrupting his parents enough to keep Sam from misbehaving? “Personally, he strikes me as a man-child sociopath unlikely to be deterred by the complete destruction of his family.”[Serious Trouble]

Fresh hell from FTX

Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang had their plea hearings on December 19. The hearings weren’t open to the public. Bloomberg reporters went and got the transcript from the court. (You have to go to the court physically.) Ellison and Wang both said they acted as directed by Sam Bankman-Fried, and they knew what they were doing was wrong. [Bloomberg]

Ronnie Abrams, the Southern District of New York judge who was overseeing the SBF case, has stepped down: “It has come to the Court’s attention that the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, at which my husband is a partner, advised FTX in 2021, as well as represented parties that may be adverse to FTX and Defendant Bankman-Fried.” [Bloomberg]

SBF appears to have pledged the same shares in day-trader brokerage Robinhood as collateral for multiple loans. There are now four jackals circling the corpse: BlockFi, FTX creditor Yonathan Ben Shimon, FTX led by John Jay Ray, and SBF himself, who has mounting legal bills. FTX has asked the court to freeze the shares until the issue is sorted out. [Doc 291, PDF]

SBF hasn’t posted to Twitter since December 12. But he’s still using Twitter, and just followed Dogecoin co-creator, Billy Markus. [Reddit]

Other FTX fallout

The collapse of FTX had systemic effects on crypto. Basically, everyone was just using FTX as their bank.

Didier J. Mary follows crypto-colonialism, where cryptocurrency missionaries try to inveigle themselves into poor countries — now that America is sick of crypto. Smart but poor people in Africa, wanting an opportunity, thought crypto might work to help them get ahead. The usual flurry of crypto-trader academies, masterclasses, and hype followed. Bank the unbanked!

A huge number of these African enterprises kept their cryptos at FTX — the blockchain contingent at the World Economic Forum promoted FTX in particular. That’s all gone now, and everyone’s wrecked. This post is in French but is very readable with a translator. [LinkedIn, in French]

Sam Bankman-Fried ended up putting $100 million into Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. John Ray will definitely be calling to get that back. [Semafor]

Brendan Greeley from the Financial Times has locked down his Twitter in these post-Musk times, but in 2018 he gave us “Greeley’s First Law of Capitalism: Any industry that can afford stadium naming rights needs more aggressive regulation.” [Twitter]

Even Zhu Su from Three Arrows Capital (3AC) was calling out Alameda in 2019. [Twitter, archive]

A&P has provided me with the world’s smallest turkey

As you sit around the Christmas table with the family, don’t forget to ask that relative how their “bot-coins” are going. Merry Christmas, and don’t let the buttcoins bite.

Merry Christmas, from the FTX family. ❄️ pic.twitter.com/rxAKMn0FnU
— FTX (@FTX_Official) December 25, 2021

Feature image: This terrible picture is from a 2021 FTX Christmas tweet, in which Santa Sam takes treats out of the stockings and sends them to Alameda. [Twitter]

Posted on December 24, 2022December 24, 2022 by Amy Castor 0

FTX: Sam Bankman-Fried out on bail, Ellison and Wang cop pleas

We just posted our latest coverage on the FTX saga. This one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

SBF is back on US soil, after being escorted by the FBI from the Bahamas to NY, and yes, he is free on bail. His parent’s secured their Palo Alto home on a $250 million personal recognizance bond. Their home is only worth a fraction of that.

SBF’s friends Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang have been charged as well, but they’ve ratted Sam out to save themselves.

Expect more superseding indictments to come. The DoJ is coming down fast and hard on FTX.

The entire game in crypto right now is pretending you’re solvent when you’re not. We’ve put together a list of clever tricks that crypto firms are currently employing to do this.

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: Regulatory altruism at FTX — Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

While I’ve been sick with a bug for a few days, David was able to finish up and post our latest. This one is on his blog. [David Gerard]

“Take the money and run” is a plan with just two parts. Sam Bankman-Fried completely failed to get around to the second part.

After SBF’s extensive tour of confessing financial crimes to anyone from the press who would listen, the Weasel of Wall Street was arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the U.S. on Monday, December 12, where he awaits extradition.

Image by npcdad on Reddit

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Amy Castor 0

Crypto collapse: BlockFi even deader, crypto miners going broke, Sam will not shut up, Binance and Tether are fine

By Amy Castor and David Gerard
Send us money! Our work is funded via our Patreons — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s. Your monthly contributions help greatly!
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the wonderful thing about bitcoin is that ‘sorry i was too dumb to do things properly so it all collapsed’ is not only a feasible explanation but historically likely
— Boxturret on SomethingAwful

Shut up, Sam

If you may be in legal trouble, any lawyer has one piece of advice: stop talking. If you’ve just filed a high-profile bankruptcy with maybe billions of dollars missing: stop talking. If you’ve got prosecutors sniffing around your activities: stop talking.

Sam Bankman-Fried never got the memo, or he did and threw it in the trash. In reference to his lawyers, he told Tiffany Fong: “they know what they’re talking about in an extremely narrow domain of litigation. They don’t understand the broader context of the world.” [YouTube; Twitter]

Despite producing reams of potential “evidence” that could one day be used against him, SBF will talk to any reporter, anywhere, any time of day. On Wednesday, November 29 he spoke on an NYT DealBook panel. On Thursday, November 30, he spoke to Good Morning America.

He loves the camera. But he still can’t tell you where the money went.

In the DealBook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, SBF said he “never tried to commit fraud,” and he didn’t knowingly commingle $10 billion in customer funds. He frames the whole matter as he seemingly lent Alameda customer funds from FTX as a risk management problem that got out of hand. Well, it sure did that. [Video; Transcript]

George Stephanopoulos from Good Morning America, who actually flew to the Bahamas to talk to SBF, was a lot tougher on him. SBF again denied “improper use of customer funds,” saying he failed at oversight. “You said one of your great talents in a podcast was managing risk.” “That’s right.” “Well, it’s obviously wrong.” [GMA; Twitter]

As Lying for Money author Dan Davies points out, prosecutors just have to show that SBF intentionally deceived clients as to what was happening to their money. When you tell people their money is segregated and it’s not, that’s fraud. “The offence was committed the minute it went in the wrong account.” [Twitter]

If you ignore your lawyer because you’re smarter than everyone, no lawyer is going to work with you. Martin Flumenbaum at Paul Weiss already dumped SBF. We’re hearing unconfirmed rumors that David Mills, his father’s colleague at Stanford, who was advising SBF, is also refusing to work with him further. [Semafor; Twitter]

A lot of FTX employees bailed after the company filed for bankruptcy. But a few have soldiered on — likely so they can nail SBF, who screwed them over about as much as he screwed over all of his customers and investors. While SBF is telling his side of the story to reporters, FTX employees are leaking emails. NYT wrote about the absolute chaos that FTX lawyers and execs endured in wresting power away from the deluded SBF in the wee hours of November 11. [NYT]

If Sam’s lawyer had jumped in front of the camera and ripped Sam’s larynx out with his bare hands, he could reasonably bill it as extremely valuable and important legal services to his client.

starting to think his strategy is to spend the next few months producing so much self incriminating material that any jury will die of old age before the trial ends pic.twitter.com/fSZGYciAsi
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) November 24, 2022

Extremely predictably, there goes BlockFi

In January, there were three big crypto lenders — Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi. Now all three are bankrupt, and our emails are clogged with new bankruptcy filings.

After weeks of frozen withdrawals, BlockFi filed for voluntary Chapter 11 on November 28 in New Jersey. [Petition, PDF; bankruptcy docket on Kroll; CNBC; press release]

BlockFi was already a dead firm walking. They were dead after Three Arrows blew up in May. FTX kept BlockFi’s head above water with a $400 million credit facility — but then FTX imploded. [Twitter]

The New Jersey firm doesn’t just have more liabilities than assets — a lot of the assets are missing too. All of BlockFi’s cryptos were in FTX. They were using FTX as their crypto bank.

BlockFi has over 100,000 creditors. Assets and liabilities range between $1 billion and $10 billion. There’s $1.3 billion in unsecured loans outstanding and $250 million in customer funds locked on the platform.

BlockFi has $256.5 million cash on hand — after selling their customers’ crypto:

In preparation for these chapter 11 cases, BlockFi took steps to liquidate certain of its owned cryptocurrency to bolster available cash to fund its business and administrative costs. Through the process, BlockFi was able to raise $238.6 million of additional cash, for a total unencumbered cash position as of the Petition date of $256.5 million.

Ankura Trust is BlockFi’s largest unsecured creditor to which it owes $729 million. Ankura is typically brought in to represent the interest of others in bankruptcy. If so, who are those creditors? We’d love to know.

FTX US is BlockFi’s second-largest unsecured creditor, with a $275 million stablecoin loan. This is the credit facility that SBF “bailed out” BlockFi with in June.

BlockFi’s fourth-largest unsecured creditor is the SEC — BlockFi still owes $30 million of its $50 million in penalties from February. The total settlement was $100 million, with half owed to the SEC and half owed to state regulators. [SEC; Twitter]

All the other creditors’ names are redacted. Very crypto.

BlockFi is entangled in FTX in multiple ways. BlockFi had a $680 million loan to SBF’s Alameda Research. This was collateralized by SBF’s personal shareholding in popular day-trading broker Robinhood — just days before FTX filed for bankruptcy. BlockFi is suing SBF for his stake in Robinhood. It doesn’t help that SBF was shopping his Robinhood shares around as collateral after he’d pledged them to the BlockFi loan. [Filing, PDF; Complaint, PDF; Bloomberg]

Crypto miners — we told you so

We set out in detail in August this year how publicly traded bitcoin mining companies were always going to leave their lenders and investors as the bag holders.

We predicted that the miners would default on billions of dollars in loans, leaving the lenders with worthless mining rigs and unsaleable piles of bitcoins. They would then go bankrupt — with all the paperwork in order.

The miners depreciated their mining rigs over five years — and not the 15 months they should have — to make their companies look like better investments.

And miners are now defaulting on their rig-backed loans. Lenders — New York Digital Investment Group, Celsius, BlockFi, Galaxy Digital, NYDIG, and DCG’s Foundry — are getting stuck with worthless e-waste. [Bloomberg]

Iris Energy (IREN) faced a default claim from its lender NYDIG on $103 million “worth” of mining equipment. The company’s miners aren’t making enough money to service their debt. So Iris defaulted! And NYDIG now owns some obsolete mining rigs. [SEC filing, Global Newswire; Coindesk; CoinTelegraph]

Shares in Argo Blockchain (ARBK) dropped 40% after the firm announced that its plans to raise $27 million by selling shares were no longer happening. [Twitter; Decrypt]

Core Scientific hired law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges and financial advisors PJT Partners to help figure out ways to stave off bankruptcy. The options include exchanging existing debt for equity or additional debt, asset sales, equity, or debt financing. They’re gonna go bankrupt — because that was always the exit strategy. [The Block]

Just how bad is the crypto collapse?

My landlord friend in Dallas just asked me if I know anything about bitcoin miners:

“This bitcoin mining company defaulted, moved out, and left all their equipment behind.”

200 Antminers 🏃🏽‍♂️💨 pic.twitter.com/qUNStCYT5F
— Zack Guzmán (@zGuz) November 21, 2022

Binance goes shopping

In the financial crisis of 2008, when banks were dropping like flies, some big banks would buy smaller banks that had healthy books — so they could patch the holes in their own books. Bigger and bigger shells to hide the Ponzi under.

Crypto is doing the same. FTX was buying up, and planning to buy up, small bankrupt crypto firms to try to hide the hole in its own books. And Binance, the largest crypto exchange, just bought Sakuro Exchange BitCoin (SEBC), a Japanese exchange that is already licensed with the country’s Financial Services Agency. [Binance; Bloomberg]

Japan learned its lesson early. Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, one of the first big bitcoin exchanges, blew up in 2014. Japan went on to become one of the first countries to regulate crypto exchanges with a licensing system. Crypto exchanges in Japan are required to keep customer assets separate, maintain proper bookkeeping, undergo annual audits, file business reports, and comply with strict KYC/AML rules. They are treated almost like banks! [Bitcoin Magazine]

Binance tried to set up operations in Japan in 2018, after getting kicked out of China — but Japan’s FSA told Binance they needed to play by the rules and apply for a license or pack their bags. [Bitcoin Magazine]

Binance’s bogus bailout fund

Binance announced a $2 billion “industry recovery fund” to prop up all of the other flailing crypto firms that have been struggling since FTX blew up. They claim that 150 crypto firms have applied for a bailout. [Bloomberg]

Binance has its own stablecoin, BUSD, that it claims is run by Paxos and Binance, “and is one of the few stablecoins that are compliant with the strict regulatory standards of NYDFS.” The crypto bailout fund is $2 billion in BUSD.

BUSD is a Paxos-administered dollar stablecoin. Each BUSD is backed by an alleged actual dollar in Silvergate Bank, and attested by auditors. (If not actually audited as such).

That’s true of BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s not true of BUSD on Binance.

BUSD on Binance is on their internal BNB (formerly BSC) blockchain, bridged from Ethereum. It’s a stablecoin of a stablecoin. Binance makes a point of noting that Binance-BUSD is not subject to the legal controls that Paxos BUSD is under. We’re sure it’ll all be fine if there are any issues, which there totally won’t be. [Binance]

Treating FTX’s claims about other crypto firms as confessions would have given you pretty detailed correct answers — it was all projection. FTX was accusing others of what they were doing themselves. You should look at what Binance has been saying the same way.

We’re going to go so far as to assert that Binance is a hollow shell too, and the bailout fund is most likely for a hole in its own books.

Every one of the crypto companies accounts for their value in dollars by calculating their mark-to-market value. “We have a billion dollars of $CONFETTI!” Even if they couldn’t get $10,000 in actual money for it.

All of crypto is bankrupt if you account for the crypto assets at realizable value rather than mark-to-market. Realizable value depends on the inflow of actual dollars into crypto — and that inflow has plummeted because the retail suckers went home.

All crypto companies are Quadriga. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see Celsius/FTX-style non-accounting, a Google spreadsheet if you’re lucky, and incompetence. Such utter blithering didn’t-understand-the-question incompetence. It’s been this way since 2011.

Tether is fine, you FUDster

Tether has been issuing tethers by lending out its USDT stablecoin, rather than exchanging the USDT one-to-one for dollars (LOL).

As of Tether’s attestation for September 30, 2022, 9% of USDT are loans to Tether customers. Tether claims these are collateralized — but they won’t say who the borrowers are or what the collateral is. [Tether; WSJ, paywalled]

In their long-winded response to the WSJ writeup, Tether blames …. the media. [Tether]

We know from the CFTC settlement in October 2021 that Tether was issuing USDT to its big customers with a kiss and a handshake. Now they’re admitting it publicly.

Other crypto exchanges/firms in trouble

CoinDesk’s report on the hole in Alameda’s balance sheet and Alameda’s close ties to FTX did so much damage to the crypto industry — and to Coindesk’s parent company Digital Currency Group — that the news site has attracted take-over interest. [Semafor]

CoinDesk did not blow apart the crypto industry. This was an unexploded bomb that was set up in May.

It was all going to explode eventually as soon as someone looked inside the box. As CZ told The Block’s Larry Cermak in 2019: “some things are better left unsaid.” [Twitter]

Japanese social media company Line is shutting down Bitfront, a US-based crypto exchange that it launched in 2020. They said the closure was unrelated to “certain exchanges that have been accused of misconduct.” [Announcement; Bloomberg]

AAX exit scam completed. Hong Kong-based exchange AAX froze withdrawals on November 13, and its executives quietly slipped away as opposed to filing bankruptcy — social media pages removed, LinkedIn profiles deleted. Sources tell us that employees have been laid off and the founders are nowhere to be found. [Hacker News; AAX]

John Reed Stark: Since the FTX debacle, Big Crypto’s SEC hit pieces and talking points calling for “regulatory clarity” are pure pretense and subterfuge, intended to distract and dissemble the truth — that the crypto-emperor has no clothes. [Duke FinReg Blog]

Image: Sam talking on GMA

Posted on December 1, 2022December 2, 2022 by Amy Castor 3

Declaration of John Jay Ray — FTX is worse than Enron

John Jay Ray III took over FTX in the wee hours of November 11. Hours later, he filed for Chapter 11 in a Delaware court.

The new CEO filed his first-day declaration this morning. It’s incredible. David Gerard and I summarize it — this one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

In his 40-year career, Ray, who oversaw the Enron liquidation, has never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls.”

Ray has divided SBF’s empire into four silos, but the accounting is all unreliable because he’s gotten the numbers from SBF.

Ray and his team will have to create a balance sheet and financial statements from scratch using what records they have of cash transactions.

FTX Digital Markets, the company’s Bahamas subsidiary, filed a for Chapter 15 in SDNY. Ray’s team is asking the court to move the Chapter 15 case to Delaware.

Ray thinks the filing in SDNY was shenanigans by SBF and unnamed agents of the Bahamas government!

SBF’s late night DMs with a Vox reporter, published the next day, make it looks like he was in on the plot.

Posted on November 17, 2022November 17, 2022 by Amy Castor 0

FTX files for bankruptcy, and the fallout begins. Who’s next?

It’s been an exhausting week trying to keep up with the chaotic news coming out on FTX. Here’s our latest crypto collapse update and analysis. This one is on David’s blog. [David Gerard]

While many people have been comparing the fall of FTX to Enron or Lehman Brothers, it’s really more like MF Global, a major global financial derivatives broker that went belly-up in 2011.

MF Global’s fatal flaw was the same as FTX-Alameda: They failed to segregate funds and used billions of dollars in customer money to cover up losses in trading.

Everyone should have seen this crash coming, especially the “sophisticated” venture capitalists who neglected to do due diligence on FTX and instead kept shoveling money into the fire, creating the myth of Sam Bankman-Fried, boy genius, in the process.

You should assume that every offshore crypto firm is like the failed Canadian exchange Quadriga — Zeppelins flying high, waiting for a single spark to set them off.

Image: Hindenburg exploding

Posted on November 13, 2022 by Amy Castor 1

Crypto collapse: J. Pierpont Moneygone — FTX rekt, bought by Binance

By Amy Castor and David Gerard
Send us money! Our work is funded by our Patreons — here’s Amy’s, and here’s David’s. Your monthly contributions help greatly!

The 2021–2022 crypto bubble made a lot of traders look like geniuses. Then the bubble popped, the tide went out, and the traders turned out to be hugely overleveraged formerly-lucky idiots.

Sociologists know that when a cult prophecy fails, most cultists exit the cult, and the remaining factions turn on each other.

Crypto watchers know that this can also be exceedingly funny.

Imaginary assets, real liabilities

Sam Bankman-Fried’s boosters compare him to the legendary banker J. P. Morgan. He’s spent the crypto collapse bailing out ailing companies to keep the entire market afloat.

Bankman-Fried runs three large crypto enterprises:

Alameda Research, his crypto hedge fund;
FTX, his unregulated offshore crypto casino that doesn’t allow US customers;
FTX US, his exchange for US customers that purports to operate under US law and accepts actual dollars.

On November 2, Coindesk’s Ian Allison posted an explosive story on a partially leaked balance sheet for Alameda. [CoinDesk]

Of Alameda’s $14.6 billion in claimed assets, $5.8 billion is FTT — FTX’s internal exchange token. You can use FTT for cheaper trading fees and increased commissions. FTT is also traded outside FTX.

Allison also noted that $5.8 billion is actually 180% of the circulating supply of FTT!

Alameda’s liabilities are listed at $8 billion, most of which is $7.4 billion of loans — quite a bit of that from FTX.

Alameda is super cashed-up … if you account for FTX’s own FTT token at mark-to-market, and not what you could actually get for that much of their private illiquid altcoin.

To make matters worse, Dirty Bubble notes that a lot of Alameda’s other assets are crypto tokens from other Sam Bankman-Fried enterprises. [Dirty Bubble Media]

Alameda and FTX seem to have printed FTT, pumped its price using customer assets — FTX was quite open that it was the FTT market maker, and there’s no other real demand — and used the mark-to-market value of their illiquid made-up token as collateral for loans, or as evidence that pension funds should invest in crypto companies.

This works great while number is going up!

Regular readers will know that this sort of flywheel scheme is precisely what Celsius Network tried to run with their CEL token and Nexo with their NEXO token. Celsius is bankrupt, and regulators have noticed that Nexo is only solvent if you allow them this particular tricky bit of accounting.

Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison said the leaked balance sheet Coindesk got a hold of was “incomplete,” and there were $10 billion in assets not listed there. [Twitter, archive]

The crypto world spent a few days wondering if Alameda was the next Three Arrows Capital.

CZ pulls the plug

Large flows of FTT were noticed on the blockchain on November 6. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed that this was Binance selling off its FTT: [Twitter, archive]

“As part of Binance’s exit from FTX equity last year, Binance received roughly $2.1 billion USD equivalent in cash (BUSD and FTT). Due to recent revelations that have came to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books.”

The remaining FTT that Binance sold was worth $530 million. [Bloomberg]

CZ was also annoyed at Bankman-Fried’s lobbying efforts for crypto regulation in Washington: “We won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.” [Twitter, archive]

The crypto market is incredibly shaky. Alameda and FTX operate as separate corporations, but the market seems to think they’re closely entwined. Trouble at Alameda leads to worry about FTX.

So panicked holders, thinking Alameda might be insolvent, started withdrawing funds from FTX as fast as possible — and hardly deposited anything at all.

FTX paused all withdrawals on the Ethereum, Solana, and Tron blockchains around 11:37 a.m. UTC on November 8, according to Steven Zheng at The Block. [The Block]

Finally, just after 4 p.m. UTC, Bankman-Fried and CZ announced that Binance was buying FTX. Specifically, they have a non-binding letter of intent, pending due diligence. [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive]

Essentially, CZ started a bank run on FTX, then swooped in to buy his competitor after breaking it. CZ did to Bankman-Fried what Bankman-Fried has been accused of doing to a string of others.

At present, this is only a letter of intent, not a done deal — CZ is making Bankman-Fried suffer. He could just let FTX go hang.

How screwed are FTX and Alameda?

CZ said FTX was in a “significant liquidity crunch.” This is the sort of “liquidity crunch” that everyone else calls “insolvency.” If it were just liquidity, FTX could have borrowed against its assets and found another way out of this. [Twitter, archive]

We don’t know for sure that Alameda was trading with FTX customer funds — but this sort of fractional reserve operation is the only not-entirely-fraudulent reason that FTX could have run out of customer funds in this way.

Bankman-Fried claimed on November 7 that “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings. We don’t invest client assets (even in treasuries).” This appears not to have been true, and he later deleted the tweet. [Twitter, archive]

If FTX couldn’t get its funds back from Alameda quickly, that would have then led to the liquidity crunch.

What about FTX US?

Bankman-Fried was quick to reassure customers that FTX US was not affected and that it was “fully backed 1:1, and operating normally.” So at least FTX US explicitly claims it isn’t playing the markets with your deposits. [Twitter, archive]

FTX US is also attempting to buy the remains of the bankrupt Voyager Digital, a deal that we think is likely to go through.

The separation of customer funds and platforms is the whole point of FTX US versus FTX. It’s there to make Sam look good to regulators.

But it’s all Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s Sam’s left pocket versus his right pocket.

We think that if your paycheck goes into FTX US, you probably want to stop doing that immediately.

What happens next? It’s contagion time!

Alameda has likely been borrowing against the FTT it held — the FTT that is now crashing. (Earlier today, FTT was worth $19; as we post this, it’s trading at $4.60.)

Binance might rescue FTX, but it’s sure not going to rescue Alameda.

This means a series of margin calls by everyone who’s lent to Alameda. If Alameda defaults, those lenders will likely end up with worthless FTT.

BlockFi and Genesis have a pile of money in Alameda. BlockFi is or will be owned in some unspecified manner by FTX US, but that doesn’t make the books balance — there’s already a rumor of a 24-hour margin call by BlockFi against Alameda. [Twitter]

Remember that Three Arrows Capital collapsed when their UST turned out to be worthless. This then took out a pile of other crypto trading firms — most notably Celsius Network and Voyager Digital.

We’re left with two questions:

Who is lending to Alameda?
Who’s lending to those lenders — and risks going down in turn?

The crypto market is not happy. Bitcoin has been up and down like a yo-yo today, from $19,500 just before 4 p.m. UTC to a peak of $20,500 and a trough of $17,500.

We predict more market excitement to come — specifically, a possible Alameda collapse, a chain reaction of lender failures, and attempts to cover sudden balance-sheet holes, much as we saw after the Terra-Luna and Three Arrows collapses.

But Caroline Ellison from Alameda insists there’s another $10 billion behind the sofa or something. Maybe it’s all fine!

So, the thing that is bringing down crypto is: The largest exchange, which launders money for for the Iranians, lost trust in the second largest exchange, whose founder said that crypto is basically a ponzi scheme on the Odd Lots podcast?
— EL (@evan_lorenz) November 8, 2022

Image: FT Alphaville

Posted on November 8, 2022November 9, 2022 by Amy Castor 2

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Independent Journalist

The SEC rap sheet

The Fed and DFPI rap sheet

What happens in the SEN stays in the SEN

Silvergate and FTX

Whoops, liquidity!

Borrowing to cover debts

What does this mean?

Coinbase gets out the conspiracy board

Bill’s beautiful launderette

Paolo’s beautiful launderette

FTX: Salame sliced

The war on Terra

Regulatory clarity

Still good news for bitcoin

Go directly to jail

SEC appeals Ripple

Prime Trust goes Chapter 11. You had one job!

Knives out at TrueUSD

Worldcoin wants your eyeballs

Hex enduction hour

This bank failure is fine, nothing to see here

Still only good news for bitcoin

“Attorney-1” was a bad boy

Following the money

No, no, it’s research

Time travel by document

Sam the philanthropist

FTX sues Friedberg

Chief noncompliance officer

Hush money

Other FTX news

Bittrex takes a dive

Good news for Binance

Monkey laundering comes to bitcoin

Child genius, adult moron

The searing light of regulatory clarity

Unvaxxed bitcoin is the new bitcoin

Media stardom

Sam is a growing boy, he needs his crimes

Binance: This is fine

Be your own Signature Bank

The SEC shuts down Beaxy

More good news for decentralization

Regulatory clarity, European style

Terra-Luna

MicroStrategy doubles down

More good news for bitcoin

Freeing yourself from fiat history

Mycrimes.txt (2) (FINAL) (USE THIS ONE).docx.pdf

New York goes after CoinEx

Coinbase posts another loss

The FTX fallout continues

Regulatory clarity

Voyager Digital

Celsius Network and your pension

Other good news for bitcoin

FTX: It’s a family affair

What’s a little witness tampering between friends?

Celsius Network: Let’s make more magic beans!

Banks

Other happy little accidents

Happy Penis Day, to those who celebrate

Media stardom

Genesis goes down — DCG is fine, fine

Who wants to buy CoinDesk?

3AC and CoinFLEX — a remarkable team

FTX: Judge says Sullivan & Cromwell can stay

FTX: mycrimes.blog

Bitzlato: Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’em

DCG: Congratulations, you played yourself

Gemini Earn, Genesis, GBTC, and 3AC

Class action against Gemini Earn

Silvergate Bank

FTX

Huobi’s real-time meltdown

Binance

DeFi: Go directly to jail

FTX vs the Bahamas

Just seizing some assets, don’t mind us

**Sam did nothing* wrong**