Issue 54 – Cases continue

Issue 54 – Cases continue

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Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is finally over, and he has been returned to his jail cell to begin his 25-year-long sentence. He will appeal, but he almost certainly won't succeed. He will keep trying to claim he was just a smol dumb boy who made mistakes but committed no crimes, as though if he just repeats it enough, people might begin to believe him. Soon, the media will stop writing about him. The rest of the world will move on.

Sadly for anyone within the cryptocurrency industry's ever-expanding blast radius, the United States regulatory and legal environment has not changed in any ways that would prevent the next Sam Bankman-Fried from emerging. I said as much in a piece for the Guardian last week:

Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison. The crypto industry isn’t any better for it

There have been no changes since the ex-mogul’s conviction as lawmakers fail to pass regulations to protect the public

The GuardianMolly White

Regulators and prosecutors will continue their slow game of whack-a-mole while more people are taken for all they're worth by thieves who use the same old playbooks. As Bankman-Fried becomes a more and more distant memory, the industry will try to convince people that it's cleaned itself up since its chaotic Wild West days. Without intervention, it may succeed, and the cycle will begin anew.

But I will be here, shining a light on it to the best of my abilities.

In the courts

KuCoin

Federal prosecutors have filed charges against KuCoin, a major cryptocurrency exchange registered in the Seychelles, and two of its founders (who are both Chinese nationals, and "at large") [W3IGG]. According to the complaint, the exchange operated as an unlicensed money transmitting business and failed to implement proper know-your-customer programs. Although KuCoin claimed not to serve US customers, they had a history of making wink-wink-nudge-nudge statements that pushed US customers towards the exchange's no-KYC accounts, where they wouldn't have to disclose their residence or citizenship.

Simultaneously, the CFTC announced a civil suit against the platform, alleging multiple violations of CFTC regulations and the Commodity Exchange Act.

Customers began fleeing the KuCoin platform en masse after the enforcement actions were announced, with more than $1 billion pouring out of the platform within 24 hours. Some complained of withdrawal delays, though those seemed to eventually work themselves out.¹

Coinbase

The case by the SEC against Coinbase will move forward, as Judge Katherine Polk Failla has concluded that "the well-pleaded allegations of the Complaint plausibly support the SEC’s claim that Coinbase operated as an unregistered intermediary of securities" and that "the SEC adequately alleges that Coinbase, through its Staking Program, engaged in the unregistered offer and sale of securities". She did, however, dismiss the SEC's claim that Coinbase's Wallet offering made them an unregistered broker.²

Although it would have been surprising to see Failla dismiss the case at this stage (as I noted in an earlier issue), this decision has still been widely described as a major victory for the SEC.³ Even though in past hearings Failla has seemed to seriously consider some of Coinbase's arguments [I49], and question some of the SEC's actions [I33], in this opinion Failla largely endorsed the SEC's stance on cryptocurrency. Despite Coinbase's frequent cries that new legislation is needed to regulate the "innovative" and unique field of cryptocurrency, Failla opined: "The 'crypto' nomenclature may be of recent vintage, but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eighty years."

Much of Coinbase's arguments have also hinged on the "major questions doctrine", in which they argue that the SEC is overstepping its authority by enacting significant new regulations without Congressional instruction. Failla had been skeptical of this claim in the past [I49], and in this ruling found that this is not among the most "extraordinary cases" in which that doctrine might apply.

[W]hile certainly sizable and important, the cryptocurrency industry "falls far short of being a 'portion of the American economy' bearing 'vast economic and political significance.'"

She also noted that the SEC's actions with respect to cryptocurrency seem to fall well within the bounds of its authority.

Genesis

Gemini and Genesis also lost a motion to dismiss a case from the SEC, as Judge Edgardo Ramos found the agency's allegations to be plausible. This lawsuit involves the Gemini "Earn" program, in which Gemini customers loaned their cryptocurrencies to Genesis to earn interest.⁴

Only days after Ramos's decision, the SEC announced they had reached a settlement with Genesis. The bankrupt firm will pay a $21 million penalty, although the settlement terms put the SEC in line to collect this behind Genesis's creditors (which include the Gemini Earn creditors). Genesis also agreed to an injunction barring them from offering or transacting in unregistered securities.⁵ The portion of the case against Gemini, which as of writing is not bankrupt, remains ongoing.

Terra

The SEC's multi-billion dollar civil fraud case against Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon has kicked off, despite the fact that Do Kwon remains in extradition limbo in Montenegro. Although normally the SEC would wait to argue its case until after an associated criminal trial had wrapped up (as they have with FTX, for example), the US criminal trial against Kwon won't proceed until he is in the United States, so the SEC goes first.

Although Terraform Labs is bankrupt and not likely to meaningfully continue in the cryptocurrency world, the case has very interesting implications for some different entities, including Jump Trading. Jump is a powerful and wealthy US-based trading firm with an active cryptocurrency arm, and their name just keeps popping up in shady places. You might also recognize the name from my writing about the Oasis "counter-hack" of the Wormhole exploiter.

The Oasis “counter-hack” and the centralization of defi

Wormhole, Jump Crypto, and Oasis demonstrate the centralization threat introduced by multisig-controlled upgradeable smart contracts.

Citation NeededMolly White

The SEC wrote in their complaint that it was only thanks to a May 2021 bailout from "a US trading firm" (Jump) that the Terra stablecoin was able to restore its peg, although Do Kwon had widely claimed that Terra's restabilization was thanks to its "self-healing" algorithm. After buying heavily discounted Terra tokens, which served to move the Terra price back up to its intended peg, Jump later reportedly sold them for a profit of $1.28 billion [I27]. No lawsuits or criminal charges have been filed against Jump or its executives, but if we're lucky, the ongoing Terra lawsuit could shine a light on some of what's been going on behind the scenes.

And of course it will provide more information into the Terra collapse, and the culpability of those behind it.

Binance

A saga has been unfolding in Nigeria since the country detained two executives of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange in late February [I52]. One of the two executives, the British and Kenyan citizen Nadeem Anjarwalla, slipped away from Nigerian guards on March 22 after he was taken to a mosque to pray, and somehow managed to flee the country despite having had his passport confiscated. The other executive, US citizen Tigran Gambaryan, remains in Nigerian custody. Before joining Binance to lead its investigations team in 2021, Gambaryan had been a special agent in the US IRS's criminal investigations division.⁶

On March 25, Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service charged Binance, Anjarwalla, and Gambaryan with tax evasion. The charges were related both to Binance's handling of its own taxes, as well as allegations that the platform had assisted its customers in evading taxes they owed to the country.⁷ On March 29, Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission added even more criminal charges in a case alleging money laundering and operating without a license.⁸

Anjarwalla and Gambaryan have both sued Nigeria's National Security Adviser and its Economic Financial Crimes Commission for violating their human rights by detaining them.⁹

Tornado Cash

Roman Storm has moved to dismiss the criminal case against him, which includes charges of money laundering, conspiracy to violate sanctions, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business [I38]. In the motion, his lawyers describe the case against him as "fatally flawed", and make several arguments for its dismissal. Among them is the argument that writing code is First Amendment-protected speech, which cites precedent established in Bernstein v. United States, a set of cases pertaining to the other "crypto": cryptography. They also make what is now becoming a classic argument in the cryptocurrency world: that Tornado Cash was decentralized, and that Storm had relinquished the ability to modify the smart contracts he wrote by the time the DOJ alleged they were used by bad actors including North Korean hacking groups.¹⁰ Worth a shot, but I don't see this case being dismissed at this stage.

Storm also filed motions to try to stop the feds from seizing his cryptocurrency assets,¹¹ and to compel them to turn over their records pertaining to him, as well as any communications with Dutch authorities.¹²

Over in the Netherlands, prosecutors are reportedly looking for fellow Tornado developer Alexey Pertsev to be sentenced to 64 months (5 ⅓ years). A verdict in his trial is not scheduled until May 14.¹³ He's already been in custody for over a year and a half [W3IGG].

Craig Wright

The evidence was so overwhelmingly against Craig Wright's claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto that the judge overseeing the five-week-long trial in the United Kingdom ruled on the matter immediately as arguments came to a close.¹⁴ Justice Mellor was expected to take some time to consider the case before issuing a ruling, but was apparently so firmly convinced that he announced his decision then and there. A written judgment is still forthcoming, and will include a decision on related matters including whether Wright will have to pay the plaintiffs' roughly £6.7 million ($8.4 million) in court fees.

Apparently anticipating such a decision, Wright immediately began transferring assets out of the country. The rather perturbed Mellor promptly granted a freeze on Wright's assets, noting in the order that Wright had boasted in the past about having "made [himself] untouchable" by structuring his assets such that they would be out of reach of court judgments.¹⁵

Everything else

Justin Sun wants the judge to dismiss the SEC's case against him, the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation, and others.¹⁶ He boldly claims that his sales of Tron and BitTorrent tokens took place "entirely overseas" and were never meant to target US-based investors, despite the fact that Sun paid for promotions from American celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy and Austin Mahone. In total, eight American celebrities were charged by the SEC in March 2023 for illegal touting, and all except for Soulja Boy and Mahone immediately settled [W3IGG]. Soulja Boy and Mahone later lost the case, Soulja Boy by default.¹⁷

Michael Patryn (aka Omar Dhanani, aka Omar Patryn), the surviving^a co-founder of the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange, is facing court scrutiny in Canada as officials probe how he happened to acquire more than $250,000 in cash, 45 gold bars, a diamond Rolex, and other jewelry. According to a filing, chat messages between Patryn and his late co-founder Gerald Cotten show them talking about stealing customer funds in 2014 and 2015.¹⁸ Patryn has pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in the past, and changed his name twice to try to dodge scrutiny. In January 2022, two days after people lost a ton of money to cascading liquidations across the Wonderland project [W3IGG], crypto sleuth zachxbt revealed that it was Patryn who had been managing the project's treasury. Before he was unmasked, he had been hiding behind a pseudonymous account called "0xSifu" [W3IGG]. All normal cryptocurrency stuff, really.

Custodia, a crypto bank that's been facing off against bank regulators, sued the Federal Reserve in 2022 after they delayed, then denied Custodia's request for a master account.^b They've lost that lawsuit. If the judge had decided that they indeed were entitled to a master account as a chartered state financial institution, this "would effectively mean that every depository institution chartered under the laws of a state, regardless of how soundly crafted, is entitled to a master account allowing it direct access to the federal financial system", he wrote.¹⁹

In bankruptcies

FTX

The law professor who spearheaded a nine-professor amicus brief in the FTX bankruptcy case, which argued for the appointment of an independent examiner due to concerns over legal conflicts of interest [I43], now has a paper coming out in Stanford Law Review. In "FTX’d: Conflicting Public and Private Interests in Chapter 11", he and another co-author have argued that mega law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had undisclosed potential conflicts of interest which have undermined the bankruptcy efforts. "FTX is a cautionary tale about the power that lawyers have to frame, control, and profit from, claims about the public interest in chapter 11," they write. They go on to argue that, thanks to Sullivan & Cromwell's substantial work for FTX prior to the bankruptcy, the firm either knew or should have known that FTX was commingling customer funds, but that they still vouched for FTX to contractual counterparties and to US regulators.

The concerns over legal conflicts of interest in this bankruptcy case are messy. The judge overseeing his criminal case described Bankman-Fried's continued allegations against FTX's lawyers and bankruptcy team as little more than a strategy to try to bend the public narrative in his favor and deflect blame, and Sullivan & Cromwell have since pointed to those same statements from the judge when defending themselves in statements to the press against Bankman-Fried's claims.²⁰ However, it's possible for there to be shady business among the legal team and for this to be largely inconsequential as far as exonerating Bankman-Fried from his own misdeeds.

In governments and regulators

Ethereum ETPs

In the wake of the SEC's approval of bitcoin spot ETPs [I49], the cryptocurrency industry has been eagerly anticipating a decision by the SEC on an Ethereum version. Many within the industry see the bitcoin spot ETPs as largely responsible for cryptocurrency's recent price revival, and hope Ethereum equivalents could further pump their bags.

Those hopes were dampened somewhat when reports came out that the SEC is investigating the Ethereum Foundation, supposedly in hopes of classifying Ethereum as a security [W3IGG]. This report first emerged when CoinDesk noticed the Ethereum Foundation had removed a warrant canary from its homepage, and was bolstered by reporting out of Fortune citing people at other companies that had received subpoenas pertaining to the Ethereum Foundation. One source told Fortune that the probe seemed to have started around September 2022, when Ethereum completed The Merge and moved to a proof-of-stake consensus model [I4]. Another source confirmed that they had received a subpoena within the last few weeks, though, suggesting the investigation remains active.

Designation as a security could hinder the path to an ETP approval, not to mention hurt Ethereum's status in the cryptocurrency world, where cryptocurrency issuers avoid their tokens being designated as securities at all costs due to the accompanying regulations.

The SEC faces a May 23 deadline to approve or deny one of the seven pending applications.²¹

Hong Kong

Hong Kong regulators have added Bybit and 11 of its offerings to their "Suspicious Virtual Asset Trading Platforms Alert List", and warned of enforcement action against the Dubai-based company. Bybit is not registered with Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission.

HKVAEX, a crypto exchange whose bid to obtain a Hong Kong crypto license was reportedly backed by Binance, has announced it's withdrawing its license application and shutting its doors. They have given customers only thirty days to withdraw their assets.²²

Everything else

US and UK investigators have reportedly teamed up to investigate more than $20 billion in Tether that have flowed into the Moscow-based Garantex cryptocurrency exchange since it was added to wartime sanctions lists in April 2022. This would be among the largest violations of the sanctions that have been imposed against Russia, Bloomberg reported.²³ A later report from the Wall Street Journal focused on Tether, which they described as "fuel[ling]" Russian weapons smugglers, with the help of Garantex.²⁴

County commissioners in Navarro County, Texas declined Riot Platforms' proposed request for millions of dollars in tax breaks for a planned mining facility. According to one commissioner, the decision to reject the request was influenced by vocal opposition to the facility by residents who were concerned about factors including massive energy consumption, water usage, and noise pollution. Furthermore, promises by bitcoin mining companies that their facilities will provide jobs and stimulate economic activity have fallen flat, with mining facilities requiring fairly few employees to operate.²⁵

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has confirmed that social media influencers — termed "finfluencers" when they focus on financial topics — fall within new advertising regulations. Even those who are not being paid by a firm but who are promoting a firm's services in hopes of future compensation, or those who are promoting services in hopes of attracting social media engagement, could be subject to the new guidance if they are deemed to be acting "in the course of business". The FCA was explicit that the kinds of memes prevalent within the crypto sphere fell under their remit, and have to be fair, clear, and not misleading.²⁶

Portugal is the latest country to crack down on WorldCoin, ordering the eyeball-scanning orb company to stop collecting biometric data for ninety days.²⁷

Elsewhere in crypto

Ethereum completed its "Dencun" upgrade, which sought to reduce fees on layer-2 blockchains like Optimism and Arbitrum. The goal was to make Ethereum more scalable, moving it towards its goal of becoming "the world computer". Some community members celebrated by uploading the entire script of the Bee Movie, an endeavor which evidently cost about $14.²⁸ I respect that.

Bakkt is a cryptocurrency exchange that loves to brag that it was founded and is majority-owned by the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the same group that owns the New York Stock Exchange. Now, though, Bakkt's stock has tanked so badly that that very same NYSE is threatening to delist them.²⁹ Thanksgiving dinner is going to be so awkward this year.

The Web3 is Going Just Great recap

There were 26 entries between March 13 and April 1, averaging 1.3 entries per day. $68.07 million was added to the grift counter.

Prisma Finance hacker demands thanks for over $11 million theft

[link]

After stealing $11.5 million from the Prisma Finance defi protocol, the attacker got the Prisma team's hopes up when they announced via on-chain message that they were a "whitehat" hacker simply "rescuing" funds that were vulnerable to a bug they discovered.

These hopes seemed to wear off pretty quickly, though, when the attacker became upset that the Prisma team had not responded quickly enough, thanked them for their efforts, or apologized to their users. The attacker then transferred the funds to Tornado Cash, indicating they were beginning the process of laundering them to evade detection. The team has gone back and forth with the hacker a few more times, but has expressed that they don't believe the attacker is sincere in their claims that they intend to return the money.

Schnibbles, schniblets, and snuggeries

[link]

Somehow a game involving "Munchables" that eat "schniblets" and live in "snuggeries" managed to amass more than $60 million, which was then stolen by an attacker who discovered a flaw in the project's smart contract.

The attack has been attributed to one individual who managed to obtain a developer job with the Munchables project and gain access to its internal infrastructure. In fact, according to blockchain sleuth zachxbt, the individual behind the theft was actually pretending to be four different developers working for the project. A couple more and he could have become a mythical 10x engineer.

Later, likely thanks to his identity being discovered, the attacker agreed to return the stolen funds. The Munchables will live to munch another day, safe in their snuggeries.

Everything else

• FixedFloat exchange hacked again [link]
• Solana faces wave of drain attacks linked to trading bots including Solareum [link]
• Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison [link]
• LENX co-founder accused of $10 million rug pull [link]
• KuCoin and founders criminally charged [link]
• Curio RWA project suffers $16 million exploit [link]
• Solana memecoin frenzy sparks trend of incredibly racist meme tokens [link]
• Previously rug-pulled Lucky Star Currency project somehow rugs again [link]
• TICKER project developer steals $900,000 [link]
• Super Sushi Samurai exploited by whitehat for $4.6 million [link]
• AirDAO exploited via social engineering attack [link]
• Dolomite exchange exploited for $1.8 million [link]
• SEC launches investigation into Ethereum Foundation [link]
• Bitcoin flash crashes on BitMEX [link]
• Slerf memecoin meltdown only adds to mania [link]
• Wilder World game suffers $1.8 million theft, blames contractor [link]
• Phisher impersonating influential crypto trader in Twitter replies scams over $2.6 million [link]
• Remilia Collective reports multi-million dollar hack [link]
• NFPrompt discloses hack [link]
• Someone accidentally burns $1.36 million Tether [link]
• Mozaic exploited for $2 million, recovers 90% [link]
• MOBOX lending platform exploited for $750,000 [link]
• Massachusetts prosecutors seek to seize $2.3 million from crypto romance scam [link]
• Phishing attack drains $2 million from one victim [link]

Worth a read

In the news

I also went on two BBC shows to talk about SBF's sentencing, but I'm not sure those were posted online because most of the BBC's content is geo-locked.

That's all for now, folks. Until next time,

– Molly White