Stories by Amy Castor
Founder of SushiSwap DeFi Protocol Cashes Out
Chef Nomi, the mysterious founder of SushiSwap—the latest decentralized finance protocol to flourish above the thriving canopy of this summer’s DeFi craze—has cashed out. Over the weekend, the self-described “head chef” withdrew 2.5 million SUSHI from the decentralized exchange in exchange for 18,000 ETH—worth about $6 million. He also removed 20,000 ETH, worth another $7 million, from the same liquidity pool. The move, recorded on Etherscan, comes just after the creator of SushiSwap, a fork of...
Darknet Moderator Paid in Bitcoin Sentenced to 11 years
Nine months after entering a guilty plea in a California district court, Bryan Connor Herrell, 26, was sentenced Tuesday to 11 years behind bars for his role as an AlphaBay moderator, according to an announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice. A dark web contraband marketplace accessible through the Tor web browser, AlphaBay was a place where vendors and purchasers could come together to buy and sell drugs, guns, stolen identity information, credit card numbers, and other illicit items—but...
Bermuda Teams with Stablehouse to Launch Digital Stimulus Token Pilot
Bermuda is trying on for size a Bermudian dollar-backed stablecoin. In partnership with Stablehouse, a startup that touts itself as a “global digital currency clearinghouse” for the exchange of stablecoins, the Government of Bermuda announced today that it has launched a digital stimulus token pilot. Stablehouse, a Bermuda-based startup, which boasts as an advisor a former executive of Tether—the firm that issues the world’s most popular and controversial stablecoin—is providing the technical e...
Suspect in Bitfinex Case Held Accounts at Dozen of World’s Top Banks
In a new court filing today, US prosecutors submitted a list of bank accounts subject to forfeitures in an ongoing case against Reginald Fowler, the Arizona businessman and ex-Minnesota Viking minority owner charged with operating a shadow banking operation. Fowler is linked to the missing $850 million that crypto exchange Bitfinex has been accused of hiding. The exchange claims the money was deposited with Panamanian payment processor Crypto Capital Corp and then seized—through no fault of Bitf...
Fed Announces New Inflation Approach—a Move that Could Benefit Bitcoin
The Federal Reserve says it is pushing aside a 40-year-old practice of lifting interest rates to stave off higher inflation in favor of a new approach. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced the move Thursday in a speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium conference, which has been forced to go virtual because of the coronavirus. The new policy dubbed “average inflation targeting” means the central bank will be more apt to allow inflation to run higher than the standard 2% target before hiki...
Russian Offered Man $1M in BTC to Plant Malware on Company Computer
Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov allegedly offered to pay an employee at a Nevada company $1 million in Bitcoin to install malware on his employer’s computer. The plans were foiled, however, when the employee opted to report the Russian national to the FBI instead. According to court documents unsealed Wednesday, the US Department of Justice charged Kriuchkov, who traveled from Russia to the US to try and recruit the employee (known as CHS1 in the complaint), with conspiracy to damage a protected comput...
Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy Offers to ‘Save Bitcoin’
El Presidente continues to taunt the Bitcoiners. After purportedly buying $1.25 million of the world’s most popular crypto and dumping it days later, much to the dismay of Bitcoiners who would have preferred him to “hodl,” Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy now says he will save Bitcoin—but only if Bitcoiners are civil toward him. “I will save bitcoin if they ask me nicely,” he said today in a tweet that has so far garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets. Noted gold bug and Bitcoin ha...
Curve founder seizes 71% of Curve DAO voting power
The “decentralized” part of decentralized finance came into question today for Curve when founder and CEO Michael Egorov took over 71% of the voting power for the platform’s DAO. An Ethereum-based DeFi liquidity pool and exchange platform, Curve lets holders of its CRV governance token lock up their tokens to obtain a separate voting token, veCRV. Holders can then use veCRV to vote on network proposals submitted through the Curve DAO, and those with a high enough veCRV can even submit their own...
Is Dave Portnoy in hot water for pumping Bitcoin? Unlikely, lawyers say
Barstool Sports’ David Portnoy bought more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin — or so he claimed — earlier this month. Less than two weeks later, the media empire president suddenly announced that he had sold it all. “I currently own zero bitcoins,” he told his legions of Twitter followers on Friday. “I’m out on crypto because coins don’t always go up.” DDTG ALERT: I’m out on crypto because coins don’t always go up. Stocks on the other hand continue to always go up. pic.twitter.com/8zfOvNqEVX — D...
Hackers net half a million in University of Utah ransomware attack
The University of Utah paid a ransomware gang nearly half a million dollars to avoid having its data encrypted—and leaked. The university has become the latest victim in a recent string of ransomware attacks aimed at higher education. In a statement posted on its website Thursday, the university revealed that it was the target of a ransomware attack on July 19. The hackers managed to encrypt only 0.02% of the data stored on its servers, the university said. The university did not specify wheth...
DOJ charges 'multi-million-dollar crypto Ponzi' AirBit Club with fraud
The U.S. Department of Justice charged five operators of AirBit Club, a purported cryptocurrency mining and trading company that promised guaranteed profits—in crypto—with fraud and money laundering. Four of the five operators of the alleged scheme were arraigned in US courts yesterday and today, while a fifth—Gutemberg Dos Santos—was arrested in Panama and is awaiting extradition to the U.S. AirBit co-founders Pablo Renato Rodriguez and Dos Santos and their attorney Scott Hughes, along with Air...
Florida taxman uses public money to fund blockchain startup
During the period he was Tax Collector for Seminole county in Florida, Joel Greenberg had grand plans for launching a blockchain company. The only problem: He allegedly used public money to fund the private venture. After forming Government Blockchain Systems LLC last year, Greenberg billed the public office $65,860 to buy computer servers for the company, according to the Orlando Sentinel. He eventually returned the money, sending a final check to the office in February, to make up the balanc...
Edward Snowden got paid $35,000 to talk about Bitcoin
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden got paid at least $35,000 to give virtual talks on Bitcoin, according to a recent court filing. Blockstack, an Ethereum competitor, paid him $20,000 to speak at Blockstack Berlin in March 2018, where he was interviewed by Coin Center research director Peter Van Valkenburgh. And BTC Media, publisher of Bitcoin Magazine, paid him $15,000 to speak at Bitcoin 2019, a conference held in San Francisco in June of that year, where he was interviewed by BTC Media CEO Da...
New: Nomics develops an algorithm to rank crypto products
You aren’t sure about what crypto wallet to use? Trouble finding an OTC trading desk? Nomics wants to help. The Minnesota-based cryptocurrency data aggregator has joined forces with Nexo, a provider of crypto-backed loans, to create an algorithm that calculates a reputation score for crypto products. In other words, you don’t have to comb through all the nonsense on the internet yourself. Nomic’s algorithm crawls the web for product mentions. The startup then gives products a reputation score of...
Banned YouTuber raises $60K in Bitcoin Cash from supporters
After YouTube banned several far-right figures—including Internet commentator Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke for hate speech—supporters donated $60,000 worth of Bitcoin Cash to Molyneux’s BCH donation address. Since Monday, when the ban happened, Molyneux has received 11 donations of BCH—the largest was 120 BCH, which was worth about $26,636, early today. (Update: Shortly after this story went live, someone beat that with an ev...
Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to crypto-related fraud
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged NAC Foundation, its CEO Marcus Andrade, and political lobbyist Jack Abramoff with conducting an illegal offering of AML Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency they touted as a better version of Bitcoin. According to its press release, The SEC alleges that NAC Foundation raised at least $5.6 million from more than 2,400 investors by selling tokens that could later be converted to AML Bitcoin. “AML” stands for anti-money laundering. The company claimed its...
Emin Gün Sirer: Blockchain won’t fix this
Blockchain may be here to stay, but it has no place in the current climate of social unrest, one of the higher-profile academic experts on blockchain technologies said. “There will be a lot of people who will try to jam blockchain as a solution to social woes,” Emin Gün Sirer, a Cornell University computer science professor and DeFi startup founder, told Decrypt. “I don't see any role whatsoever for blockchain to come in and ease racial tension or unite these factions.” Following the death of...
Coinbase wants to identify Bitcoin users for DEA, IRS
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is looking to license its blockchain analytics software to two U.S. government agencies. According to public records, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Internal Revenue Service are planning to buy licenses from Coinbase for a cloud-based software called Coinbase Analytics. According to the prospective DEA contract, Coinbase's software will provide "identity attribution" for crypto addresses both domestically and internationally. The public documents we...
Company behind suspect COVID-19 data has crypto connections
A little-known data analytics company called Surgisphere, which had an outsized influence on COVID-19 policy, has links to cryptocurrency. Why is Surgisphere in the news? Because important studies based on patient data coming from this company caused the World Health Organization to put its hydroxychloroquine trials on hold. Now that data is being called into question. And dodgy details about the Chicago-based company are starting to emerge. Among those, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s...
Where in the world is Bitfinex?
Where is Bitfinex? The question had long been nagging Cas Piancey (pronounced “Caspian Sea”), an online persona, who tweets relentlessly about the crypto exchange. He became so obsessed about the firm's opaque business model, that two years ago, he and a cameraman buddy flew from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to uncover the mystery of where it was located. He figured Bitfinex must have an office somewhere. “No one knows where they are, if they have an actual office, how to get in touch with the exec...
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