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Donald Trump's teases a "major announcement" that's just NFTs December 15, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=donald-tru

Donald Trump teases a "major announcement" that's just NFTs It's finally happened. The siren song of NFT grifting proved too much for Donald Trump. Trump supporters got all excited when Trump posted on social media to tease a "major announcement". Was he going to run for speaker of the House? Return to Twitter? Unveil a presidential running mate? His supporters were surprised — and not exactly thrilled — when the announcement turned out to be a collection of 45,000 NFTs (sorry, "digital trading cards") featuring artwork of himself in heroic outfits and poses. The NFTs are "just" $99 apiece, and money goes to Trump, not his campaign.

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Even some of his strongest supporters were nonplussed. Steve Bannon said, "I can't do this anymore," and opined that he should fire whoever advised him to make the collection. A source working for Trump said that he is "supposed to be running for president right now", and questioned how "fleecing our supporters for $99" was in service of that goal. Nevertheless, the NFTs seemed to sell decently well, with more than 30,000 minted by that evening.

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web3 is going just great Retweeted

Molly White

@molly0xFFF

Dec 13

The FTX hearing by the House Committee on Financial Services starts in about twenty minutes. I'll be livetweeting it here, and will be publishing a recap of it in my newsletter later. Hearing stream: youtube.com/watch?v=rWAnri Newsletter:

newsletter.mollywhite.net

Molly White

a weekly critical breakdown of the latest crypto news and disasters, regular deep dives, and detailed explainers. Click to read Molly White, a Substack publication with thousands of readers.

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USA Damian Williams: Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.

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Latrae L. Rahming (DOC)

@latraelrahming

On 12 December 2022, the Office of the Attorney General of The Bahamas is announcing the arrest by The Royal Bahamas Police Force of Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), former CEO of FTX.

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Sam Bankman-Fried arrested December 12, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=sam-bankma

Sam Bankman-Fried arrested Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested by Bahamian authorities, who said in a press release that they took the action "follow[ing] receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition".

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Class action lawsuit against Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, and others accuses them of undisclosed NFT promotions December 8, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=class-acti

Class action lawsuit against Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, and others accuses them of undisclosed NFT promotions A class action lawsuit against the company behind Bored Apes and its executives, those on the board of "Ape DAO", a whole host of celebrity promoters and brands, and the MoonPay service has accused the group of a scheme to employ celebrities to promote Bored Ape NFTs and ApeCoin without proper disclosures. The suit goes on to claim that MoonPay, a service known for brokering big-ticket celebrity crypto purchases, was used to obfuscate payoffs, and itself benefitted from the publicity earned from brokering these deals. The suit alleges that each of the "promoters" were compensated in some way, either through direct payments or via financial stake in MoonPay. The promoters listed in the lawsuit are: talent manager Guy Oseary, digital artist Beeple, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon and related entities, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Wi

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Argo Blockchain faces possible bankruptcy December 12, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=argo-block

Argo Blockchain faces possible bankruptcy When the company accidentally published draft bankruptcy documents to its website, Argo Blockchain was forced to reveal that it is in last-ditch negotiations to raise capital. The company stated that they were still hoping to avoid a Chapter 11 filing, but that they were "at risk of having insufficient cash to support ongoing business operations within the next month". The company has been trying to raise $25–35 million since late August, and when a $27 million equity deal fell through in early November, the miner acknowledged it might soon have negative cash flow. As a result of the inadvertent publication of bankruptcy documents, the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq paused trading on the company's stock. The company published a statement saying they had requested trading be re-enabled, since they had not actually filed for bankruptcy (yet).

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U.S. Department of Justice is considering filing criminal charges against Binance December 12, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=us-departm

U.S. Department of Justice is considering filing criminal charges against Binance Reuters has reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is considering filing criminal charges against Binance executives, including CEO Changpeng Zhao ("CZ"). This comes as a part of a four-year-long criminal investigation into money laundering and sanctions evasions. According to Reuters, DoJ prosecutors are "split" on whether to take aggressive actions against Binance executives, or to spend more time reviewing evidence. Reuters reports that Binance's defense attorneys have argued, among other things, that "a criminal prosecution would wreak havoc on a crypto market already in a prolonged downturn." Well then.

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Finished on-chain analysis of how OnlyFans model Vanessa Sierra rugged her first #NFT project SmolBoyzLand Please share to spread awareness

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Food $200 Data $150 Metaverse rent $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

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Raw hex version of the Bitcoin genesis block, showing the encoded message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

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this is what finally gets me to buy in to crypto. this is my opportunity to build the crypto lehman brothers and burn it down from the inside.

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i, for one, am looking forward to the metaverse subprime mortgage crisis. somewhere out there, satoshi's going to have an aneurysm

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Decentraland adds that one feature we've all been waiting for: landlords December 11, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=decentrala

Decentraland adds that one feature we've all been waiting for: landlords If the idea of dropping thousands of dollars to "own" a plot of "land" in the Decentraland metaverse doesn't do it for you, have I got news for you: Decentraland has just introduced official support to allow its users to become a part of the rentier class. Exciting! In case you were wondering, I checked, and yes. Someone has already come up with the concept of metaverse mortgages. Personally, I'm excited to see other horrific parts of the system of homeownership get recreated virtually. Metaverse homeowners associations. Metaverse building permit red tape. Metaverse NIMBYs. Metaverse property liens. Metaverse neighborhood watch.

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Former Love Island Australia contestant Vanessa Sierra rug pulls her NFT project December 8, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=former-lov

Former Love Island Australia contestant Vanessa Sierra rug pulls her NFT project After a stint on Season 2 of Love Island Australia, Vanessa Sierra has made a career as a successful OnlyFans performer. In 2021, she also began offering crypto trading tips in a Telegram channel that now has more than 10,000 subscribers, and in March 2022 she launched her first NFT project: "Smol Boyz Land". The project was supposed to involve acquiring metaverse land, and was based around her opinion that "it's clear statistically and exponentially that [metaverse land] prices will trend upwards". What could go wrong?

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An investigation by OKHotshot has reported that Sierra rug pulled the NFT project, using project funds to wash trade her own NFTs before cashing out. In total, she withdrew 120 ETH (at the time worth around $316,000; today worth around $151,000). Throughout, Sierra claimed that "absolutely none of the funding has been taken by founders". In addition to the allegations around her NFT project, OKHotshot identified other shady behavior by Sierra, such as pumping-and-dumping other NFTs she'd purchased, and placing lowball offers in $DAI on big-ticket NFTs, hoping that their owners would mistake them for ETH. After OKHotshot published the thread, Sierra blocked them on Twitter, and deleted the NFT project's Twitter account and website.

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Protocol was exploited and deposits have been drained. We have set all interest rates to 0 so that supply and borrow balances are not moving while we weigh recovery options. What we know right now:

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Lodestar Finance attacked and drained of nearly $7 million in assets December 10, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=lodestar-f

Lodestar Finance attacked and drained of nearly $7 million in assets The Arbitrum-based crypto lending platform Lodestar Finance was attacked by an exploiter who was able to manipulate the price of the plvGLP token, allowing them to "borrow" the entire available liquidity of the Lodestar platform with the inflated token. The attacker made around $6.4 million in profit. Some of the stolen tokens were burned—hence the difference between the attacker profit and the loss to the platform. According to Lodestar, they think they may be able to recover around $2.4 million of the stolen funds. Meanwhile, they have attempted to contact the thief to try to negotiate the return of stolen funds. "We will generously reward your collaboration," they wrote on Twitter.

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Dec 10

Koinly lays off 14% of staff December 6, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=koinly-lay

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CEO of crypto media outlet The Block resigns after it's revealed he took tens of millions in loans from Sam Bankman-Fried December 9, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ceo-of-cry

CEO of crypto media outlet The Block resigns after it's revealed he took tens of millions in loans from Sam Bankman-Fried The Block is a cryptocurrency-focus media outlet that was originally founded in 2018 by Mike Dudas. In 2020, Michael McCaffrey became CEO of the company, and in 2021 he led a buyout to make the company employee-owned. Dudas says that at the time, he believed "McCaffrey's family was wealthy and loaned him money to buy out [his stake] and the VCs so the team could assume full independent ownership." Now it has come to light that McCaffrey had actually taken a series of loans amounting to $43 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-collapsed FTX exchange and Alameda trading firm. According to McCaffrey and various others at The Block, he was the only one who knew of the arrangement.

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The original $12 million loan was used for the company buyout. Another $15 million loan in January 2022 went towards company operations. A third $16 million loan was used... to buy personal real estate in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, The Block's disclosures page reads, "It is critical that The Block is fully transparent about our own financial holdings so as to avoid any appearance of bias or impropriety. The most valuable asset that we hold and strive to earn again every day is our reader's trust. Therefore, we have implemented a financial disclosure policy that is industry leading."

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Digital Surge enters administration December 8, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=digital-su

Digital Surge enters administration The Australian crypto broker Digital Surge entered voluntary administration several weeks after suspending withdrawals in the wake of the FTX collapse. In their announcement, executives proposed a "proposed rescue plan" that will be voted upon by customers, and which would involve cash infusions from the company's directors. Some of Digital Surge's customers reported having entrusted the company with hundreds of thousands of dollars from their superannuation funds (retirement pension). "I lost everything," said one customer who had put his entire superannuation of more than AU$150,000 (~US$102,000) into his Digital Surge account, where it is now frozen.

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FTX-hosted NFTs break after website is redirected to a restructuring page December 7, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ftx-hosted

FTX-hosted NFTs break after website is redirected to a restructuring page After FTX declared bankruptcy, the entire FTX.us domain was redirected to a page providing information on the bankruptcy proceedings. However, NFTs that had been minted on the FTX platform relied on metadata from an API at that domain, meaning that the NFTs are now pointing to broken links. Owners of these NFTs can still see that the NFT exists, but images no longer work—even when viewing the NFTs in their own wallets, or when listing them for sale on other platforms. Other projects that rely on the FTX NFT platform's API, such as the Coachella NFT project, also broke: the Coachella NFT platform shows 0 NFTs in existence. Those NFTs are still show up where they are listed on external NFT platforms, although the images and metadata are broken.

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Dec 7

An earlier version of this entry included reports that customers had beaten AAX staff at an office of the company in Lagos. It appears that this is false, so I have republished a corrected version. See a statement from SIBAN: siban.org.ng/wp-content/upl

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AAX customers search for executives December 3, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=aax-custom

AAX customers search for executives On November 13, the AAX cryptocurrency exchange suspended withdrawals, claiming they were dealing with a botched system upgrade. Shortly before, they had reassured their customers that they had stable reserves and no exposure to FTX. On November 28, the company's vice president for global marketing and communications acknowledged that he had resigned from the company, explaining on Twitter that "I did fight for the community but none of the initiatives we came up with were accepted." Upon realizing that the exchange was unlikely to resume withdrawals, some customers have taken it upon themselves to try to find AAX's executives. Some showed up at the Hong Kong headquarters, only to find it deserted. Another user appeared at their Singaporean coworking space, also to find it empty. Users have been posting leaked personal identity documents of listed executives on Telegram, hoping to locate them.

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web3 is going just great Retweeted

Molly White

@molly0xFFF

Charting the FTX collapse.

did a huge update to the FTX contagion chart last night. i've begun capturing their investors as well as their creditors, and there are now nearly 50 impacted companies listed.

mollywhite.net

FTX Contagion

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Swyftx lays off another 40% of employees December 5, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=swyftx-lay

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Orthogonal Trading is insolvent, defaults on $36 million in loans December 5, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=orthogonal

Orthogonal Trading is insolvent, defaults on $36 million in loans The unsecured lending platform Maple Finance published a blog post announcing that they were severing ties with Orthogonal Trading, who had "misrepresented its financial position" for a month. "It is now clear that they have been operating while effectively insolvent, and it will not be possible for them to continue operating a trading business without outside investment," wrote Maple. On December 3, Orthogonal Trading admitted to Maple that they were unable to meet loan repayments. The group was unable to repay a $10 million loan due the following day. The group has $36 million in liabilities across various loans on Maple's USDC and wETH pools.

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Orthogonal Credit, a sister group to Orthogonal Trading, published a blog post distancing themselves, writing that they were "shocked and dismayed" by Trading's misrepresentation. "We are speechless by the extent of the exposure and liquidity position of Orthogonal Trading’s book of business," they wrote. They attributed the insolvency to FTX exposure.

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Bybit lays off another 30% of employees December 4, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=bybit-lays

Bybit lays off another 30% of employees After reducing their staff by 20–30% in June, Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange Bybit is doing another round of layoffs. This time the cut is estimated at around 30%, which is likely around 750 people based on their headcount.
In a Twitter thread, Bybit CEO attributed the layoffs to the "deepening bear market" and said the layoffs touch all departments.

"We are all saddened by the fact this reorganisation will impact many of our dear Bybuddies and some of our oldest friends," he wrote. On the bright side, they no longer have to be called "Bybuddies".

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Genesis owes $900 million to customers of Gemini Earn December 3, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=genesis-ow

Genesis owes $900 million to customers of Gemini Earn After a domino effect in which Gemini suspended withdrawals from its "Earn" lending product due to Genesis suspending withdrawals due to FTX's collapse, it's been revealed by the FT that Genesis holds around $900 million in Gemini customer assets. Gemini has formed a creditor committee to try to recoup funds from Genesis, as well as Genesis parent company DCG.

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Bitso lays off more employees November 29, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=bitso-lays

Bitso lays off more employees After cutting around 10% of their employees in May, the Latin American crypto exchange Bitso has performed another round of layoffs.
The company didn't reveal how many employees were affected by the layoffs, but Portal do Bitcoin estimated that around 100 employees were let go — around 15–20% of the company's remaining staff. One employee wrote on LinkedIn that he was among "dozens" who were laid off.

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Hoo Exchange vanishes November 18, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=hoo-exchan

Hoo Exchange vanishes On June 19, the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange Hoo announced that they would be pausing withdrawals for "24–72 hours" while they transferred some assets to top up their hot wallet. Since then, there has been little communication and a series of shady activities. According to HOO CEO Rexy Wang on Twitter on July 15, Hoo employee and former Binance head of security Fang Wenbin (known as "Top") "took advantage of his position at Hoo to delete the company system privately, causing everyone in the company to be unable to access the system, resulting in a temporary failure of the main domain name". Top replied to allege that, "Rexy himself has transferred most of the assets from the platform. Employee salaries and platform users cannot withdraw coins". At some point after that, Wang made his Twitter private. Hoo's social media channels have been inactive. On November 18, the exchange website was replaced with a post that identified the "Hoo de facto controller", Xu T

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Maersk and IBM announce the discontinuation of their blockchain-based TradeLens platform November 30, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=maersk-and

Maersk and IBM announce the discontinuation of their blockchain-based TradeLens platform Tough news for folks who insist that blockchains' obvious use case is for supply chains: IBM and Maersk have discontinued their private blockchain-based TradeLens platform due to lack of interest. The idea was to use a private blockchain to "promote more efficient and secure global trade" by allowing shipping companies to share information including shipping container contents and tracking. However, it was apparently tough to convince these companies to actually adopt the project, and Maersk and IBM pulled the plug.

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HAY actually describes itself as a "destablecoin", which is apparently supposed to mean "decentralized stablecoin", but has taken on a second meaning

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Oracle attack on Helio, enabled by a separate hack on Ankr, allows attackers to steal $15 million December 1, 2022 web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=oracle-att

Oracle attack on Helio, enabled by a separate hack on Ankr, allows attackers to steal $15 million Attackers were able to take advantage of an exploit on the Ankr protocol to obtain around 183,000 aBNBc tokens for only 10 BNB (~$2,900). Before the Ankr exploit, which crashed the price of aBNBc, this many aBNBc tokens would have had a notional value of around $55.5 million. An issue with the price oracle on the staking platform Helio allowed attackers to borrow 16,444,740 HAY, a stablecoin intended to be pegged to the US dollar. The attackers then swapped those HAY for around $15 million in the BUSD stablecoin. Meanwhile, the HAY stablecoin lost its peg, crashing as low as $0.20.

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Additional details: [begin highlight] We have been in touch with the DEXes and told them to block trading. [end highlight] We will reissue tokens in the future after we assess the situation.

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It appears that a subsequent person has used the Ankr exploit to then exploit the Helio stablecoin protocol for around $15 million.

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PeckShieldAlert

@PeckShieldAlert