News of the arrest came only a week after 20,000 BTC from the Bitfinex hack was observed being moved. Although the DOJ didn't explicitly say that this movement led to the arrest, it seems like a safe bet.
U.S. Department of Justice arrests duo for trying to launder billions stolen from Bitfinex in 2016
The U.S. Department of Justice announced that they had arrested a New York couple and seized more than $3.6 billion in Bitcoin that they were allegedly trying to launder. The fortune was a portion of what was stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex breach, which saw the exchange lose around 120,000 BTC — then valued at around $71 million but worth around $4.5 billion at today's BTC prices. The husband and wife pair, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, both describe themselves as tech entrepreneurs; Morgan also describes herself as a "surrealist rapper", and her work sure is surreal.
LooksRare team cashes out $30 million in wETH, panicking their community
The team behind LooksRare, an NFT platform known for its enormous proportion of wash trading, cashed out around 10,500 wETH worth around $30 million. They had earned the wETH by staking $LOOKS tokens, the platform's native token. A LooksRare team member explained that "The fact that the team earns WETH has never been a secret", though it certainly seemed to come as a surprise to many in the community.
The discovery of the withdrawal caused panic, with some community members believing it was a sign that the team was rug pulling. Some also questioned the team members' choice to send the funds to a cryptocurrency tumbler, believing this meant they were trying to hide the cash-out from community members. One might understand why they would try to hide it: after the withdrawals became public, the value of the native $LOOKS token crashed around 15%.
More broadly, the fear around the team cashing out illustrates a common belief among some crypto project communities: that if you cash out even some of your holdings, you're not a true believer. A LooksRare team member explained that the team behind the project had "been grinding night and day for 6+ months" without payment and had collectively fronted "more than 7 figures in costs" before the platform launch (reassuring!), and the withdrawal was simply 10+ team members finally receiving payment. Apparently unsatisfied with this explanation, the community tried to demand the team use their wETH to repurchase $LOOKS, though it doesn't appear this has happened.
SuperRare parts ways with its community manager over racist tweets, she hosts a disastrous "apology" Twitter Space
The same week as bigoted tweets from an ENS director Brantly Millegan surfaced, so too did racist tweets by Ashni Christenson, then-community manager for the NFT platform SuperRare. Christenson, who is white, had presented herself as an ally to people of color and other members of marginalized communities in her work with SuperRare. The first tweets to appear were from 2011, where in several instances Christenson used the n-word when quoting rap lyrics. SuperRare quickly announced that they had "parted ways" with her, and Christenson tweeted that she had "stepped down". Unlike Millegan, who doubled down on his statements after they resurfaced, Christenson appeared apologetic for what she had written in the past. She expressed on Twitter: "wish I got the chance to take accountability & talk about this". She apparently decided to try to do so by hosting a Twitter Space, oddly called "a warning to all web3". The Space went well for her in the beginning, with several people speaking up in support of Christenson and condemning SuperRare for the firing, and with Christenson championing a project she led at SuperRare to highlight Black creators and expressing how upset she was over "the situation". Several commenters expressed that they thought this was "cancel culture" at work, and that web3 was supposed to be resistent to "censorship" and "canceling".
However, as the Space continued and amassed several thousand listeners, several Black women stepped up to express that her apologies didn't seem genuine or self-reflective, and that the Space appeared to be little more than an opportunity for other white people in the web3 community to "forgive" her and pat her on the back, as she gained followers throughout. The women who spoke up immediately began to receive extraordinarily racist and threatening mentions and direct messages on Twitter from various people in the Space.
As the Space was ongoing, more of Christenson's past tweets surfaced, several considerably more recent than 2011, and none involving song lyrics: several that were racist towards Mexicans and one that appeared to be questioning the experiences of rape survivors. When one speaker asked how old Christenson had been when she made the 2016 tweets about Mexicans, Christenson initially dodged. When another listener repeated the question she answered that she had been 26, but that research shows that your frontal lobe isn't fully developed until you're 25... or something. As the Space continued, Black web3 community member mec. kindly suggested that Christenson end the Space and take some time to genuinely reflect. As more Black speakers expressed that they felt hurt by Christenson's actions, the Space abruptly ended. Although the Space was being recorded, Christenson took down the recording shortly after.
Another project tries to sell music NFTs without permission from artists
Following close on the heels of the disaster of an idea that was HitPiece, a new project called "NFT Music Stream" cropped up. Like HitPiece, the project appeared to be scraping Spotify to list music by an enormous number of artists, all apparently without the consent of the musicians. Crypto critics and musicians who questioned the project quickly found themselves blocked.
Also like HitPiece, NFT Music Stream claimed to be doing artists a favor, tweeting, "We are on YOUR SIDE and are going to flip the industry on it's[sic] head by cutting out the middle man & giving control back to you profit wise." They also wrote, "I think a lot of people are missing the point of the project", apparently not understanding why musicians might be less than thrilled to see their work resold without permission.
EarnHub claims they've been hacked for around $284,000
EarnHub, a DeFi platform with its own rap song, suddenly saw 660 wBNB (around $284,000) disappear from their project. EarnHub wrote on Twitter that "A hacker was able to exploit our contracts and steal most of the tokens in certain pools, then sell them, draining our LP." However, blockchain security firm CertiK found in their analysis that the "hack" was likely to be a rug pull.
NFT marketplace Cent shuts down over "rampant" fakes and plagiarism, founder says "I think this is a pretty fundamental problem with Web3"
Cent, the NFT marketplace which sold Jack Dorsey's NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, stopped transactions on February 6. The founder explained that people selling NFTs of content they didn't own, copies of other NFT projects, and NFTs resembling securities were "rampant" problems on the platform. "We would ban offending accounts but it was like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole... Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up."
Ubisoft holds internal workshop to address major employee concerns about NFTs, delivers celebratory NFT to employees
Players are not the only ones questioning Ubisoft's decisions to incorporate NFTs into their games (such as their newest Tom Clancy game), though Ubisoft has done little more than brush those aside with statements from executives that players simply "don't get it". Questions and concerns have also been raised by Ubisoft employees, to the point where the company held an internal workshop to address questions like "How can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity, and egoism, then say 'yes this is good, I want that, let's put it in art?'" Bloomberg reported that an internal announcement pertaining to NFTs received hundreds of negative comments from employees.
Meanwhile, Ubisoft announced that they were creating a celebratory virtual hat NFT to gift to their employees in early March, in honor of the opening of the Ubisoft Quartz NFT platform. Maybe just give them a cash bonus next time.
The team behind Doodled Dragons rugpulls again with "Balloonsville", taunts buyers and the NFT platform they used
On January 9, the team behind an NFT project called Doodled Dragons made off with $30,000 and wrote that the charity to which they'd promised to donate "will instead now be... my bank account". A month later, the same team rug pulled again with a project called "Balloonsville", this time netting 5,000 SOL (about $590,000). The project had been listed as a "Featured project" on the Magic Eden NFT platform, a popular Solana marketplace. Before deleting their Twitter account, the Balloonsville project posted a series of tweets, including one that read, "all it took was a couple of paid actors, and boom. we did it again. y'all really believe anything nowadays. Magic Eden NFT refund everyone we scammed cause you were too stupid to ask for ID which could've easily shown we were a rug - doodled dragons". The Magic Eden NFT platform did indeed subsequently announce that they would stop allowing anonymous projects to use their platform. The platform also refunded users who sold their Balloon NFTs below the original mint price, though not the users who bought after the mint and later sold at a loss.
UN reports that millions of dollars in stolen crypto have gone towards funding North Korean missile programs
A report by the United Nations identified cyberattacks as an "important revenue source". At least three cryptocurrency exchanges were targeted by North Korean hackers, and a January Chainalysis report suggested that cyberattacks originating from North Korea could have provided the country with as much as $400 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
Contracted developer makes off with all the funds for the Ratz Club NFT project
Mexican VTuber Zilverk created an NFT project called Ratz Club, built on the Solana blockchain. On February 6, the project announced that a developer they had contracted drained all of the funds from the project wallet. The project lost about 1,300 SOL, or around $140,000. The project announced that Zilverk and another developer would be putting their own money back into the project, and that "you are going to be able to replace your Ratz with a new series of Ratz, all holders will receive the same amount of Ratz they had minted for free. (Since the Ratz you already minted are kinda are useless)."
- Tweet by Zilverk (in Spanish)
- Medium post by Ratz Club