• Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay, speaks with Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, November 17, 2022. (Photo: Village Global/Flickr)
    Media,  People

    MoonPay Founder Revealed as Mystery Suarez Funder

    Ivan Soto-Wright gave half mil to Miami Mayor’s presidential PAC

    August 1, 2023 /

    Ivan Soto-Wright is capable of excellent timing. The cherubic, celebrity-adjacent founder and CEO of crypto payment app MoonPay moved to Miami just before Covid shut down most of the country. And also before Florida’s hands-off approach to the pandemic attracted a wave of liberty-loving crypto enthusiasts. And then, in a further burst of excellent timing, he and other top MoonPay executives sold $150 million in shares of the company at the end of 2021, near Crypto’s mid-pandemic sugar high. But he’s also displayed some less fortunate timing. In April 2022, just as NFTs were ending their brief and idiotic reign as the flavor of the month, Soto-Wright told the audience…

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  • Cameron Winklevoss, Co-Founder of Gemini, at Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt, May 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
    Commentary,  Media,  People

    Did Cameron Winklevoss Libel Barry Silbert?

    Exceptionally nasty spat has Gemini chief accusing Genesis head of ‘fraud’

    July 12, 2023 /

    The crypto world is abuzz about the can’t-look-away anger between Cameron Winklevoss and Gemini on one side versus Barry Silbert and Genesis on the other. As fun as it would be to see this cage match as the undercard on a Musk-Zuckerberg UFC dream bout, it will actually unfold in a courtroom in State Supreme Court in Manhattan sometime this fall. Last Friday, Gemini sued Genesis, claiming that “Defendants DCG and Silbert engaged in a fraudulent scheme to induce a variety of depositors, including Gemini users for whom Gemini acted as custodian and agent, to continue to lend huge amounts of cryptocurrency and U.S. Dollars to DCG’s subsidiary Genesis Global…

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  • Innovators,  Politics

    Sam Bankman-Fried Political Donations Were Hardly ‘Bi-Partisan’

    Dems got 99.5% of disgraced dough, but GOP got plenty from other FTXers

    July 10, 2023 /

    One of the weird little elements to the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle —and there are so many, and we journalists are quite grateful for them — has been the determined way the media has tried to make his political donations appear bi-partisan. “The FTX scandal is prompting lawmakers from both parties,” wrote Politico, “to symbolically give up campaign contributions from the crypto exchange’s top executives, underscoring the firm’s political toxicity in the aftermath of its collapse.” “[Sam] Bankman-Fried, 30, and his younger brother Gabriel donated lavishly to members of both political parties,” the New York Post noted. In fact, SBF was the seventh largest donor of the entire 2022 cycle, according…

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  • Innovators,  People

    Blockchain Intelligence Group Fights Fraud in Earthquake Relief

    Crypto watchdog ensures that donor money reaches legit charities

    February 13, 2023 /

    The scale of the disaster in the wake of last week’s earthquake is almost impossible to describe. For 33,000 souls to vanish from the earth in the space of a few minutes can only be conceptualized by picturing it as metaphor—“it’s like eleven 9-11s” or “it’s like the disappearance of everybody at a Yankees playoff game.” In other words, there are no words. In the modern world, where there’s a disaster, there’s money. Generous citizens from around the globe have stepped up to donate to crisis relief, especially needed since the quake affected parts of the globe already traumatized by war and terrorism. It’s been inspiring to watch—one anonymous donor…

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