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The public will pay -- Molly White
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/Justin Sun buys his way out of an SEC fraud case, Iranian transactions on Binance draw DOJ scrutiny as the exchange sues the newspaper that reported on them, and crypto super PACs dump millions into Tuesday’s primaries in Illinois.
Another stellar newsletter from Molly White who writes clearly about the crypto world and scams that abound. There is the podcast and much, much more to read.
After investing or committing to invest $223 million into the Trump family's crypto ventures, Justin Sun has walked away from his SEC fraud case with a $10 million slap on the wrist and no admission of wrongdoing. The settlement comes from a Trump SEC that has spent the last year systematically dropping enforcement actions against the president's benefactors. It's also created a potential legal mess: by fining Sun under securities laws, the SEC has effectively declared that the tokens described in the lawsuit are securities, which would suggest every US exchange currently listing them is operating as an unregistered securities exchange. This is the same argument the SEC made against Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and many other crypto firms in cases it has now abandoned, raising the question of how the agency plans to explain why some tokens are securities and others aren't when they all look remarkably similar.
Trump's memecoin grift has hit new lows -- both in price and defensibility. He's announced a second event for top $TRUMP holders, and this time the leaderboard conveniently obscures wallet addresses. It's likely an attempt to thwart the kind of blockchain analysis I performed last time, which revealed that 73% of that event's attendees (and 92% of its VIPs) were likely foreign nationals and raised concerns among Congressmembers about foreign emoluments violations. Fear not, I still was able to identify most of the VIP wallets for this event, which reveals the same pattern.
There's a lot more to cover in this newsletter, from a DOJ investigation into Iran-linked transactions on Binance and a lawsuit from Binance against the newspaper that originally reported on it, to the crypto super PACs' $10 million in spending against an Illinois Senate candidate who they've deemed "strongly against crypto" solely because she mentioned the millions of dollars the industry has been spending on attack ads targeting her.
. . .
Trump's memecoin grift has hit new lows -- both in price and defensibility. He's announced a second event for top $TRUMP holders, and this time the leaderboard conveniently obscures wallet addresses. It's likely an attempt to thwart the kind of blockchain analysis I performed last time, which revealed that 73% of that event's attendees (and 92% of its VIPs) were likely foreign nationals and raised concerns among Congressmembers about foreign emoluments violations. Fear not, I still was able to identify most of the VIP wallets for this event, which reveals the same pattern.
There's a lot more to cover in this newsletter, from a DOJ investigation into Iran-linked transactions on Binance and a lawsuit from Binance against the newspaper that originally reported on it, to the crypto super PACs' $10 million in spending against an Illinois Senate candidate who they've deemed "strongly against crypto" solely because she mentioned the millions of dollars the industry has been spending on attack ads targeting her.
. . .