...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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So far, losses are estimated to affect around 100 investors, who have up to AU$100 million (US$65 million) in claims.
Balanian had boasted of his career experience as a former NASA mission planner, and targeted his fund to wealthy investors with a minimum initial deposit of AU$50,000 (~US$33,000).
US Attorney Damian Williams described this as the first ever conviction for a smart contract hack.
Ahmed forfeited around $12.3 million in stolen funds, and will pay more than $5 million in restitution.
On April 10, CEO Edgar Pavlovsky tweeted that he had resigned from MarginFi, publicly calling that he "d[idn't] agree with the way things have been done internally or externally". Pavlovsky had been criticized for his response to the controversy around MarginFi, in which he had been argumentative and insulting, tweeting things like "take your money out, go fuck yourself" to those who accused him and MarginFi of malfeasance.
Amid the chaos, more than $210 million in TVL has exited the protocol.
The notice was received with an adversarial posture by Uniswap, who announced its receipt with a blog post titled "Fighting for DeFi". "Taking into account the SEC's ongoing lawsuits against Coinbase and others as well as their complete unwillingness to provide clarity or a path to registration to those operating lawfully within the U.S., we can only conclude that this is the latest political effort to target even the best actors building technology on blockchains," they wrote.
The news was met with outrage in the crypto community, who generally saw the action as indicative of an overly aggressive posture by the SEC to crack down on defi and crypto more broadly.
According to STFIL, while some of the core team members were detained by Chinese police, FIL tokens were moved to an unknown wallet. They also acknowledged that there had been "abnormal, unscheduled upgrades to the protocol". They asked their community members for help in tracking the wallet.
Some speculated that the story was fake, and that the project had stolen the funds. However, Chinese police have in several instances cracked down on people and companies involved in Filecoin-related projects, including an $83.3 million alleged pyramid scheme in August 2023 and a group of Filecoin Ponzi schemers in 2021. Filecoin mining became popular in China after its 2018 initial coin offering, and also became a magnet for Ponzi schemes and other scams.
The project described itself as a DEX with a native $MUSK token, and launched in July 2021. However, the token tanked on December 25, 2021. Although the project team tried to blame the crash on "liquidity issues" and promised paths forward, they locked the project Telegram chat on March 11, 2022. On April 5, 2022, the team withdrew remaining funds and deleted the website.
Crypto analysis firm CertiK linked the MuskSwap project to several other scam tokens and projects: RocketDoge, InfinityGame, SpaceX, MUFC (themed after Manchester United), and Elona Musk. Altogether, the rug pulls have drawn in $5.1 million.
Some more recent Yelp reviews described fairly mediocre food, which "[t]he NFTs don't make up for".
The restaurant opened in April 2022, a month after owner Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 for $268,000, along with three Mutant Apes for an additional combined $187,000. #6184 became the restaurant's logo, and the others were incorporated into the restaurant's branding. The NFTs haven't been resold since, although it's unlikely they could recoup close to their original purchase prices — Bored Apes have been averaging a little under $50,000 in recent sales, and Mutants around $8,500 each.
Kwon and his company were behind the algorithmic stablecoin, Terra, which dramatically collapsed in May 2022, sending huge ripple effects throughout the ecosystem. He and his company had lied about the stability of the token, ultimately causing massive financial damage to the tune of around $40 billion.
Kwon is in custody in Montenegro after attempting to flee criminal cases in both the United States and South Korea. The civil case in the US proceeded without him.
The "yes" votes are currently in the lead with a 63% margin. The most yes votes came from sushigov.eth, the official SushiSwap team address, which also created the proposal. It is the first time that address has ever participated in a governance proposal.
The 5.5 million yes votes from the team wallet, plus another 3.1 million delegated from other community members, were enough to push the vote to majority support. A former SushiSwap contributor has also alleged that the SushiSwap team was manipulating the vote with additional wallets.
On Twitter, Sushi's "Head Chef" claimed that he had consulted with lawyers and then authorized the voting activity out of fear of an "extortative [sic] governance attack attempt".
Despite that, people sent the creator over 8.8 ETH (almost $29,000) for the project's "pre-sale", even as they repeated on Twitter that the project was a scam and that no one should buy it.
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