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Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao's wealth probably fell $11.9 billion as revenue at the world's largest crypto exchange slid 38%, Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated. The drop would see CZ's wealth drop to $17.2 billion, Bloomberg reported on Friday. His net worth hit a peak of $96 billion in January 2022, Bloomberg said. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculates Binance's revenue based on trading data from the spot and derivatives markets using data tracking sites such as CoinGecko and CCData. |
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Sam Bankman-Fried began his testimony like the brilliant former golden boy from crypto’s better days. He ended the longest, strangest, most torturous day yet of his criminal trial more imperiled than ever before. “Part of the problem is that the witness has what I'll simply call an interesting way of responding to questions,” Judge Lewis Kaplan said before a gallery of exhausted faces late Thursday. The only solace for Sam may be that the jury wasn’t there to hear it. Kaplan had sent them home after lunch. He wanted to hold a “for my ears alone” hearing to determine if some defense arguments were admissible – a practice he’d seldom done in his 29 years on the federal bench. Looking for more in-depth reporting on the SBF trial? Subscribe to "The SBF Trial" newsletter pop-up, written by CoinDesk reporters and editors on the ground in court. |
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Bitcoin and Ether Options Up |
The notional open interest of the dollar value locked in active bitcoin and ether options contracts on leading exchange Deribit has risen to $20.64 billion, according to data tracked by Swiss-based Laevitas. The tally nearly parallels the peak registered on Nov. 9, 2021, when bitcoin traded above $66,000 or 90% higher than the going market rate of $34,170. In other words, the current open interest in contract terms is significantly higher than in November 2021. The record activity means flows in the options market tied to investors and market makers will have more say in determining the spot market price. |
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Gemini Sues For $1.2 Billion |
Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini has sued Genesis Global, its former business partner for its Gemini Earn product, over 60 million shares of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) that were pledged as collateral. In an action filed as part of Genesis' bankruptcy case, Gemini is seeking to gain control of the GBTC shares, which, Gemini said, "would completely secure and satisfy the claims of every single" Earn customer – whose money was locked up when Genesis froze withdrawals last year. The lawsuit comes a week after New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a separate lawsuit against Gemini, Genesis and DCG over allegedly defrauding more than 230,000 investors of more than $1 billion. |
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The Takeaway: SBF's Defense Gamble |
Yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried took the stand at his monumental criminal trial, but not for the benefit of the jury. Instead, in a marathon session, SBF took the stand and gave New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan a dry run of what certain — let’s call it controversial — testimony could sound like in court. Over the past few weeks, Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have been lambasted by onlookers and the presiding judge for what looks like an incongruous or inarticulate defense strategy in face of the stronger narrative of SBF’s multi-year scheme to defraud FTX’s users and investors. That’s largely for two reasons: most importantly, up until Thursday, we were in “the prosecution’s case,” meaning it was attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice looking to convict SBF who scheduled the witnesses and largely ran the narrative. Nothing even says SBF’s defense counsel needs to “bring a defense,” if they feel the U.S. attorneys haven’t convincingly made their case. But SBF wanted to testify, for any number of myriad personal and philosophical hangups. So the defense is “bringing a defense,” but not exactly the one they really would have liked to. Before the trial started, we heard much of SBF’s strategy would be rolled up into two basic arguments: blaming his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, and blaming his ex-lawyers. The so-called advice-of-counsel defense is a well-established legal routine that tries to cast doubt in a defendant's culpability by spreading fault to people who were advising him, and should have known better. DOJ lawyers, however, have long argued this strategy is besides the point, and have filed numerous documents in the case saying SBF’s lawyers should be prohibited from making it, in part because it might distract the jury from the actual crime. You know, the $8 billion embezzlement scheme SBF has been accused of. By and large, Kaplan has been partial to the prosecution here, and even prevented SBF’s counsel from bringing up his lawyers’ possible complicity in opening statements and permitting Can Sun, former general counsel at FTX, to testify under a non-prosecution agreement. On Thursday, Kaplan was trying to work out how much of this argument SBF’s lawyers can coax out of him on the stand, saying both sides have submitted lengthy filings that he hadn’t made up his mind on. Not only could an advice-of-counsel argument mislead jurors, but in many cases it often requires more formal legwork in trying to establish timelines and dig up legal documents than SBF’s lawyers seem to have put in. SBF’s lawyers, instead, argue they are looking to present a sort of abridged advice of counsel defense. They asked him questions about the auto-deleting Signal messaging settings SBF asked his underlings to use as well as the payment agreement between Alameda Research and FTX, which SBF’s lawyers were supposed to privy to to make the case that everything was above board even as SBF directed staff to drain customer funds from his exchange.
- Dan Kuhn, CoinDesk deputy managing editor
@DanielGKuhn
Read the full article on the web. |
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Cryptocurrency Payment Solutions are (Finally) Emerging, Thanks to Payment Gateways Like Alchemy Pay* If cryptocurrency-as-payment were truly easy and ubiquitous, there wouldn’t be playful articles about how hard it is. And that gets to the crux of the issue. The idea of “buying coffee with bitcoin” was quirky and fun but not mainstream. Not only Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency like Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, XRP have been used to make payments, but failed to take off as a widespread payment solution. None have truly caught fire in a mainstream way. The reason for this lack of adoption? Let’s look at it from the perspective of users, merchants, and enterprises. Continue reading **This is sponsored content by Alchemy Pay |
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