The sentence follows his conviction on all seven felony charges in November 2022 — a decision reached by the jury within hours of beginning their deliberations.
Bankman-Fried intends to appeal the conviction.
...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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The sentence follows his conviction on all seven felony charges in November 2022 — a decision reached by the jury within hours of beginning their deliberations.
Bankman-Fried intends to appeal the conviction.
Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in restitution for widespread wrongdoing including failure to implement proper anti-money laundering programs, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations. Binance will be allowed to continue operating, but will be subjected to a three-year-long monitorship program to ensure AML and sanctions compliance.
Simultaneously with the DOJ action, Binance reached agreements with the CFTC, FinCen, and OFAC on ongoing legal issues. Notably, the SEC lawsuit was not among those settled.
CZ posted a long thread on Twitter, admitting "I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility," carefully sidestepping mentioning what any of those mistakes were.
The SEC, apparently unconvinced by Coinbase's usual spiel, filed a complaint with five claims for relief involving operating without registering with the SEC and offering unregistered securities by way of providing a cryptocurrency staking program.
Coinbase has responded with its usual bluster, and vowed to fight the lawsuit. They don't really have much choice, given their business is almost entirely predicated on being able to continue operating in the US. A tweet by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong refers to "the US congress... introducing new legislation to fix the situation", suggesting he is hoping that Congress might bail him out of the mess he's in. Given the amount of lobbying Coinbase has been doing, and the apparent bought and paid for crypto advocates who sit in Congress, his hopes are not entirely misplaced, but we shall see. As with the lawsuit against Binance, this is not likely to resolve anytime soon, particularly if the companies both decide to fight in court.
The complaint echoes some of the allegations made by the CFTC in a March lawsuit, including that Binance.US was primarily a front for Binance's international platform that was used to try to distract US regulators. However, it also goes farther by adding allegations around Binance's lack of controls around market manipulation, which the SEC alleges contradict public statements by Binance that they had sophisticated programs to prevent wash trading and other manipulative actions. The SEC even claims that the CZ-owned and -operated market maker Sigma Chain was engaged in substantial wash trading on the platform.
The SEC lawsuit was also a bit of a bombshell in its naming of some major cryptocurrencies as securities: SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI. These are the crypto assets associated, respectively, with the Solana, Cardano, Polygon, Filecoin,[d] Cosmos, The Sandbox, Decentraland, Algorand, Axie Infinity, and Coti projects.
On March 1, Silvergate revealed that they would miss the deadline to file their annual report with the SEC, which they blamed on regulatory inquiries. They also revealed even more losses, which added to the massive $887 million in losses they experienced in Q4 2022. They also disclosed that they were having to evaluate whether the bank was going to be able to survive.
Silvergate's stock plunged on the news, worsening its already marked decline in price over 2022–23. Some crypto firms began distancing themselves from the bank, as well: Coinbase announced on March 2 that they would no longer be transacting with Silvergate "in light of recent developments and out of an abundance of caution". Galaxy Digital, Paxos, CBOE, Gemini, Crypto.com, and Bitstamp also announced they would cease transfers to and from Silvergate, and Circle announced they would be "unwinding certain services with them".
This decision was what allowed Jump Crypto to obtain a court order requiring the Oasis platform to "upgrade" a smart contract in such a way that Jump Crypto could remove stolen funds from where the hacker had placed them on the Oasis protocol. Oasis released a defensive statement, writing that their cooperation in the recovery was "only possible due to a previously unknown vulnerability in the design of the admin multisig access", and that "we will be making no further comment at this time". Oasis is a frontend for the MakerDAO project, which was originally started as part of MakerDAO but later spun into a separate entity, though it still appears to enjoy preferred status by MakerDAO.
The stolen funds in question were the proceeds of the February 2022 Wormhole bridge exploit, in which attackers stole 120,000 wETH (then ~$326 million; now $192 million). After the hack, Wormhole's parent company Jump Crypto plugged the hole left by the hack with their own funds. Since then, the attackers have been moving the funds throughout the cryptocurrency ecosystem, even taking out a highly-leveraged position on in Lido-staked Ether last month.
Ultimately, Jump was able to recover around $140 million via their "counter-exploit". While many celebrated the recovery, some were concerned about the precedent of a so-called defi platform changing a smart contract to remove funds from a wallet at the direction of a court. Some described the upgradability as a "backdoor". "If they'd do it for Jump, what does that say about possible coercion via state actors?" wrote one trader on Twitter.
It remains to be seen what the impact of a Genesis bankruptcy may have on its parent company, Digital Currency Group (DCG). DCG owes Genesis more than $1.65 billion, according to bankruptcy filings, including a $1.1 billion promissory note created to absorb Genesis losses in the Three Arrows Capital collapse.
On November 16, Gemini halted withdrawals from Earn after Genesis halted withdrawals after FTX collapsed. Since then, Gemini and Genesis have been engaged in a very public battle, with Gemini's founders accusing Genesis and its parent company of misconduct and demanding the return of the $900 million in Gemini customer funds.
It quickly became apparent that a man named Avraham Eisenberg was behind the exploit. In screenshots leaked from a conversation in a private Discord channel shortly before the attack, Eisenberg talked about the exploit he had planned. "I'm investigating a platform that could maybe lead to a 9 figure payday. Should I do it?" he wrote. When someone replied, "unles[s] it is highly illegal", Eisenberg responded: "Are there rules these days?" When someone suggested responsibly disclosing the vulnerability to the protocol, Eisenberg refused, saying the bug bounty was likely to be too small.
Eisenberg later owned up to the attack, tweeting a thread in which he wrote that he "was involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy last week. I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are."
The feds apparently disagreed with his evaluation, and arrested Eisenberg in Puerto Rico on December 26. He is charged with commodities fraud and commodities manipulation.
After some back-and-forth, with legitimate-looking contracts and falsified emails appearing to come from the real company's real founding director, the NFT collector was asked to use their crypto wallet to sign a contract, via the fake company partner website that had been set up.
When the collector did so, the smart contract drained the collector's wallet of its fourteen pricey Bored Ape NFTs, then accepted the highest offers that were outstanding on each of the Bored Apes, netting 852.9 ETH. The scammer converted the stolen ETH to the DAI stablecoin, making off with $1,075,000 in DAI.
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