As we noted two days ago in Will Congress Finally Do Its Job?, the operator of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $4.3 billion to resolve the Justice Department’s investigation into violations related to the Bank Secrecy Act, failure to register as a money transmitting business, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Additionally, Binance’s founder and CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao also pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program, resigned as CEO of Binance and personally paid a $50 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) for “intentionally sabotaging and subverting Binance’s superficial compliance controls, including controls designed…
-
-
Bitcoin Is 15, and the Tributes Are Legion
Commemorating Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal white paper outlining a peer-to-peer electronic cash system in 2008
On the 15th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto publishing the Bitcoin white paper, Modern Consensus has gathered a selection of tributes – a mix of the poignant, the thought provoking and since Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gensler felt the need to weigh in, the clownish. Bitcoin Magazine One of the very first publications devoted to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Magazine was co-founded in 2012 by a 17-year-old Vitalik Buterin, whose father had piqued his interest in the young technology the year before – and who went on to invent Ethereum, announcing it in his own white paper in November 2013. In a feature published today entitled “The Reformation of Money: Bitcoin’s Whitepaper…
-
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…
-
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…
