• Innovators,  Ripple,  Technology

    Backing Centigrade, Ripple Tries to Save Mother Earth

    Fintech company bets on blockchain for carbon offsets

    In the wake of Ripple’s historic David-versus-Goliath near-total victory over the SEC in July, those who follow the company are excused if they missed its announcement about its investment in Centigrade. But this move, seeking to establish an open data platform serving the market for global carbon offsets, sets a goal even more ambitious and improbable than prevailing against a government agency with infinite resource: Saving the planet. According to Centigrade, the new platform “will provide developers of carbon and nature credits with a low-barrier, intuitive way to bring their projects to market, providing full data transparency and traceability for the entire lifecycle of credits.” Carbon markets allow organizations to…

  • Media,  People

    MoonPay Founder Revealed as Mystery Suarez Funder

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

    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…

  • Commentary,  Media,  People

    Did Cameron Winklevoss Libel Barry Silbert?

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

    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…

  • 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

    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…