Unchained - How Justin Sun Has Allegedly Tried to Manipulate Markets and Escape Regulation - Ep.329

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Chris Harland-Dunaway, a freelance reporter for The Verge, talks about his most recent investigative story on Tron founder Justin Sun, which details a long string of questionable decisions and actions by Sun. Show topics: why Justin Sun fled China after the Tron ICO why Chris’s 15 sources were granted anonymity for this story why Chris believes that Tron’s market-making team was performing insider trading how Justin Sun has tried to evade US securities law what “Operation Couch Cushions” was and how it led to 300 BTC being sent to Poloniex where Justin Sun is looking for citizenship what Chris knows about a grand jury investigation into Justin Sun what Justin Sun had to say about Chris’ allegations Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021    Coinchange: https://coinchange.io   Episode links:    Christopher Harland-Dunaway: https://twitter.com/ChrisHDeee  Justin Sun: https://twitter.com/justinsuntron    Chris’ articles on Justin in The Verge: March 2022: https://www.theverge.com/c/22947663/justin-sun-tron-cryptocurrency-poloniex  September 2020: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/21459906/bittorrent-tron-acquisition-justin-sun-us-china    Justin Sun’s rebuttal https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1501626464596201472    Chris’ previous Unchained appearance ​​https://unchainedpodcast.com/abuse-and-ethical-lapses-what-happened-when-justin-sun-acquired-bittorrent/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream meter reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the March 11th, 2022 episode of Unchained. Coin Change is the easiest way to earn passive income using crypto. You can safely deposit cash, or cryptocurrencies to earn up to 20% annual yield. There is no lending or market risk, just simple, high return yield farming. Create an account today at tri-defi.c-c-unc and receive 40 USDC. That's tri-defi.cc slash unccc. With the crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code, Laura.

Link in the description. Today's guest is Chris Harlan Dunaway, freelance reporter for The Verge. Welcome, Chris. Hey, thanks for having me, Laura. You recently wrote a long article for The Verge called The Many Escapes of Justin's Sun. What was your story about and why did you write it? The story's about the many escapes of Justin's Son, and they're mostly unknown escapes.

They're sort of behind the scenes, regulatory escapes, or physical escapes running from a country. In this case, China, that's how the story begins. But I decided to write the story because I first wrote a profile about Justin, I think a bit over a year ago. And it took quite a while to write, put it together, put it out. But the story didn't really touch on the cryptocurrency that underpins Justin's crypto empire.

And it was more of a labor story. It was more about what it was like in the work. if you worked for Justin Sun and sort of cobbling together a picture of who this guy was through that. After I finished that story, new sources approached me to talk to me. And I learned a lot more about the crypto side, the financial side. So really, I set out to write a financial story where I could follow the money as closely or as, you know, most attainably as possible and sort of go after that, find out as much as I could. And this is really the product of that and some very courageous sources really leaned on them a lot to put this story together.

So the article opens with Justin's son at Seoul's International Airport. What was he doing there and why was that a significant moment? This is really his first escape. So he had learned from Z of Binance, Chang Penzau, that there would be an ICO ban in China. And he was tipped off. And so he conducted his ICO for TRX, you know, his king making token. And he finished it off. The next day, the ban went into effect. And he was afraid, sources told me he was afraid that he would be caught for this because it was a sort of shady maneuver, potentially illegal maneuver. It's hard to really say how the authorities would have dealt with it. And he must have felt the same way, apparently felt the same way, and decided he'd be better off leaving the country as quickly as he could.

And so the scene that unfolds in Seoul-Inchon International Airport is him, you know, awaiting his flight to get out of, you know, any potential reach of the Chinese authorities. and he landed in San Francisco where he hit out for a bit and bought BitTorrent for that matter shortly after. And as you mentioned earlier, you got your story from 15 sources who did not speak to you on the record. You also were able to get confidential documents. Why did these people not want to use their names? And then what can you tell us about those leaked internal TRON documents you were able to obtain?

These 15 current and former employees are all very, very intimidated by speaking frankly about the behavior and potentially illegal conduct of a billionaire. This is sort of the reality of working for a billionaire. They have enormous financial resources to chase you in court should they wish to. Should they wish to try to hunt you down and sue you for, defamation, they can do that. And Justin's son does have quite a few lawyers in his army to do that. And sources were afraid from that perspective, they were afraid of not being able to work in crypto again if that was the field that they chose to work in, or they were sort of in love with. But then on a more basic level, there's some who were just fearful for their life.

So given the risks that these sources faced and the fears they told me about, we granted them anonymity, I know who they are. I know exactly who they are. But to the reader, they're anonymous. They're referred to as former employees or employees. As for the documents, I can't really get into the sourcing on that. But what they told me is quite a bit about the financial dealings of Justin's empire. a lot of focus on Tron itself, but also his personal finances. So I was able to learn quite a bit from cobbling together and getting this big old leak from a source. When you say that people were worried for their lives, is that because of Justin's temper, which is also mentioned in both your previous article and this article? I have to be careful here. Temper could be part of it, but so as not, to imply what he might or might not do. They believed that Son had the resources to potentially harm them. That was their belief, as they expressed to me. Wow. So you wrote,

speaking about the financial aspect, you wrote about some eyebrow raising behavior, your son engaged in regarding Tron's TRX token, certain market making behaviors as they were called. What was he doing there? And what's your sense of whether or not that was illegal? That's a really good question. So the illegality or potential illegality, I'll get to that second. But first of all, here's what I learned from sources. The person who led the market making team was this guy, Zhu Bao Long, like sort of quiet, technocratic worker at Tron, clearly a finance guy. and he had this one-on-one lunch with one of my sources where they went to the seafood restaurant.

They were eating this riverfish called Crucian. And the source begins asking Juba Long, so what's the market-making team do? And he says, it's to keep, among other things, we keep the price, the value of TRX at a certain level that Justin wants. And so the source goes, oh, well, how do you go about doing that? and he said, well, you know, we know when good news is going to be released by Tron. And so we'll buy TRX and wait for the good news to be released.

It comes out to the public. The value of TRX almost, you know, always rises as a result of the good news. And then they would sell the TRX. And this was something that the source, as they heard at the lunch, became fearful because in their mind they said this is the so-called market making is insider trading and they're doing it all the time. So to your question, is insider trading, they're clearly using material non-public information. That is the key part of the law. If you are using that to trade on securities and make money off of securities, that's a problem.

But the question is sort of like, has that law been extended to? crypto before. And the lawyers I spoke to who work at the intersection of crypto and finance said their opinion was unanimous that a case can be made that insider trading law applies to crypto. The key thing is whether a crypto is deemed a security or not. A security, old-fashioned word for an investment. And if it is a security, in their opinion, indeed insider trading law applies to it. However, it's not well tested. It's really not something that's been widely tested. So it's one of these realms of the law that crypto sort of, you know, piled into and everyone's looking around wondering, is that sort of enforcement going to happen or not?

Yeah, this comes up in my book as well. Clearly, there are behaviors that people would recognize sort of as insider trading, but because these are considered commodities or, or, or, or, or, are not clearly defined as securities. Technically, it's not illegal. But I'm actually pretty sure that most crypto people know that this is going on because you'll often see those tweets where it'll be like, look at the trading volume and the price action on this token before they announced their liquidity mining scheme or, you know, whatever.

And then it's very clear like insiders were, you know, banking on the price pop after the announcement. So it's one of those things. All you need to do is see the, timeline. It's one of those very elegant things that you can show in data pretty clearly. So I agree, it's very interesting when stuff like that happens. And to your point, like, the source who told me about the meeting with Zhu Belong also said, you know, this is not just a gray area. This is a black area. We don't know a whole lot about. Yeah, yeah, I found that to be

such an interesting quote. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about. how Sun tried to obtain sort of like regulatory approval, whatever that might be, even if it's in air quotes. But first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Join over 10 million people using crypto.com. The easiest place to buy, earn, and spend over 150 cryptocurrencies. Spend your crypto anywhere using the crypto.com visa card. Get up to 8% cash back instantly. Plus, 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 with the code Laura.

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That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Back to my conversation with Chris. So in general, obtaining an imprimatur of legitimacy and regulatory approval was something that Justin's son was seeking. how did he go about trying to obtain that? Well, going back to sort of the theme of the story, this idea of escape. There's physical escape running from China, for example. But then there's this other sort of trapdoor.

He sort of sussed out and detected in the U.S., and that's quite simply legal arguments. You can sort of forestall the consequences against you if you have a complicated or clever or just, you know, a bunch of lawyers who support you, or at least write legal findings for you that can limit your liability potentially. And so Justin was detected this, and he began approaching lawyer after lawyer after lawyer, asking for legal findings that would deem TRX or BTT, which is BitTorrent token, which he was later ICOed in the U.S. And these legal findings were to deem,

that they're not securities. That's what he sought. And so he approached among them, the sort of most notable one is this guy, David Labhart, who was a former SEC compliance officer. And that was a big reason why Justin hired him. He thought, you know, wouldn't it be great if we had someone from the SEC? That would look awesome.

And so David Labhart had this sort of tense, strange job interview with Justin, where Labhart was proposing to just overhaul the compliance process at Tron. And Justin would sort of go, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. I just would like a sort of decisive legal finding that TRX is not a security. And of course, that was a bit confusing for Labhart. But Sun sort of continued to push and push and eventually Labhart resigned, expressing, you know, reservations to put it mildly about how. Justin was approaching the ICEO with BTT and how he was just thinking about the securities law

and trying to navigate securities law in general. Yeah, I actually have to say I found those passages kind of funny. And there was another one with a Hong Kong lawyer where he finally did obtain the letter stating that it wasn't a security in the U.S. the commentary was like, can you do that? Can you get a letter from a Hong Kong lawyer where it's not even clear? if they practice in the U.S. to make a statement about U.S. law. So that was just hilarious. When I heard that source say that,

I was like, these are all great questions. So that's why it's in the piece, exactly, you know. And part of the article also goes into the corporate structure of kind of the Poloniacs but Torrent Tron set up. What was your finding there? Well, Poloniacs, when it was purchased by Justin, was moved, you know, the main corporate entity was placed in the Seychelles and, you know, distant island, which is known for being quite crypto-friendly is one way to look at it,

or, you know, not aggressive with regulation against crypto is another way to say it. That's where they set up shop and then Poloniacs itself, which he had just acquired, became this blandly named LLC called August Tech. So August Tech was owned by Polonix and Seychelles, but really all of the Polonix employees in Boston who have always been working for Polonix were just working for this blandly named corporate entity now. And it was sort of puzzling.

I asked sources about why, and one of them pointed out, you know, it's just a very confusing corporate structure, potentially to just obfuscate responsibility potentially. But one thing that several sources pointed out is that if you're a user for Poloniacs and you had some type of injury, not physical injury, legal injury that you wanted to adjudicate, you would likely have to go to the Seychelles to be in the correct jurisdiction to, you know, solve your problem. So would you do that? I can't think of a whole lot of people who would, you know, book a flight to Seychelles to take up their grievance. So it was, it was complicated a bit odd and the sources always found it, found it off-putting,

that it was reorganized that way. One of the craziest stories in your article is something called Operation Couch Cushions. Tell us what that was. Operation Couch Cushions was sort of the baby of a brainstorming session for alternate revenue for Poloniacs. And in this brainstorming session, engineers had just sort of talked about how there's this stuff called dust in the exchange. And dust were just slivers of Bitcoin or other tokens that had just for whatever reason or another been. forgotten by users or were sort of locked up in the exchanges code in some unusual way. And it should be said, Polonex is a very odd exchange coding-wise. It's quite a mess. It was written and created by this polymath named Tristan Dagosta. And he legend has it that he got a

coding book over the weekend and began building Poloniacs at the same time. So I was going to say, I have a whole thing about Poloniacs in my book. And yes, multiple people said Tristan built the whole thing himself. And they were just shocked because normally for an exchange of that size, the information of the code would normally be distributed amongst a whole team. But everything was in Tristan's head. Like all the kind of weird nooks and crannies of the code and idiosyncrasies of it, it was all in this one person's head. Yes, you're absolutely right. You're reporting a spot on. And in fact, like, when they wanted later on, when they wanted to ask questions, you would, employees would have to go through this complicated process of like using some PGP key to email Tristan and then he would have some window of time to respond and he would respond and then you would have to wait like another 10 days before you could ask another question because it had been written into the deal. It's just very strange. But indeed, yeah, it was all inside this guy's head. And he was learning

how to code, you know, as he made it. So it was a mess. And, you know, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible, because multiple people say this guy, you know, is a genius. But in any case, money or dust would get locked up in the exchange. And so engineers had identified this one pool of dust and it was all Bitcoin. And Justin encouraged and directed this project called Operation Couch Cushions, you know, like you're fishing around between. the couch cushions for extra change that's stuck in your old couch. That's sort of like the joke of the operational name. So all of what they had found is these old tether wallets that ran on this thing,

Omni. And basically, users had accidentally deposited Bitcoin to wallets that would only take tether. And so these fractions of Bitcoin were sort of trapped in suspended animation outside the wallet. They weren't actually in the wall. They were just neither fully deposited or, you know, this strange state. So they identified it and they said, you know, this is about 300 Bitcoin.

And so Justin began saying, where's my 300 Bitcoin? And the understanding among the employees was the plan is now that Justin's going to take the Bitcoin. So eventually the operation went into effect. And this is something that is amazing because you can see it happening on the blockchain. I was able to track it down with the help of great sources and identify these transactions in the blockchain that showed all of the money being siphoned out of these problematic wallets instantaneously, you know, hundreds, thousands of wallets,

and then put into an anonymous wallet and then forwarded on to one of Polonix's hot wallets, one of the communal wallets. And that's sort of where the trail goes cold. I have to be clear, we couldn't trace it back to Justin personally. And part of that is just because these hot wallets have so much user money being deposited and withdrawn that it's really hard to do the forensics, the chain analysis and forensics to figure out where it went. But what we do know is that it ended up in the Polonix hot wallet. and as one lawyer who specializes on financial crime and cryptocurrency told me after I told him the story,

his name's Andrew Verstine, there's likely not a big difference between Poloniacs and Justin at this point anyways, because he is the sole owner. And thus, whether he took it personally or whether Polo took it is sort of a moral distinction. The legal distinction, Verstein is saying, is that there's not much distinction. It's basically the same thing. And he clarified to me, yes, theft by conversion is a crime. Wow. That's, I mean, it's just shocking.

So, you know, with everything that Justin's son has done, he seems to have an awareness that he probably will need some, regulatory cover somewhere. And you write about several countries that he seemed to be wooing, Malta, St. Kitts and Nevis, Guinea, Bissau, or I don't know how to say that. And even he somehow seems to have repaired his relations with China. And yet it does seem like the U.S. governments after him. So I literally just combined four questions in one because we're running out of time. So can you just wrap up kind of like what his regulatory picture is at the moment? and also relate this to his recent bombshell,

which is that he's now an ambassador for Granada to the World Trade Organization. Right. So the simple, short, and long of it is to sort of boil down to one moment in a meeting where he was announcing a risky business decision and wanted to pursue it. And people in the meeting pushed back. And he said, well, what's the worst thing that can happen? If I get in trouble, I just won't come to the U.S. again. Pretty straightforward, right?

And so this got me thinking, and by talking to other sources, I learned that indeed he had pursued citizenship at other places in the world, namely Malta is the one that I had the most information about. Very interesting. He sent this representative from Tron to go meet with government officials in Malta who welcomed his so-called investment as part of the individual investor program. you can essentially buy a passport from Malta if you go through the process. And he did. And he was also looking for citizenship for his mother and father, which was very interesting. It was sort of an indication that this could potentially be one of these, you know, hatches that you can escape through should things really get bad for him. And you mentioned some other countries.

He either said he had citizenship for or said he was pursuing citizenship for. So he had built this picture again of a man on the run or at least setting up escape routes should he get in trouble. And it appears indeed that he could be in quite a bit of trouble. I learned that there's a grand jury investigation by the Southern District of New York, which typically handles financial crime on Wall Street. And they're conducting this grand jury investigation into him for a long list of financial crimes, you know, wire fraud, money laundering.

spending the ill-gotten gains of the crime and defrauding the United States, selling security and lying about it. These are the charges they're exploring. I should be clear, they're exploring. He has not been formally charged. There's no indictment so far as I know. But in any case, this is a multi-agency investigation,

the FBI, the IRS, Southern District of New York, looking into this. And so they've been interviewing people And, you know, in the story, there's a little anecdote of an interaction between the IRS, IRS agent, FBI agent, and one of my sources, which was revealing for what they were searching for. And many of their questions seemed to link back to concerns that he had maybe broken the law when it came to taxes. Tax evasion is a potential thing that they're looking into. So that's where things lie at the moment.

Okay, well, we will have to see how things pan out for him. And just before we close, I'm sure you reached out to him for commentary. What was the response? I asked him for an interview and gave him quite a bit of time to reply. And then eventually we sent a long list of questions addressing every factual assertion that's in the story asking for comment from him. and we gave him 24 hours as his standard practice. We received a statement from his law firm representing him. The lawyers for Vox Media and the lawyer we've retained from Ballard Spar,

they received this message in the middle of the night and included a statement which we put into the story, which is that none of these allegations are true. and Justin's law firm Harder LLP accused me of yet another attempt to impair his reputation. And so that is his final say on the matter, aside from him tweeting the day the story was released. And what did he tweet? He didn't push back particularly hard on specifics, but he said that, you know, long story short, this is a fabricated narrative, fabricated storytelling, false allegations.

A couple claims about Poloniacs, basically running things in a legit way, but not really replying to some of the largest accusations in the piece that sources told me about in any sort of substantive way. Okay. All right. Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Laura.

Don't forget, next up is the weekly news recap. Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap. Biden's executive order leaves regulators with tons of homework. On Wednesday, President Biden signed the much-anticipated executive order on ensuring responsible development of digital assets. Document requests preliminary research and policy proposals from various government agencies on digital assets, defined as CBDCs, cryptocurrencies, and staple coins by the executive order.

The White House described the executive order as the first ever whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretaries of Labor, Commerce, Energy, and Homeland Security, appear to be spearheading the research, along with directors, administrators, and chairs of various other agencies. Financial regulators, like the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Control of the Currency,

will also add commentary. Topics expected to be covered include CBDC technology, which the Biden administration says it is considering with the highest urgency, along with the environmental impact of digital ledger technology and the potential money laundering and illicit finance risks associated with digital assets. Coin Center's executive director, Jerry Brito, felt the executive order struck a good tone. He tweeted,

The message I take from this EO is that the federal government sees cryptocurrency as legitimate, serious, and important part of the economy and society. The blockchain associations Jake Schrovensky agreed with Brito. Anyone worried that President Biden's executive order would spell doom and gloom for crypto can fully relax now. The main concern was that the EO might force rushed rulemaking or impose new and bad restrictions, but there's nothing like that here. It's about as good as we could ask. Based on crypto price movements, the market reaction to the order was also positive,

with the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies rising 6.2% on Wednesday from Tuesday. On a related note, the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Services, statistics reported that the consumer price index, a tool gauging inflation, rose 7.9% over the past 12 months. Ukraine is using its crypto dollars to buy non-lethal military equipment. Data from blockchain analysis firm, Elliptic, shows the government of Ukraine has received nearly $63 million in crypto donations to Ukraine's blockchain addresses, and the NGO Come Back Alive, which includes a $1 million gift in ETH from the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection this week. A report from Coin desk, which cites Ukraine deputy minister at the Ministry of Digital Transformation

Alex Borna Yakov estimates the number is closer to $100 million when factoring in money sent from other small funds. It appears donations will not stop at $100 million because on Wednesday, cryptocurrency exchanged Krakken announced a $10 million package for Ukrainians that will see $1,000 in Bitcoin dropped to any account based in Ukraine, created before March 9th. Additionally, Cracken will donate an amount equivalent to the total trading fees paid by Russian clients in the first half of 2022 and a later package to Ukraine. According to CoinDesk, the funds are being used for fuel, food, and other non-lethal supplies,

such as bulletproof vests, with the suppliers directly accepting Bitcoin and Eith, and Ukraine holding the funds in a multi-sig wallet with five potential signers. It is easier, not complicated, transparent, and faster in comparison to a swift transaction, which could take more than a day, explained Deputy Minister Alex Bornyakov to CoinDesk on paying with crypto. In related news, Coinbase, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, announced on Monday that it had blocked 25,000 addresses related to Russian individuals or entities and believes to be engaging in illicit activity. Coinbase said that many of the addresses

were identified prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and that the exchange has not seen a search in sanctions evasion activity in recent days. Coinbase reported that it has also shared its internal block list with the government to further support sanctions enforcement. This payment giant now supports crypto businesses. Stripe launched crypto support on Thursday for exchanges, wallet providers, and NFT marketplaces. As part of its crypto toolkit, Stripe is facilitating ID verification, fraud

prevention, and fiat on-ramps and off-ramps. FTX and FTXUS have already partnered with Stripe to improve their KYC processes. The Defi Godfather Rage Quit, for real this time. Andre Cronia, known as the

godfather of Defi, is leaving the crypto industry. And to Nell, A business partner of Andres, who played a prominent role in Phantom Success, wrote Sunday morning, Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contributing to the Defi slash CryptoSpace. Cronia's departure is not exactly surprising. His LinkedIn was updated last week to show jobs at Phantom Foundation, crypto briefing, Uren Finance, and Defi Architect, ending in February of 2022. His Twitter account was also recently deleted.

Additionally, his relationship with the crypto industry, has been exceptionally rocky. Andre has been threatening to quit for almost two years, and once published, a two-part blog post titled, Building in Defi Sucks. It appears Cronia is leaving for good this time. Nell wrote, Unlike previous building in DFI sucks, rage quits.

This is not a knee-jerk reaction to the hate received from releasing a project, but a decision that has been coming for a while now. Thank you to everyone that has supported us over the past few years. According to Nell, Cronia's departure will mark the end of support for 25 apps and services, such as Andre's personal front end for Uren.S. Finance. However, any smart contracts deployed by Cronia, such as Uren.D. Finance and Solidly,

will continue to run on Ethereum and Phantom, respectively. Cronia associated tokens such as Solid, IB, and KP3R, each saw substantial dips and prices on the news. Yerin Finance, probably Cronia's most successful in influential innovation. dropped more than 10% after Nell's tweets. However, as pointed out by Bantag and a non-dev on urine finance, Andre has not been active in building urine for some time. People burying Yafi, you do realize Andre hasn't worked on it for over a year, and even if he did, there are 50 full-time people and 140 part-time contributors to back

things up. That being said, as covered on the chopping block, Compound Labs, CEO Robert Leshner, still thinks Andre's departure is a rugpole, due to the billions in wealth, Cronia created for himself. US regulators had a busy week. It was a tough week for Ponzi schemes, fraudsters, and the third Bitmex founder.

First, on Tuesday, the CFTC brought charges against four men for their alleged role in operating a Ponzi scheme. Separately, three of them were indicted on criminal charges of wire fraud and money laundering in New York by the Justice Department. According to a finally from the CFTC,

the men allegedly ran two Ponzi schemes that promised users daily interest between 2 to 5%. Ecoin Plus brought in over $23 million in Bitcoin from investors, at which the alleged business partners kept $10 million for themselves. They also started a project called Jetcoin, which took in $21.7 million in Bitcoin, of which the men kept 36%. Two, the SEC went after an even larger project, alleging that John and Jonathanah, Barksdale defrauded investors out of $124 million through their token or Mias coin by giving buyers false information about the project. We allege that the Barksdale's acted as modern-day

snake oil salesmen using social media, promotional websites, and in-person road shows to mislead retail investors for their own personal benefit. Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director in the SEC's Division of Enforcement, wrote in a statement. Third, following the recent guilty pleas of Arthur Hayes and Benjamin Delo, the third founder of Bitmex, Samuel Reed, pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering rules on Wednesday. Reed will pay a $10 million fine and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. As today's guilty plea reflects, the office will not permit cryptocurrency exchanges to operate as a shadow financial system that enables criminal actors to move their illicit proceeds without

detection, declared U.S. Attorney Damien Williams in a statement. Bain Capital jumps on the crypto bandwagon. This week, Bain Capital, an investment firm with approximately $155 million in asset center management, announced its first crypto-based fund, Bain Capital Crypto. The fund will utilize $560 million to support the renegades and pioneers building the next generation of the internet, according to partner Stefan Cohen. In a conversation with the block, Cohen revealed that the crypto unit had been in the works for about a year, and then it planned to get its hands dirty on-chain. A little more than a year ago, we set out to design a founder-oriented fund to help them through inception to growth, Cohen explained, advising on key economics, interacting with on-chain governance, providing liquidity, and staking.

Bain's arrival to crypto comes when funding is exploding, with Sequoia, Pantara, electric capital, and FTX all announced. $100 million plus funds in 2022. It was, however, not a completely smooth arrival, as the team was memed for its all-male composition and the fact that its announcement occurred on international women's day. Cohen later proclaimed that Bain is committed to hiring women, investing in women-led projects, and being a driving force in the industry for sponsoring the creativity and genius of women, non-binary people, and people of color. Time for fun bits.

Bianca de Medici is Crypto influencer Bianca de Medici revealed her true identity this week to be the pop singer Sia, who was one of my favorite artists. She docks herself on both her own and Bianca's account and wrote the following. Dear friends, thank you for being so cool

and letting me into your world. I got into BTC in 2016, picked up some alt coins in 17, but was never much of a speculator. I became a fan of Vitalik Boudarin and his particular genius. but it wasn't until I saw the birth of punks, kitties, and the wave of art that followed

that I truly fell in love. And I mean down the rabbit hole. Total D-Gen, multiple wallets, JPEG addicts, kind of love. At the core, I'm an artist and appreciate any medium that allows people to express who they are inside. I hope that you'll allow me to keep supporting this ecosystem,

sharing and creating things that can help move the genre forward. I love you all. See ya. And see ya, if you're listening, I love you, and there's an open invitation for you to come on Unchained anytime. All right, that's it. Thanks so much for joining us today.

To learn more about Chris Harlan Dunaway and his article for The Verge, as well as Justin's son, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, put up from Anthony Yun, Daniel Nuss, Mark Murdoch, Shashonk, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.