Crypto ventures need to be outlawed forthwith

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The way Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his cohorts have robed-off billions of dollars from people through its notorious FTX Ponzi scheme and the way few more crypto ventures are continuing to crash, lots of people are now demanding an immediate ban on similar ventures, while they also are asking for prompt investigations into activities of another crypto venture named Binance. It may be mentioned here that Binance has been collecting massive amount of cash from individuals, including members of royal families in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

It may be mentioned here that, since Sam Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO and FTX filed for bankruptcy, a number of unusual details have come to light. Recently, it emerged that FTX reportedly told customers to wire money to a little-known, fake electronics retailer website. FTX executives also allegedly hid US$8 billion in liabilities in what Bankman-Fried referred to as “our Korean friend’s account”.

While critics and proponents of crypto consider the nascent sector a Wild West or Alibaba & Forty Thieves, the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX has given a new weight to the terms.

According to a report published by the Business Insider, the ties between the pieces of his crypto empire — which included exchange FTX, hedge fund Alameda Research, and scores of smaller subsidiaries — remain complex. Since FTX’s November 11 bankruptcy filing, new, bizarre details surrounding the shady finances continue to pop up.

One SEC complaint said FTX told customers to wire money to a subsidiary that was a little-known fake online electronics retailer. North Dimension, as it was called, was critical in putting FTX customers’ funds to use in Alameda’s trading activity.

The site’s been deactivated, but it was full of misspelled words and what appeared to be wrongly priced items. For example, one electronics item showed a “sale” price of $899, even though it listed a normal price of $410.

Revelations only get stranger from there. FTX execs hid $8 billion in liabilities in a customer account that Bankman-Fried referred to as “our Korean friend’s account“, a lawsuit from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleges.

And court filings show that Bankman-Fried and FTX cofounder Gary Wang borrowed US$546 million in promissory notes from Alameda earlier this year to buy Robinhood stock.

Then, Alameda Research took out a loan and pledged those same shares as collateral.

Bankman-Fried is now stuck in a four-way legal battle with FTX’s new leadership, as well as failed crypto lender BlockFi and creditor Antigua, for control of that Robinhood stake.

Meanwhile, the SEC also alleges that FTX used US$200 million of user deposits for venture capital investments. Half of that went to fintech company Dave, while half went to Web3 firm Mysten Labs.

“FTX was an opaque company that was so centralized it relied entirely on one person,” Andrew Yeoh, chief marketing officer of Web3 firm Nillion told Insider. “The point of decentralization is to prevent outcomes like FTX where one person can take advantage of trust. I think the public and certainly the industry is waking up to that”.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Sam Bankman-Fried orchestrated a years-long fraud scheme. Using customer funds for proprietary trading is a destabilizing practice, according to Jeffrey Blockinger, general counsel at Quadrata. The ensuing fallout, he explained to Insider, could end up pushing investors away from similar, rival exchanges.

To Darren Sandler, lead counsel at Republic Crypto, the entire saga is ironic and highlights the shortcomings of a centralized player in an ostensibly decentralized environment.

In just a few years since founding the crypto exchange FTX in 2019, Sam Bankman-Fried built a reverent audience among the US political and financial establishment. Then it all came crashing down.

Often dressed like he’d just come from a pick-up squash game, the 30-year-old onetime crypto billionaire had appeared with the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the Davos elite, evangelizing about the future of crypto.

FTX represented a new kind of exchange that promised a safe and efficient way for traders to make transactions around various cryptocurrencies. That vision and its customer growth drew investments from top VCs like Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and SoftBank, helping the company quickly reach a stunning US$32 billion valuation. Bankman-Fried’s own worth was once pegged at around US$20 billion, according to Bloomberg.

With some US$8 billion in customer funds seemingly gone, financial regulators alleged that what happened at FTX wasn’t some novel and complex financial engineering, but a simple and daring fraud scheme along with straightforward mismanagement.

Bankman-Fried, with the obliging support of his lieutenants, sent FTX customer funds to his other company Alameda Research, which allegedly squandered that bounty on risky investments and also served as his “personal piggy bank”, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan also ensnared Bankman-Fried, with what turned out to be the cooperation of his ex-girlfriend and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and former FTX co-founder Gary Wang. All three have been hit with serious criminal charges for fraud and conspiracy. But a large number of aides of Sam Bankman-Fried such as Constance Wang Zhe, T’Shae Cooper, Dan Friedberg, Devon Bernard, John J. Ray III, Will Stroud, Constance Wang Zhe, Tom Loverro, Jen Chan, Chris McCann, William MacAskill, Ramnik Arora, Dan Friedberg, and Ryan Salame are still on run and there is no hint as to why the law enforcement agencies are not hunting them.

Seeking anonymity, a source told Blitz, while SBF and two others are busy with legal stuff, Nishad Singh is working on secretly transferring a large amount of FTX loot-cash to several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain India, and a number of Caribbean island nations including Dominica with the help of some influential Indians who are in illegal hawala business for decades.

No one is talking about one of the key masterminds of fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, despite the fact that just within the span of couple of years he has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars through Alameda Research, an enterprise run by Caroline Ellison, ex-girlfriend of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). According to media reports, a year after Nishad Singh became board member of FTX, he quietly emerged as one of the key donors of the Democratic Party. Nonpartisan campaign watchdog OpenSecrets said, Singh donated US$8 million to federal campaigns in 2022 midterm elections and all of it went to Democrats and Sigh was deeply involved with financing the 2022 midterms.

Nishad Singh was one of a handful of FTX executives, including former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who made massive contributions in the 2022 midterm elections before the company’s collapse.

According to state federal campaign finance records, Nishad Singh has donated more than US$13 million to Democratic Party since the start of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Nishad Singh held a 7.83 percent stake in the business silo that included FTX.US, which was worth about US$572 million in March 2022, and received a US$543 million loan from Alameda Research, according to bankruptcy documents. He was likely one of the five co-workers that Sam Bankman-Fried pegged as a billionaire when asked earlier 2022.

1 COMMENT

  1. John J. Ray III has stepped in as the new CEO of FTX and is responsible for restructuring corporate failures—including Enron—and is certainly NOT running from law enforcement! Check your facts.

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