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News: Tether—now 3% backed, Binance under investigation, Bitfinex shareholder charged, fickle Elon Musk
🕑 Added 2021-05-16 17:34:30 +0000 UTCI’ve been inconsistent with my newsletters lately because I’m struggling to write this dang NFT book. It is slow going, and I keep falling down these rabbit holes. I feel like if I don’t hurry, the entire crypto market will collapse and NFTs will become a distant memory. Nevertheless, next week, I’ll begin publishing drafts of chapters on Patreon. You can subscribe here.
Tether has so far issued 58.5 billion tethers—8 billion in the first two weeks of the month. You will notice that it keeps printing tethers at a faster and faster rate. That’s to make up for all the real money that isn’t in the system. When will Tether blow up? When regulators and law enforcement step in or it crumbles in on itself. Remember, Madoff’s Ponzi fell apart on its own.
Currently, the price of bitcoin is $45,000, down after Elon dissed it (more below) and Jack Dorsey’s Square said it is no longer buying bitcoin after suffering $20 million in losses on its $220 million investment in the last quarter.
Tether’s muddy pies
You asked for transparency, and Tether finally delivered in the form of two, uh, pie charts. I wrote about it here. David Gerard covered it here. And there’s also a story in the FT.
There’s been endless chatter on Twitter about “commercial paper,” because apparently, it accounts for half of all the assets backing tethers. What’s CP?
In the case of Tether, it’s likely another way to disguise IOUs—i.e., handing out free tethers to their buds at Binance, FTX, and elsewhere. The real story here is that less than 3% of Tether’s reserves now consist of cash. What is the NYAG going to do about it? A FOIL request sent to the prosecutor recently yielded this response.
Folks are asking why Tether hasn’t collapsed yet, given that everyone knows it’s a farce and they are just printing money out of thin air. The answer is because Tether has no obligation to redeem tethers, to begin with—that’s written into its terms of service. The reckoning will come when people try to cash out of bitcoin, and it dawns on them there is no real money in the system to support withdrawals because the markets were based on funny money.
Binance under investigation
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, is under investigation by the DoJ, the IRS, and the CFTC, according to Bloomberg. Binance is unregulated, registered in the Caymans, and likes moving around a lot.
“Wherever I sit is going to be the Binance office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance office,” CZ, the company’s founder, told a podcaster last year.
The investigations come right after a report by Chainalysis that traced $2.8 billion worth of illicit bitcoin on exchange and trading platforms. Of that, $756 million went through Binance.
They also follow Germany’s financial regulator BaFin warning that Binance may have violated securities rules when it issued tokenized shares of Tesla, MicroStrategy, and Coinbase Global.
IRS agents are concerned traders are evading taxes. The CFTC is looking into whether Binance allowed US citizens to illegally trade derivatives on the platform. And the DoJ has reportedly assigned the investigation to its bank integrity unit, which handles particularly complex cases. (Arstechnica)
If you are a US citizen, and you want to trade on Binance, all you need is a VPN to disguise your whereabouts. And once you rack up a substantial winning, you can move your earnings to Coinbase for cashing out. (That’s one of the reasons this story upset so many bitcoiners earlier this year.)
Gensler: crypto exchanges need more regulation
During a public hearing on May 6, newly appointed SEC Chair Gary Gensler said he wants Congress to write new regulations for crypto exchanges to better protect investors.
“Right now these exchanges do not have a regulatory framework at the SEC or at our sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,” he said. “Right now there’s not a market regulator around these crypto exchanges and thus there’s really no protection around fraud or manipulation.” (Coindesk)
Bitfinex shareholder formally charged
Zhao Dong has reportedly pled guilty to the Chinese equivalent of money laundering. He is looking at three years behind bars.
In addition to being a Tether/Bitfinex shareholder, Zhao is the ousted founder of RenrenBit, a popular OTC desk in China. (People in China rely on OTC desks as a way to buy and sell tether and bitcoin with yuan, after the country banned centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017.)
Zhao was the guy pushing the LEO token in 2019. He also helped create Tether’s yuan-pegged stablecoin in 2019.
Last year, RenrenBit denied reports that its leader had been arrested and detained.
China has been cracking down on illegal gambling in the country, which is where Zhao ran aground. He was connected to a company called Tian Tian—a platform for exchanging crypto into fiat currency. He also ran an app called “Everyday Up,” which settled crypto for overseas gambling sites.
It was through Tian Tian and Everyday Up that Zhao allegedly washed 3.1 billion RMB ($480 million) for online casinos. (Protos)
Elon Karen Musk, your new manager
Elon Musk hinted on Twitter Sunday night in a reply to @CryptoWhale that Tesla had either dumped or was about to dump its bitcoin. His off-cuff remarks sent BTC sliding 9% to under $43,000, before recovering to ~$45,000.
Prices stabilized later in the evening when Musk clarified: “Tesla has not sold any bitcoin.” (That’s not entirely accurate. Tesla sold 10% of its $1.5 billion BTC holdings in Q1, shortly after buying them.)
All this came days after Musk announced that Tesla reversed its policy on accepting bitcoin for payment, citing environmental concerns. (NYT)
Naturally, bitcoiners are irate—their general response to anyone who tries to leave the cult. They’ve been lashing out at Musk, which is probably not a great idea. (FT)
He’s not the alone one they’re lashing out at. After Musk replied to his tweet, @CryptoWhale was besieged by angry bitcoiners, sending him death threats and spreading rumors that he is a scammer.
Meanwhile, Musk has shifted his alliances to dogecoin.
Dogecoin has been pumping ever since Musk started tweeting about it in December. At the beginning of the year, it started off at a penny. Now it’s around 50 cents. At one point, it was up over 70 cents. Thanks to Musk, this degenerate gambler invested his entire life savings and is now a dogecoin millionaire, on paper.
Musk’s insatiable need for attention led him to SNL, where he hosted the show on May 8. Dogecoin investors were waiting for him to pump their favorite coin. DOGE dropped 30% during the show. Later, it went back up again. (FT)
Turns out, Musk, who refers to himself as “dogefather,” has been working with dogecoin developers since 2019, all the while tweeting about DOGE to pump up the price. He says he wants to create a cheaper, greener alternative to bitcoin. Sure you do, Elon. (Decrypt)
Jackson Palmer, who created dogecoin in 2013 along with Billy Markus, but left in 2015, returned to Twitter briefly to call Musk a “self-absorbed grifter,” before he deleted his tweet and vanished again.
Other dogecoin news
Rumor has it Ryan Kennedy, the convicted rapist who ruined dogecoin in 2014 and drove the founders out, is out of jail on parole and apparently getting back into crypto. Watch out for this guy. David Gerard wrote about him here.
@idleoctoput did some sleuthing on the mysterious “DH5” dogecoin address, which hold 30% of all DOGE. He also thinks it’s controlled by Robinhood Crypto—not Elon, as some folks were thinking. This backs up Redditor AndreiFromAlbera’s findings as well. (Twitter thread)
Colonial Pipeline hit by ransomware attack
Russia-based cybercrime group DarkSide attacked the Colonial Pipeline, leading to a six-day shutdown that ended May 12. Colonial, which supplies fuel to the East Coast of the US, paid the hackers 75 bitcoin, worth $5 million.
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic tracked down the DarkSide wallet and says the funds arrived on May 8. The same wallet has received $17 million in BTC since March, so they’ve clearly been running a profitable business. (Elliptic)
A day after President Biden said the US would go after the group, unknown actors took control of the ransomware gang’s servers and ransom payment funds, which the DarkSide gang was supposed to divvy up between itself and affiliates. DarkSide also said they were releasing decryption tools for all of the companies that have been ransomed but which haven’t yet paid. (Brian Krebs)
Bitcoin is the lifeblood of ransomware, and this is the sort of event to spur regulators into taking action against crypto exchanges, especially those that enable hackers to cash out of their crypto. The US government knows it can’t have hackers going after critical infrastructure.
Stephen Deihl wrote a post about the oncoming ransomware storm—what will happen if regulators don’t take strong action. “Cryptocurrency exchanges are the channel by which all the illicit funds in this epidemic flow. And it is the one channel that the US government has complete power to rein in and regulate. The free flow of money from US banks to cryptocurrency exchanges is the root cause of this pandemic and needs to halt.” (Stephen Diehl)
Other newsworthy stuff
Between January and April, $156 million was stolen from DeFi-related hacks—more than was stolen from DeFi protocols in all of 2020. And that doesn’t include an additional $83.4 million stolen via “DeFi-related fraud,” mainly the infamous “rug pull,” which involves token holders making off with investors’ money. (Decrypt)
Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, went to Washington, D.C., to lobby. He posted a lengthy Twitter thread on the entire event along with “fun photos.” He says he hopes to get more “regulatory clarity” for crypto in the US. After the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty more “regulatory clarity” (Decrypt)
In addition to his ransomware post, Stephen Deihl also wrote up a thread explaining the Tether scandal. “Every Tether is backed by a giant pile of IOUs to strangers. And that’s worth exactly what you think it is.” (Twitter)
Caitlin Long is warning of a doomsday for bitcoin heralded by fraudulent Tethers. She claims she has long suspected it is coming. Then why bring it up now? The laws she spearheaded for Wyoming helped Tether exchanges like Kraken. If the doomsday is on its way, it is using the roads that Long built. (Her lengthy tweet thread)
The DoJ have a wallet holding 69,000 BTC, originating from the Silk Road. Nicolas Weaver suggests they dump it on the market at 1% per day, mess up the price of bitcoin, and reveal the Ponzi scheme for what it is. (Tweet)
Christie’s sold a lot of nine CryptoPunk NFTs for $17 million—we still don’t know who the buyer is, and whether they paid in crypto, which I’m sure they did. (I wrote to Christie’s but no response.) (Coindesk)
I visited the CryptoPunks Discord group recently and asked them why there were more male CryptoPunks than female CryptoPunks, only to get attacked. No misogyny in that group.
Me, in the news
I wrote a story about CryptPunks for Artnet titled “12 Questions the Art Market Should Have About CryptoPunks, the NFT Avatars Set to Sell for Millions at Christie’s, Answered by an Actual Expert.” (Artnet, paywalled)
“Dead Man’s Switch,” a documentary on QuadrigaCX, will soon be available to watch for free in Canada. (CBC)
“Exit Scam,” is an 8-part podcast series on QuadrigaCX by Aaron Lammer and Lane Brown. Episode 1 is now available.
“Death in Cryptoland” is a CBC podcast on QuadrigaCX debuting on March 25. (CBC press release)
Updates: Ryan Kennedy is a convicted rapist—not a convicted scammer. I updated this post to make the correction. Also, the DOJ controls a wallet with 69,000 BTC, not 69 BTC as stated previously.
