39 Burst results for "Auditor"
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from SBF TRIAL: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried's Trial Defense Episode 2
"The most important thing is, you know, just because a lawyer tells you something is okay, that's not a defense. Geez, he said it. He seemed to think everything was okay. Yeah. That's not an advice of counsel defense that negates criminal intent, that's an excuse. In part two of our series digging into SPF's defense, we dissect Sam Bankman -freed's claims that his lawyers played a larger role in FTX's collapse than he did. It might sound like a stretch, but there is legal precedent behind it. SPF also says he was pressured by counsel into turning FTX over to their hand -picked successor. In this episode, we sit down with Mark Litt, the prosecutor who took down Bernie Madoff, Travis Kling, a fund manager who still has millions of dollars tied up in FTX, and Mr. Purple, a pseudonymous crypto investor and fellow FTX victim, to see if there's any legitimacy to SPF's claims that lawyers who were there for FTX's rise are now primed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees. Money that SPF says should be used to pay back depositors. I'm Zach Ousman, you're listening to the SPF Defense Podcast, a coinage investigation. SPF's position is that FTX would have made it through the crisis if not for his lawyers, which conspired to steal the company out from under him, cover up their role in its operation, and siphon hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees from the bankrupt estate. SPF even names one lawyer in particular, Ryan Miller, who joined FTX US from the law firm's Sullivan and Cromwell, and planned on returning there after his time at the exchange, according to an affidavit from FTX's top lawyer. SPF says Miller conspired to hand the company over to Solcrom and their chosen agent, John J. Ray III, who also handled Enron's bankruptcy. And whether you come to believe Sam's claims or not, Solcrom and Ray clearly won. If FTX's bankruptcy process takes the two years like Enron's did, it's on track to cost over $800 million. And Solcrom's relationship has already been called out by more than just Sam. It's even been raised as an issue by senators and 18 state regulators. But could SPF be right about Ryan Miller and Solcrom's nefarious motives? And even if they did do some evil lawyer shit, will it be enough to get SPF off the hook? To fully understand this defense strategy, it helps to start with SPF's story behind his attempt to plug the now notorious multi -billion dollar hole at FTX back in November's collapse. As the story goes, he was preparing to handle the liquidity crisis by courting Nomura, Japan's largest investment group, and the crypto company Tron, who had pledged billions of dollars in liquidity to FTX, while other investors were still deliberating. SPF had said he planned on giving away most of his equity in the company, and therefore most of his wealth, in an attempt to make customers of FTX International whole. SPF has always maintained that FTX US remained completely solvent right up to the end. But SPF says his rescue plan failed because Ryan Miller and Solcrom agents at his company, including Tim Wilson, another FTX lawyer with a past at Solcrom, pressed him repeatedly to sign the company's over to John Ray in bankruptcy, and even implied that if he refused, they could have him arrested and quote, change control in order to authorize a proper insolvency process. SPF said he changed his mind within 10 minutes of signing, but it was already too late. And he says his lawyers reneged on their promises to let him select a board share, blocking him out of his accounts and refusing to communicate further. As soon as John Ray was installed, he chose Sullivan and Cromwell as FTX's primary counsel. To be fair, SPF actually has a point when it comes to the sketchiness of that process. Even outside legal observers have taken issue with Solcrom being tapped as the firm to manage FTX's bankruptcy. In fact, a bipartisan group of two Republican and two Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren, sent a letter to the judge overseeing the case, urging him to appoint an independent examiner rather than Solcrom, which worked with FTX and Alameda before the collapse, bringing in $8 .5 million in legal fees. The senators argued, quote, given their longstanding legal work for FTX, they may well bear a measure of responsibility for the damage wrecked on the company's victims. Regulators from 18 states echoed that issue, saying appointing an independent examiner wasn't just right, it was also legally required. But back in February, the judge in the case threw out those requests, saying it would cost too much money, though we should note FTX's lawyers also charged the bankruptcy estate $21 ,000 over 20 days just for meals, which apparently isn't too much to spend. And if you ask the victims in FTX's collapse, this is all pretty important, considering it's their deposits and claims at stake. And if their money is being drained in broad daylight by a law firm who also helped FTX pre -collapse, that might not sit any better than Sam spending it. We talked to Travis Kling, who lost his crypto investment fund in FTX's collapse, and asked him to weigh in. If you ask me at the very beginning, do you think this is going to be one of the most expensive bankruptcies in U .S. history, I would say yes. Yes. You know, it's enormous. There's a ton of fraud, and it's magic internet money. Trying to kind of Monday morning quarterback this and say, oh, Sam would have been better off not filing for bankruptcy. That's not something that I feel very strongly about. And Solkrom's outrageous fees aren't the only reason for concern. SPF also claims Solkrom gave a clean bill of health to Alameda's trading accounts on FTX in a report with the CFTC just months before the collapse. Furthermore, in his affidavit, Dan Friedberg, who was both FTX's chief compliance officer and Alameda's general counsel until he stepped down following the crisis, says Miller only included FTX U .S. in the bankruptcy proceedings precisely because Miller knew it had the funds to pay Solkrom for its work, which backs up what SPF said about how FTX U .S. was never insolvent. So this may be a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Solkrom denies any of this, of course. The firm's top bankruptcy lawyer, Andrew Dietrich, who told other lawyers FTX was rock solid in an email just days before the bankruptcy, said he only spoke with SPF twice. The FTX debtors also countersued Friedberg to seek damages, alleging he breached his fiduciary duties. We can't say much more beyond that because Solkrom never got back to us when we asked for a comment. But one thing is clear, what guidance Sam's lawyers gave him, and particularly what they knew about the business, will become integral to SPF's defense at trial. Even if you asked Ryan Miller before the collapse, the laws are pretty simple for any business, crypto or otherwise. Here he is explaining that concept at an MIT Bitcoin meetup in July 2022. Don't do fraud, don't lie, don't release materially incomplete statements. That then creates a basis for liability, liability from a criminal authority, be it a Department of Justice or liability in a civil context. Yet according to Caroline Allison's guilty plea, they had trouble following even those rules. In her sworn testimony, she said, quote, I agreed with Mr. Bankman, Fried and others to provide materially misleading financial statements to Alameda's lenders. Could Miller or any of SPF's lawyers, for that matter, be one of those others? Sam's other allegation that Miller contacted the DOJ to turn over documents that led to his indictment days before SPF linked, which controlled the company, makes Miller start to look even sketchier. But even if Solkrom really does have a true conflict of interest, could SPF really use their role in everything that happened to get an acquittal? Given that I'm not a lawyer, we pose that defense to Mark Litt, the prosecutor who took down Bernie Madoff. Can a lawyer be a criminal? Sure. Yeah. Can a lawyer be part of a criminal enterprise? Yes. Do they often go down? I don't know a lot of reputable lawyers who are going to bless lying to investors, lying to banks, intermingling funds, lying to auditors. If he happened to find one who knew all that was going on and blessed it, then maybe as a defense. But I tend to doubt it. You can't think of it as, well, oh, well, you know, Sullivan and Cromwell was involved or a former Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer was involved and, geez, he said he seemed to think everything was okay. That's not an advice of counsel defense that negates criminal intent. That's an excuse masquerading as an advice of counsel defense. Advice of counsel defense is very specific and narrow. You need competent counsel and they'll stipulate that any lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell is competent in the subject area that they're being asked about. Second, every material fact has to be disclosed to them. Third, you have to seek their legal opinion on a subject. And fourth, you have to follow the advice. So if the defense can make out those elements, I would think they'd be able to present the defense and it might have a shot of winning. So Sol Cromwell might not be saints, but as we covered last time in episode one, SPF isn't exactly facing a trial over FTX's collapse. He's charged with a lot of things that led up to FTX's collapse. Arguably, what's alleged to have happened post -collapse matters more for FTX's victims. And if you ask them, the reviews are mixed on exactly what's played out thus far. If I'm going to judge Sullivan and Cromwell and John J. Wray from my purview of being someone who's seen these things in bankruptcy, I would give them a very low grade because you can say, oh, this is crypto, it's difficult, but it's not that difficult. And sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don't. I will say that these debtors are extremely bad in my professional experience. That was Mr. Purple, a pseudonymous crypto investor who has experience following bankruptcy proceedings. For former FTX customers like him, Sam's spat with Sol Cromwell matters very little, as long as the firm can help achieve a meaningful recovery of their funds. And despite the fact that legal fees are stacking up, the bidding market for FTX customer claims is showing a growing hope they might not be stuck with pennies on the dollar. Another way to frame it is, you know, there's a claims market for FTX claims, trade claims, trade actively. There's a little niche of traditional finance that all they do is go around to different bankruptcies in all industries and they buy claims. This is this is a, you know, a subsector of of investing. And this is a huge bankruptcy. So this has been a very big liquid market. Right. And the first, you know, we're a very big creditor in this. So, you know, I'm in active conversations in this claims market. First, first bid we saw was in Thanksgiving and it was like six cents. That was the first bid. Six cents on the dollar, six cents on the dollar. And now now it's like 40 cents. And so it's gone from six to 40 cents. So then I'm like, OK, well, that feels quite good. Yeah. And OK, these guys are charging a load of money for that, but they have taken us from six cents to 40 cents. With both FTX's bankruptcy case and SPF's criminal case unfolding in real time, one may very well impact the other. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CFTC to share the report. Sam says Solkrom filed to support that FTX's structure was above board. The agency denied our request, saying it's unable to share documents that, quote, could interfere with the conduct of federal agency law enforcement activities. And of course, as long as Solkrom selected John Ray is running the show at FTX, it's unexpected anything comes out to support SPF's case. FTX, too, didn't get back for comment. So unless SPF has direct evidence of lawyers being aware of FTX's shaky financials and helping for years to cover it up, it's hard to judge SPF's advice of counsel defense or the idea that he thought he was in the clear leading up to the collapse just because his lawyers said it was fine. As Litt said, that sounds more like an excuse than a defense. As a community owned Web3 media outlet, Coinage will be breaking down everything we've learned together through this series and curating still unanswered questions at Coinage .Media. I'm Zach Guzman. This was the second part of Coinage's investigative series covering SPF's defense. Stay tuned for episode three, where we'll explore another pillar. Of SPF's defense. You've been listening to the SPF Defense on the Coindesk Podcast Network. Follow the Coindesk Podcast Network to get all the Coindesk shows in one place and head over to Coindesk .com for all the Sam Bankman freed coverage. Thanks for listening.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
Fresh update on "auditor" discussed on The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"All right. Let's talk about Sam Bankman here. Sam Bankman-Fried FTX trial. Five things you need to know gets underway very, very shortly, folks, in two days. So we're right around the corner here. So he's set to face 21 days in court during his criminal trial, expected from the 4th to November 9th. He's been in pretrial detention at the MDC in New York City, I think it's the Brooklyn Detention Center, and has filed several unsuccessful motions seeking temporary release to prepare for his trial. What happened to FTX? Well, we know what happened. We're not going to get into all that. They kind of go into the tweet that some say began the whole situation here, liquidating our FTT position here. All right, so he's facing seven counts of conspiracy and fraud relating to the collapse of the exchange. Who will testify? He said he'll call up several witnesses, including former FTX clients, investors, and staff. Is Caroline going to take the stand? That's going to be news, right? If Caroline takes a stand, talks about the diary, you know, maybe they cross-examine her about their personal relationship. People like salacious details, and I see it just trending and getting pretty popular here. Might even percolate into mainstream media. I think I could see mainstream media picking up the story like lover spat, billionaires, vegans, polycule. It's just got a lot of exciting components here. Let's see. Will his sentence be her whipping him again? Or... Sentence be what? Caroline whipping him again, or do you think he's into that? Is that a thing that happened? I don't know. They're pretty kinky. You were there. Wait a minute. Are you telling us you're a witness? Wait a minute. What did you do in Bahamas, DJ? Are you going to be witnessing us? Dude, I do freelance video work. Hmm. Okay. That's... I think we can see where you're going with that one. All right. FTX wasn't a Ponzi scheme, but a real business, said American author here. So this is according to Michael Lewis in an interview with CBS News. He shared his stories of meeting the CEO, Sam Bankman-Frieden, claimed that people were misreading him. He said that the fall was a financial collapse and no one had ever cast aspersions on the business if there hadn't been a run. That's so dumb. It's like no one would have seen me as a murderer if they hadn't found the body. No one had ever cast aspersions on the business if there hadn't been a run on deposits. They'd still be sitting there making tons of money. No, they probably wouldn't because it seemed like they had pretty bad operating expenses and it seems like they were definitely spending more than was coming in. And if they were spending more than they were coming in in November of 21 during the bull market, you don't think they're going to be spending more than they're making in the bear market. They would have collapsed. If anything, it's better that it happened sooner rather than later. I mean, they had the negative news in a semi-positive environment. I can only imagine the negative news in a negative environment. It would have been probably a little bit worse there. All right, the interview sparked much debate in the community. Many weren't happy with it. Ryan Selkis said the Michael Lewis interview is infuriating. SBF was a scumbag and we need to hear about his tragic call. Crypto lawyer John Deaton called the interview insane reporting. So what is going on with this? All right, let's just get into the... enough said. There are rumors that this is an apparatus of the intelligence agencies. Enough said. Drew, would you concur, CBS? Is it on the list with like Rolling Stone and Guardian? 100% said Drew. When it comes to stuff like that, if Drew says 100%, I'm more inclined to trust my gut on that one end. So I'm not saying it. I'm just saying smart people have said it more than Drew. Other people have said that. So to me, that is just nothing more than a psy-op to portray him as the lovable goofy kid that bites on a cucumber. He's a lot more than that. He's a lot more evil than that. That's all I got to say. I mean, what are your thoughts on... why do you think that they're fluffing him up? Is it because they disagree with his effective altruism? I was going to say, I mean, look, they got to... they have to soften the blow of how ugly this is because of the people he was known to have relationships with. And I'm not talking about BJ's videoing relationships. I'm talking about political relationships. On both sides, by the way. On both sides. We're not going to turn into a one side thing. It was on both sides. A lot of it was with Gary Wang that did it on the other end, you know, compared to what they're usually doing it. I was mad when FTX recovered a black folio because I could no longer keep up with the portfolio. Hey, slugger slug, enjoy your breakfast. Some say the most important meal of the day. Hope you're having something good. Get some eggs in that. Some people are wrong, though. Some people are wrong, though. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people. All right, let's talk about SEC finding charges against former FTX auditor over independence violations. So it looks like even the auditor was maybe a little bit sketchy here. John J. Ray has previously expected apprehensions about the validity of information in the audits conducted by the firm. SEC says they incorporated, let's see, provisions and over 200 different instances here, practice that reportedly compromises independence, according to federal security laws. So as alleged in our complaint over nearly three years, they fell short of fundamental principles. Our complaint is important reminder that auditor independence is crucial to investor protection. Yeah, that's an off use criticism of auditors like who who's the author of the Watchmen BJ? Oh, I have no clue. Neil Gaiman? Gaiman? Is it? I can't recall. Frank Frank something who wrote anyways, he has a very good quote. And the quote is that who watches the Watchmen? So who audits the auditors? It's a good question. And it makes you think about who is truly impartial. I am going to share some Vegas stories that show it made me think alright, so where we were saying Westgate, they had a steakhouse and they had an Italian place. Guess what 2022 Travelocities number one restaurant in Vegas, number one steakhouse and number one Italian restaurant. And they're both made it was actually TripAdvisor, TripAdvisor.com that seemed a little suspicious to you, BJ. Didn't we go there in 2021? Yes, yes. It was pretty good. It was pretty good, but best in Vegas. And they both happen to coincidentally, the same corporation gets an award from the same corporation for two different distinct restaurants. It's a fake award was my theory here. And so it's the same thing. You know, you can have Oh, yeah, JD Power and Associates, and then you're like, well, JD Power and Associates was corrupt. Oh, Consumer Protection Report, you're like, Oh, well, that was corrupt. Oh, FDA. Oh, FTC. It could go into government agencies, too. So we can't trust government agencies. We can't trust independent agencies. Can the blockchain save us? Maybe, maybe. Make it transparent, but do people still care? It's just like, for example, somebody who worked for the FDA that then works for another company that or goes from that other company, the FDA that's transparent, but people still don't care, even though it's blatantly obvious the corruption. Frank Miller. Okay. SPF has plot armor. He can be harmed. Was it? Oh, the show was Alan Moore and David Gibbons. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Oh, maybe it's Alan Moore. I think Frank Miller was the author. No, he's the author of the artists. Frank Miller was an artist. I can't recall guys. It's been a while since I've been deep into the comic industry here. TripAdvisor is one of the biggest third party. I'm in the vacation industry. TripAdvisor is one of the biggest third party scams. Whoa. Whoa. It's like, yeah, sometimes things just don't pass the sniff test or the really test. Guys, you got to be able to you got to turn on these filters. All right. The plot armor though. I almost like that. That's a part of the simulation there that make a little bit more entertaining. The plot armor would presumably come from the same people that, you know, visited the island. You know, what protected those people? What would be the same apparatus protecting him? All right. Let's talk about Doukwan. Speaking of protection, got people who need it here. Terra founder Doukwan chat history is leaked from the SEC here. So reveal the chat history between Doukwan and Daniel Shin, the founder of the payment app Chai. The chat between the both founders date back to 2019. Didn't even like Mr. Beast promote this like years ago? I think like early early Mr. Beast, I may be I'm not I'm not 100% sure. I can just create fake transactions that look real which will generate fees and we can wind that down as Chai grows. He said to Shin in response to a question, asked when will participants start engaging in staking or when the token airdrop ends? Shin was concerned about the suggestion and asked, well, what if people find out it's fake? He said, all the power to those that could prove it's fake because I would try my best to make it indiscernible. I won't tell if you won't wink. That part was missing in the message, though, but it was implied the defendant's attorneys were against the SEC's request saying it was impossible to allow Doukwan to leave Montenegro. The attorneys therefore requested that the court should dismiss the request, positing that would prevent Terraform's labs from presenting a statement from Doukwan during the summary judgment process, if granted. Yeah. OK, so we got the looks like SEC is trying to get them. They're trying to get them. Hey, put them put them in a cargo container and ship them over here. Terraform's partnered with Chai in 2019 to speed up Terra's payments. Blockchain announced its partnership with Chai and Medium noted it would rebuild the payment stack on the Terra blockchain to simplify the legacy payment system and provide transaction fees at a discounted rate to merchants. I mean, he obviously was greedy. He also bought mansions. I believe it was alleged. I believe, you know, there were some mansions, you know, I don't know if it was bought legally with the funds or not. I wasn't the auditor looking at that. But there are people saying like the guy really was trying to build something special. He just was in over his head. That kind of makes me think that. But obviously, yeah, if you're going to try to up in the whole world's payment system, don't spend customers' money. I'm not saying he did, but let's just have that as a general rule moving forward here. Let's see. Yeah, yeah. Well, Coinhead, we didn't announce our time change. And so I'm actually going to announce the ATB time change for PM. Well, let's do it next week. So OK, what do we got? OK. Uh, Coinhead, how are you doing, man? How are you doing? Let's let's let's be positive as we move into 2024 and 2025. I believe in you. Would you do an update on COTI? OK, that is a Cardano stablecoin. That's a good idea, Marco. I might have to look at that. The biggest problem with the travel industry is when booking through third parties, they get a cheaper room price. But when they arrive, they get what they pay for. Booking through third party is hell. Yeah. Yeah. I would concur. Yeah. I've never trusted any of those third party systems. All right. All right. Let's talk about Tron. I am Tron. All right. Tron total value lock balloons to over 15 billion dollars. DeFi growth evident here. So I looked into it. 14 of the 15 was just in time. Now I'm just kidding. That was a joke. That was a joke. Everybody. It was actually 14.9. Can we kidding? All right. As a press time, the total value locked associated with Tron has surged to an impressive 15.8 billion, reflecting a substantial growth of more than 2% within the span of just 24 hours. I mean, 2% is a lot when you're dealing with 16 billion. Let's see. That would be 16, 32 million. Yeah. Only 32 million. 160 million would be 10%. 1% would be, yeah, 60. Wow. Only 32 million. All right. Total value locks is essential for assessing a DeFi project's health, security, and attractiveness to users and investors. So this is a thing that retail looks at when they're trying to pick what coin to buy. And right as we get closer to the bull run, we have total value lock surging. This increases my odds, or the probability, I think, that 15.5 was the bottom. I have said this since 2021, since I first ever appeared on this camera. You are not going to out trade Justin Sun, okay? You're just not going to do it. Look it up. He catches tops. He catches bottoms. And it signals that he's long term bullish in crypto's ecosystem because if Bitcoin was going to fall, Tron's going to fall. And I don't think he would be investing all this money. So I feel like Justin feels like there's a reversal in the markets here. So I'm not saying I'm super bullish on Tron, but I'm super bullish on Justin Sun being super bullish. I'm reading between lines. Maybe he's not super bullish. Maybe he's tentatively bullish. But I think he's at least that. All right. So timeshares. You can trust a timeshare salesman. Ha ha ha. LOL.
The Breakdown
A highlight from How the Crypto Investing Landscape Has Changed
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, September 24. And that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review. Or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends. Welcome back to Long Read Sunday. Today we are getting into a topic that relates to maybe one of the biggest themes that we're watching right now, which is capital fun flows and the institutional engagement with the cryptosphere. Now, our piece today comes from Jeff Dorman, the CIO of ARCA, who has some really interesting insights to share about the time that he has been running his fund. The piece is called What I Learned Managing a Crypto Fund for Five Years. And because I am recording my sixth podcast of the day, I am going to enlist a little help from AI me, but I will be back as regular old NLW with some wrap up thoughts at the end. I've been running a crypto fund for one thousand eight hundred and twenty five days. ARCA just achieved a major milestone, reaching a five year track record of managing outside capital in our liquid hedge fund. Five years in any other industry may not seem like a long time frame, but in crypto, we often joke that one crypto year is equivalent to five normal years. And with twenty four seven trading hours, it's not untrue. During these past five years, I have seen many of our peers come and go, leaving a bit of survivorship bias as it pertains to crypto asset management. As chief investment officer overseeing this fund, as well as three others under the ARCA umbrellas, I experienced firsthand the evolution of this industry through good times, bad times and constant innovation. The five year anniversary provided a natural timestamp to reflect upon what I learned about managing money and about the industry. Here are five of the most important takeaways from managing a crypto portfolio for the last five years. In short, investing in these markets is very challenging. One tweak assumptions and risk models. This perhaps goes without saying to any person who has invested in this market, but this is not an easy asset class to invest in. For starters, the frequent booms and busts creates a false sense of liquidity and an often accurate depiction of expected beta and returns. All risk models, expected loss provisions and sizing parameters are based on historical data and correlations, which change incredibly quickly. There is a reason why most funds in this space are early stage venture funds, where many of these real time market related issues are not relevant. For those like ourselves who manage liquid funds, it is a constant game of tweaking assumptions and risk models to interpretation over speed. Contrary to popular belief, just because crypto markets trade 24 seven globally does not necessitate 24 seven trading coverage. Overtrading every tick is costly in any asset class, and the additional hours of crypto trading often try to lure you into more activity. But the reality is that the fragmented global investing landscape actually gives you more time to react to news and information. While there will always be bots and algorithms that react immediately to news, much like after hours equities trading post earnings, these initial knee jerk reactions are often wrong. And since one third of the world is sleeping at any given time, it often takes days for the true market reaction to play out. A correct interpretation of information is much more important than the speed with which you react. Three, careful documentation is crucial. On the flip side, the 24 seven workday does lead to difficulties not seen in traditional markets. In TradFi, even your worst day week eventually comes to an end, giving you ample time to reset and think through decisions while markets are closed without price gyrations clouding or influencing your thought process. In crypto, these natural resets often don't exist. Take the events of Terra Luna, for example. The entire unwind of a 30 billion dollar ecosystem happened within three days, with continuous trading and new information flow over the 72 hour period. We made decisions during this stretch that in retrospect would not have been made with more of a grace period. And we have since learned how to better implement risk management during a future period like this. In hospitals, mistakes don't often occur because doctors are overworked or tired, but rather because of improper handoffs to the next doctor who lacks that full set of information because the previous doctor failed to document fully. Crypto asset management requires similar knowledge, handoffs and documentation for balance between short and long. In debt and equity markets, quiet periods of time, summer holidays often lead to slow grinds higher in price. It is expensive to stay short and dividends and coupons continue to accumulate, adding more buy interest to the market. The opposite is true in digital assets, since the majority of crypto projects accrue value through network activity, slower periods of time tend to slow momentum of an asset. And since most assets have no distribution of cash flows, the cost to short is minimal. As such, negative price action tends to be more prevalent when markets are slow, leading to difficult decisions with regard to hedging and long exposure. As a result, active management continues to trump passive indexes. Rules based passive index strategies simply cannot keep pace with the innovation and changes to these markets. Similarly, these indexes can't take advantage of the volatility, which creates quite a bit of alpha. Over time, this will likely change as the market matures, but we're not there yet. Building a good team is fundamental for success and incredibly challenging. I've worked for seven different financial firms over the past 25 years. I've seen thousands of resumes and have interviewed hundreds of people. I've worked personally in just about every financial department, banking, trading, research, sales, business development. If a TradFi Wall Street firm asked me for a candidate, I could find them one pretty easily that best fits their needs. Five, hire people passionate about the industry. But what are the best attributes and qualifications for a research analyst in crypto? What makes the best trade ops person? Who is best suited to handle investor relations? These are still not easy questions to answer in crypto. During the first few years of our fund, we took what we could get, which is to say, whoever wanted a job. The pay sucked, the hours were long, and the future was very uncertain. Anyone who wanted a job in this industry in 2018 shared a true passion for blockchain success and was willing to learn any part of the job necessary to succeed. Most people who joined this industry pre -2020 are still working in this industry, and their job responsibilities evolve in real time. But in 2021, I could have handpicked any person I wanted from every major bank, brokerage, and hedge fund, who all had zero crypto experience but saw big money ahead. The resumes were pouring in. Many of these employees didn't work out. In 2023, we're back to the passionate souls who will do anything to work in this industry. Six, everyone wears multiple hats. This is a very hands -on business where research analysts have to test functionality of applications, challenge status quo financial modeling, and network live with other industry veterans at conferences. Traders have to navigate back and forth from US macro to Asian currency markets to crypto -specific on -chain wallet movements depending on the current correlation du jour. Back office employees have to test new service providers every three weeks to keep up with changing regulation, best practices, and LP demands while navigating constant bankruptcies, closures, and hack attempts. The common denominator seems to be a real willingness to test new theses. If you give 10 equity analysts the same inputs, they will give you largely the same answer and will present the same homogenous modeling techniques to arrive at this answer. If you give 10 crypto analysts and traders the same inputs, they will most likely give you 10 different answers using entirely different analyses. That's refreshing and often leads to outsized alpha, but also creates challenges when it comes to creating a repeatable formula for success. Seven, trade ops is the most important department. When I worked at credit and equity funds, the back office was overlooked. They were usually young kids eager to move into a real trading role as soon as they could. The job was basic blocking and tackling. Make sure trades settled, make sure your brokerage statement was accurate, and make sure the fund admins did their job. Compliance teams were there simply because they had to be. We all knew the rules, we obeyed them, and if there was any doubt, we checked with compliance but knew the answer would be, don't do it. We should be so lucky in crypto. Trade operations is the single most important job in crypto. You have to touch the assets every single day and a single mistake could cost the firm millions of dollars. As a result, not only do these need to be the most trustworthy people in the firm, but they need to build redundancies that can still operate even if they themselves vanish. Getting into a trade ops role is more glamorous than getting out of trade ops, and those who build their careers in this subset of the fund business end up learning the most about blockchain. Similarly, compliance is not an afterthought in crypto. Unlike in TradFi, it cannot be assumed that your employees know the rules, as most come from completely different backgrounds than Wall Street. Constant education and monitoring is a must. Further, a compliance officer can't just read the rules and assume compliance since there are few clear rules to follow, despite Gary Gensler telling us otherwise. To do your best as both a fiduciary and a law -abiding company is a Herculean effort. 8. The sell side is getting better. In traditional finance, the sell side offers a pretty valuable role. They underwrite new transactions, create novel financing ideas, advise companies on how best to participate in the capital markets, facilitate trading in existing securities, write research on new and existing securities, and pass along market color between participants. Both full -service investment banks and niche broker -dealers exist, but regardless of whether you use a one -stop shop or piecemeal the services with multiple firms, the services themselves are all covered. While the sell side is getting better in crypto, it is still incredibly fragmented and many of these services still do not exist. As a result, fund managers are often on an island, forced to manufacture its own deals, structure its own financings, and do its own research from scratch. Written research from OTC trading shops has greatly increased in volume and improved in quality, providing a necessary channel check on the state of the markets. But the trading itself continues to be very exchange -based, black box, and therefore lacks natural axes between investors. Trading color about flows and activity has improved, but there are fewer market participants to glean information from. There is still no full -service investment bank, and in fact, true investment banking services for underwriting and advisory of token launches is probably the biggest white space going forward. I'm constantly shocked at how few well -known Wall Street capital markets tools are utilized within crypto. Most token launches are doomed from the start. From low float, high fully diluted valuation, FDV token launches, to direct listings at insane prices, to poorly written tokenomics, token issuers, who are often developers and lack financial knowledge, continue to have to come to market without the assistance of those who know how to do this best, which subsequently leads to worse investment opportunities for asset managers. Some service providers are getting a lot better, like Custody Solutions, OTC Trading, and Options Liquidity. Still, others are getting worse, like fund admins and auditors, who in the wake of FTX are pulling back from these offerings. On the tech and research side, it's amazing that Bloomberg's crypto services continue to be irrelevant. The coverage list, their index, and all functionality is still from 2017 and does not take into account how much this industry has grown and evolved. Fortunately, newcomers like Nansen, Masari, Glassnode, Dune Analytics, Telegram, and others have innovated fast enough to take this corner, and we are grateful for these companies. It is entirely possible to run a crypto fund in 2023 without ever logging into a Bloomberg terminal. Overall, fund management is still challenged by the lack of sell -side tools. As the sell -side improves, so will the number and breadth of funds. 9. The investor base is getting smarter. When we began our fund five years ago, we knew the educational journey for prospective LPs would be slow. We were learning constantly as we invested and doing our best to educate interested investors in real time, but it was not practical to expect anyone who wasn't focused full -time on this industry to keep pace. Questions from prospective LPs tended to focus more on how we invest versus what we invest in, and there was definitely a bit of a leap of faith by investors. Fast forward to today and the script has completely flipped. LPs are getting much smarter about the asset class and the investment universe, thereby asking better questions. In some cases, the LPs now know more than we do as they are exposed to different areas of the industry that may not be in our everyday focus. That said, the amount of bad information that continues to flow effortlessly through the media and influencer accounts continues to reach LPs as well, often surprising us in regard to certain topics of interest that we deem irrelevant, but our investors believe are topical. As investors start to become more digital asset savvy, they want far more control over investments and specificity has increased. Asset managers in this space have launched highly specialized funds based on investor demand, including DeFi focused funds, NFT funds, etc. Many asset managers, including ARCA, have started creating funds of one inch that allow for more specificity, but provide the professional team to manage the investments. In 2018, if you asked us, we would recommend going with a professional investor, but as information is more readily available and UI UX of projects get better, we encourage retail investors to research and invest. However, to generate alpha where information asymmetry exists, it's still valuable to have professional fund managers who can take advantage of the 24 -7 news cycle, market volatility, and a murky regulatory environment. Overall, running a fund in this new and innovative space has been incredibly rewarding and we look forward to the next five years. Fund managers will continue to straddle the line between becoming more TradFi -like and adopting best practices of Wall Street, versus finding ways to take advantage of crypto -only opportunities, yield farming, airdrops, testing new applications. The most important factor for success in the digital asset space is faith in the future. We have to believe we are at the frontier of building a new financial system that has the capacity to transform society. While we fully expect bumps in the road and pushback from incumbents benefiting from the status quo, we know that as long as we continue to move forward, fight for the necessary changes, and adapt as needed, this industry will succeed. Okay guys, back to regular old non -AI NLW. The thing that stands out to me after reading that article, as trite and as cliche as it sounds, is just the how early we are theme once again. Every cycle it feels like we see it as the mass flow of new institutions into the space and to some extent it's true. We obviously got a lot more market participants from the traditional sector last time around than we had before. It feels, however, now that we're inching ever closer to a period in which those traditional actors aren't just tourists, but are long -term participants in the space. Certainly right now you have an interesting jockeying for position where the Blackrocks and Fidelities and Franklin Templeton's of the world are laying the foundation for what seems like a much more proactive end -to -end from the beginning of the cycle on through whatever happens after kind of approach. I've said before and I'll say it again that I think Blackrock's ETF application will mark a significant pivot inflection point of this cycle when we look back at it historically. I think we will see it as a firewall that stopped whatever further slide might have happened and reinforced for market participants that crypto, despite being as down as it was in every sense of the word, was going to come back. And so I think about Jeff's next five years running a fund and how different they'll look. The different participants that will make up the market. The different ways in which people will engage. It's pretty hard to imagine from where we are, but it's certainly interesting to think about. Anyways friends, that is going to do it for today's Long Read. I hope you are having a wonderful fall weekend wherever you are. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other.
News, Traffic and Weather
Fresh update on "auditor" discussed on News, Traffic and Weather
"Google took on a haunting tone before federal regulators today Northwest News radio's John LoBertini reports Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the court he worries Google use will its profits to strike exclusive deals with publishers for training its AI models further boosting its market share to the detriment of Microsoft and other rivals. As a society we haven't really come to terms. High -tech expert Rob Inderle says artificial intelligence scares the public and the industry and Google is one of biggest its players. Certainly it's been part of the rider's strike the actor's strike it's part of the UAW strike for automotive I expect more strikes. Google is the dominant search engine with as much as 90 percent of the market. Microsoft's being might be a distant second. The government has to prove two things. One they have to prove that Google is a monopoly but then they also have to prove that Google is abusing their monopoly power. The potential still for a monopoly has the Federal Trade Commission considering whether to break up Google making it smaller companies. is a monopoly. news Radio. An 82 -year -old Seattle woman is among those having federal student student loans forgiven by the Biden administration. More from Northwest News Radio's Jeff Poggio. This is part of a A program that corrects clerical errors. Karen Angstrom had continued to pay off her loan even though the terms had been is fine. She's one of more than 800 ,000 borrowers with income -driven repayment plans who never received credit for late or partial payments. The corrections made to the accounts are resulting in loan forgiveness. Angstrom had $175 ,000 in debt erased. In all, some $39 billion in student loans are forgiven being through the program. Jeff Poggio, Northwest News Radio. A King County council member is calling for some deep scrutiny for a county funded youth crime diversion program. More from Northwest News Radio's Ryan Harris. Councilmember help. Director Reagan Dunn says he has several concerns with restorative community pathways and its member organizations because he says they've been unable to account for how tens of millions of county dollars are being spent and Dunn says they don't adequately measure the success of the programs aimed at keeping low -level youth offenders from violating their crimes. Initial reports indicate that a very small fraction of the individuals who are assigned to these programs are actually completing their assignments. So Dunn wants a state audit of the programs, transparency with which the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office agrees. Spokesman Casey McNerthney says they have two goals. decrease recidivism and we want youth who have the wrong behavior to correct that. But the way you do that is with clear The State Auditor's Office says the programs will be covered by its spring audit, no reply yet for our request request for comment from Restorative Community Pathways Ryan Harris Northwest News Radio. Thanks Northwest News Radio. You're home for breaking news and traffic
The Breakdown
A highlight from Courts Hand SEC Half an L in Binance US Case
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, September 19th, and today we are talking about Binance and their SEC court decision yesterday. Is it significant? And is it just kicking the can down the road? We will go through all of that. Before we do, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, it is a day that ends in Y, so there is, of course, another Binance story. Binance had a fairly big day in court on Monday in their legal battle with the SEC. Leading into the hearing, the allegations and speculation had started to reach a fever pitch. The SEC had begun to hone in on the theory that Binance U .S. did not and never had exclusive control over customer assets. That if true would be a big deal as Binance had always maintained that U .S. customer assets were strictly segregated from the international exchange. Indeed, they used this argument to defend an SEC injunction shortly after the legal proceedings commenced in June. If granted, the injunction would have frozen assets at Binance U .S., which would have functionally been a death sentence for the domestic exchange. In deciding that injunction, the court ordered the parties to come back with an agreement that they could both live with rather than making a decision on their own. As part of those consent orders, Binance agreed that they would ensure that only local U .S. staff would have access to customer assets. However, as the SEC dug further into their investigation, they claimed that Binance U .S. which they viewed as intimately linked to Binance International. Cefu was launched under the name Binance Custody in December 2021. It was renamed in February of this year, around the same time that rumors of an in -depth government investigation into Binance first emerged. On Friday, Cefu asserted in a press release that they were entirely separate from Binance International and that they don't even service BAM Trading, which is the company that operates Binance U .S. They wrote, We strongly reject this claim. As a custody technology services provider under Cefu Holdings, we are committed to servicing institutional clients with digital asset custody solutions in select jurisdictions, excluding the United States, among others. Furthermore, Cefu's operations and services are distinctly separate from BAM and Binance Holdings Limited." A Cefu spokesperson added that, Unfortunately, earlier in the week, Binance U .S. had contradicted parts of that claim in a legal filing. Rather than denying the use of Cefu in their operations, Binance U .S. acknowledged that the service was developed by Binance International and licensed to the U .S. entity. And while the specific origin of the Binance U .S. custody system might seem like a minor detail, this is the main focus of the lawsuit at the moment. The SEC is claiming that Binance International had de facto control over customer funds at the U .S. exchange. If that's the case, then Binance could be viewed as deliberately misleading the court surrounding this issue. It would also advance the SEC's argument that Binance U .S. was nothing more than a front to allow U .S. customers to access the international exchange and provide a veneer of domestic regulatory compliance. So that's a bit of the background. Now on Monday morning, the SEC filed additional material to support their order, which asked the court to compel Binance to cooperate with the discovery process. They said, quote, Indeed, in earlier filings, the regulator had raised issues surrounding the lack of disclosure. They noted that Binance had only produced 220 documents, many of them characterized as quote, unintelligible screenshots and documents without dates or signatures. Further, according to the SEC, Binance U .S. were resisting the deposition of a number of key executives. In a court filing in August, Binance claimed that the deposition of CEO Brian Schroeder would be, quote, You'll remember that Schroeder was confirmed to have left the company in early September, although his lack of social media presence has led some to speculate that his departure was closer to the beginning of the year. The SEC appears to have been informed of Schroeder's departure only recently and clearly haven't recruited him yet as a cooperating witness. They said that this strange turn of events and Binance's continued resistance to producing Schroeder, quote, Now, the SEC was primarily concerned that Binance U .S. was continuing to use SEFU for its custody, which could be used to shift customer assets offshore. They said that Binance U .S. had failed to convince the regulator that they had control over customer assets, adding that these claims were, quote, Binance U .S. had provided, quote, They said that, quote, BAM insists that this court, like the SEC, should accept packaged counsel narratives, carefully drafted declarations, and small curated sets of documents regarding control of BAM's customer assets, and that any lingering concerns are much ado about nothing. To top it all off, the SEC warned that Binance CEO CZ is, quote, The SEC claimed that they have demonstrated that, quote, Binance has a long history of controlling BAM to serve Binance's own unlawful purpose. Ultimately, the regulator asked the court for an order, quote, Now, in their opposing court filing placed on the record on Monday morning, Binance U .S. reiterated their claim that SEC demands were unreasonable. They called the documents requested overbroad and too much of an inconvenience. Binance U .S. further alleged that many of the documents requested are either not in the exchange's possession or fall outside the scope of the lawsuit. At 3 p .m., the parties entered the courtroom for what would be a tense hearing. Binance U .S. called the demand for documents so broad they would be impossible to produce. A lawyer representing the exchange said that, quote, The judge indicated that Binance U .S. really would need to provide a bit more documentation of their custody arrangements. They said, adding that they weren't, quote, The SEC lawyer, meanwhile, explained that the problem at the moment was that, quote, They argued that the SEC needed much more information about the wallet set up at Binance U .S. than they currently have. At one stage, the attorney for Binance exclaimed, They said that the exchange had responded to every targeted request from the regulator. The lawyer added that, quote, So what came out of all of this? Well, ultimately, the judge declined to make any orders to compel discovery from Binance, but it was made clear that the exchange would need to increase its cooperation, let's say. The judge said that they were not, adding that, quote, I'm not going to order from the bench right now that they produce or not produce things. Let's continue to try to work this out. I just want to keep things moving. The judge also noted that, quote, As investor Adam Cochran summed it up, the judge did deny the inspection but also said they needed Binance U .S. to comply and produce more documentation as the judge was not convinced of the asset backing. This is saying the inspection is overkill for now and giving Binance the chance to comply. Now, ultimately, these issues around Sifu are largely still about litigating whether the assets of Binance U .S. should be frozen to prevent customer funds from being sent offshore. However, given that volumes on the exchange have collapsed by more than 99 percent over the past six months, it seems likely that users have largely taken that issue off the table already. The matter is scheduled to return to court on October 12th for a follow -up hearing. Now, outside of the hearing, the court docket continues to bloat with additional evidence gleaned by the SEC. Much of this evidence was originally filed under seal or in a heavily redacted form, but the regulator is currently in the process of unsealing documents. Earlier this month, the SEC obtained the cooperation of the former auditor for Binance U .S., which produced in excess of 6 ,500 pages on the accounting at the exchange. The document was unredacted on Monday, revealing the auditor's conclusion that it was, quote, very difficult to ensure the company was fully collateralized at specific points in time. One of the SEC's requests for further information filed in June related to a 250 million dollar intercompany loan given to Binance U .S. by the international exchange in December of last year. The convertible note was funded using BUSD, 183 million of which was sent to Paxos to convert into dollars. The SEC wanted some additional details about the reason for this transaction. The topic was initially flagged as confidential by Binance, but that designation was apparently successfully rebutted by the SEC. Now, there was a lot of chatter on this on Twitter. With many people taking it as evidence of some smoking gun, Binance had been less than honest about their dealings with Binance U .S. Perhaps the most intriguing tidbit, however, filed recently was a declaration given by J. Emmett Murphy of the SEC's trial division. The document, again filed on Monday, introduced into evidence three additional depositions. All three were filed under seal, but were used to support the need for further examination of the SEFU system. The declaration identified one witness as Eric Kellogg, BAM's chief information security officer, but the other two identities were redacted. All three depositions occurred over the last month, with the latest taking place last Wednesday. So here's the way that Adam Cochrane summed this all up, which I think is a pretty good TLDR. He tweets, SEC seeks court order for inspection of Binance U .S., now expressly calling out that SEFU is indeed a Binance -related entity and that Binance U .S. has been misleading the court. The SEC calls out that this violates the consent decree that required new wallets expressly away from Binance International Control and Access, but interestingly specifically notes this is important as Binance has controlled BAM for its quote, own unlawful purposes. That's a claim we've not seen the SEC lobby here before, at least not outside of anything sealed or redacted. We also learned for the first time that the SEC sought the testimony of Brian Schroeder, U .S. CEO, and Jasmine Lee, U .S. CFO, but have been denied and fought on that and only just got told that Schroeder is no longer CEO, despite Schroeder being missing for eight plus months. They had argued that Schroeder's testimony would be too disruptive to business and now got told he isn't on the job, which is wild, as I think we all assumed he pulled a Catherine Coley Brian Brooks and gave testimony. Seems he's just disappeared and gone silent? Either way, the SEC here is suggesting, one, there is evidence of crimes, two, there is indeed evidence that SEFU is Binance International, three, SEFU is not simply a wallet provider, and four, BAM executives themselves lack insight on Binance U .S. assets and tooling. Now, for completeness, Adam Cochran also tweeted about the deposition from the auditor that said that it was impossible to tell whether Binance U .S. had been fully collateralized at specific points in time. He said, if your own external auditor can't say you are fully collateralized when you are supposed to be a 100 % reserves exchange and have your own proof of reserves that claim you're over collateralized, that is a problem. Binance uses the SEFU wallet custody system, previously Binance Custody, for both Binance International and Binance U .S., as noted in their filings. If this system is not capable of managing the small Binance U .S. numbers, how could it keep track of International? And if Binance U .S., its more compliant exchange, never commingled or misused client funds and was isolated from International as they claim, then it would be literally impossible to have a gap. The only way this is possible is the misuse of customer funds resulting in losses. I believe at some point in their scaling, they had material losses when misusing customer funds and exposing themselves to leverage via BNB. They've continued to misuse customer funds to try and cover this hole, but a declining market has made that an ongoing shell game. Whether you think that is a fair assessment or not, there should at this point be absolutely no doubt that the correct risk model is to move your assets off of Binance. Now, for the sake of a counterpoint, Bruce Fenton tweeted this morning, Binance is perhaps the most scrutinized and attacked company in modern history. The United States has investigated them and thrown everything they can at them. Yet, despite all this, we don't have a single accusation, let alone evidence, that Binance has lost customer funds. Now, trying to wrap this all up, a lot of the commentary around this is trying to figure out if the SEC won or lost this court trip. Will Clemente from Reflexivity Research tweeted, courts have been handing the SEC L after L lately, but others aren't so sure. CZ certainly didn't think so, retweeting someone who wrote, seems like they can't find anything but they want to continue making headlines. Maybe the most middle of the road interpretation came from the headline from Bloomberg, which read, SEC fails to win immediate inspection of Binance US software, and I think that that fails to win is probably a better representation at this point than actually getting the loss. But my friends, as you can tell, we are well in the minutia of this, but the details matter. There certainly is a feeling of crescendo to this story. And either way, it's hard for me to imagine that the industry isn't better on the other side of it. Better because Binance has vindicated, or better, unfortunately, because the last giant has fallen, and we can finally move on, largely rid of what came before. In either case, I will be sure to keep you updated. So until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.
News, Traffic and Weather
Fresh "Auditor" from News, Traffic and Weather
"7. Stay informed. Good evening at 731. I'm Kelly Blier. And here are the top local stories. Chilling testimony today from the top man at Microsoft about the monopoly power of Google. Northwest News Radio's Lobertini John reports on the latest wrinkle in the antitrust case against the tech giant. As GeekWire put it, Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI looked like a glimmer search grounding in being to chat. But CEO Satya Nadella heard here back in May told the court he worries Google will use its profits to strike exclusive deals with publishers for training its AI and models further boosting its market share to the detriment of Microsoft and other rivals. We just a took huge step towards general purpose AI that we didn't think we were gonna have until 2040. High tech expert Rob Inderle says artificial intelligence scares the public and the industry and Google is one of its biggest players. Certainly it's been part of the rider's strike, the actor's strike, it's part of the UAW strike for a long time. market. The potential for a monopoly has the Federal Trade Commission considering whether to break the company, making it smaller. John Lobertini, Northwest News Radio. There were a number of problems with how Washington State pandemic distributed aid for schools. More from Northwest News Radio's Jeff Pajalup. A federal audit released last week found that the public didn't have sufficient insight into how school districts plan to spend the money. to According the Seattle Times, auditors also found weaknesses in how expenditures of the aid were reviewed for compliance. As a result of the audit, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction has changed its procedures. The OSPI will now randomly expenditures sample of pandemic aid to ensure they're in line with federal and state law. School districts will also be required to post their budgets online and be more transparent with how they are spending federal dollars. The highest statewide minimum wage in the nation is about to get even higher. Northwest News Radio's Corwin Haake reports Washington's lowest earners are getting a raise. The State Department of Labor and Industry says on January 1st, 2024, our state's minimum wage goes up to $10 .28 an hour. That's 54 cents more per hour compared to this year's minimum. We knew already the rate would go up. By law it increases every new year, but we sets the new rate in the fall based on the federal consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. Individual cities are permitted to set a minimum wage higher than the states. Seattle is one example at $18 an hour, but no city can go lower than the state minimum. Washington's minimum wage remains highest among US states, but ours is topped by a non -state. Washington DC $17 an hour. Corwin Haake, Northwest News Radio. Northwest News Time is 7 34. Let's head over to the High Performance Homes Traffic Center and get the latest on our roads. Here's Natalie Melendez. South Lake Union, an accident on Denny Way is blocking the right eastbound lane off to Dexter Avenue when there is some slowing in Kent and I -5 North crashes on the right shoulder past 5 16. This report is sponsored by unbound dot org. A girl in Kenya dreams becoming a doctor and elder in Guatemala dreams being part of a community. Reach on and change their world and it'll change your own unbound dot org. Our next hold this traffic at 7 44. Come before Shannon O 'Donnell checks our forecast brought to you by Northwest Crawl Space Services. Either everybody after
Ethereum Daily
A highlight from Applications Open For RetroPGF 3
"Welcome to your Ethereum news roundup. Here's your latest for Tuesday, September 19th, 2023. Optimism opens applications for RetroPGF3. Base introduces the Pessimism monitoring system. Arbitrum announces the return of Arbitrum Odyssey. And Safe introduces ERC7512. All this and more starts right now. The Arbitrum on Gitcoin Grants round is now live. If you'd like to support ETH daily, please consider donating to our grant by visiting ethdaily .io forward slash gitcoin. The Optimism Collective is now accepting applications for its third retroactive public goods funding round in which a total of 30 million OP tokens will be distributed to projects that have contributed to Optimism. Optimism contributors and builders can apply between now and October 23rd. Batch holders, which are members that have been selected to be part of the Citizen's House, will vote on the allocation of the 30 million OP tokens in November. The Citizen's House is a 1 % one -vote based governance system. 20 % of the OP token treasury has been allocated to retroactive public goods funding. Base introduced Pessimism, an open source monitoring system designed to improve security across the OP stack and Ethereum ecosystems. Pessimism can be used to detect protocol threats and security vulnerabilities specific to the OP stack and EVM compatible chains. Developers can use Pessimism to monitor network performance. The system consists of three primary subsystems coined as ETL, risk engine, and alerting. Coinbase plans to expand Pessimism's coverage to include bridge monitoring, including withdrawal safety and detecting potential faults. Users can make any feature requests and contribute to Pessimism by opening an issue on GitHub. Arbitrum announced the return of Arbitrum Odyssey, a seven -week initiative that rewards users with NFTs for completing protocol -specific tasks on the network. Initially launched in June of 2022, the program was paused after its first week due to high traffic and higher than expected gas fees. Arbitrum partnered with Galaxy for the new initiative. The new Arbitrum Odyssey is set to commence on September 26 and will encompass tasks involving 13 different protocols. Arbitrum explicitly stated that participants will not receive airdrops apart from the NFT badges earned. Arbitrum also announced Hop Protocol as the winner for Bridge Week. Users who used Hop Protocol during Bridge Week can now claim their NFT badge. And lastly, SAFE introduced ERC7512, a proposed standard aiming to bridge the gap between smart contract audit reports, which are typically in PDF form, and smart contracts deployed on -chain. The standard simplifies the discovery and verification of smart contract audits. ERC7512 allows auditing firms to cryptographically sign the reports using EIP712. On -chain smart contract audits can then be parsed to extract audit details such as auditor information and verified standards. Audit firms can also build their reputation through on -chain attestations facilitated by Ethereum attestation service. ERC7512 is currently open for community discussion. In other news, HAI released V1 governance talks, Eclipse introduced an Ethereum layer too powered by Solana VM, Eigenlayer partnered with Cubist, and Dan is now live on base. For the full list, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io This has been a roundup of today's top news stories in Ethereum. You can support this podcast by subscribing and following us on Twitter at ethdaily. Also subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow.
Afternoon News with Tom Glasgow and Elisa Jaffe
Fresh update on "auditor" discussed on Afternoon News with Tom Glasgow and Elisa Jaffe
"-funded youth crime diversion programs being called for by king county councilmember councilmember reagan dunn says he has several concerns with restorative community pathways and its member organizations because he says they've been unable to account for how tens of millions of county dollars are being spent and dunn says they don't adequately measure the success of the programs aimed at keeping low -level youth offenders from repeating and escalating their crimes initial reports indicate that a very small fraction of the individuals who are assigned to these programs are actually completing their assignments so dunn wants a state audit of the programs transparency with the which king county prosecuting attorney's office agrees spokesman casey mcnerthony says they have two goals decrease recidivism and we want youth who have the wrong behavior to correct that but the way you do that is with clear transparency the state auditor's office says the programs will be covered by its spring audit no reply yet for our request comment for from restorative community pathways ryan harris northwest news radio the family of a man who was mistakenly on put a first responder blacklist has settled a lawsuit against the city of seattle details from northwest news radio's arlene johnson on november 2nd 2021 william uric was having a medical emergency at home his then 13 year old son called 911 i don't know he can't breathe or something but he's not okay i think he's having a heart attack or something medics did not enter the residents though instead they waited as instructed for a law enforcement escort because uric was mistakenly on a list of people who were hostile to first responders the family's attorney mark he lingquist had never been hostile to first responders but somehow he got tagged because of a previous tenant uric's son called 911 a second time and medics decided to go in without an escort but it was too late medical experts said he would have had about a 25 percent chance of survival if the medics had gone in initially the settlement amounts to 1 .86 million dollars carlene johnson northwest news this radio still ahead death threats against a state lawmaker i'm jeff pojola with her position that's upsetting some constituents it's 604 northwest news radio you're hoping for breaking news traffic
Coronavirus
A highlight from Applications Open For RetroPGF 3
"Welcome to your Ethereum news roundup. Here's your latest for Tuesday, September 19th, 2023. Optimism opens applications for RetroPGF3. Base introduces the Pessimism monitoring system. Arbitrum announces the return of Arbitrum Odyssey. And Safe introduces ERC7512. All this and more starts right now. The Arbitrum on Gitcoin Grants round is now live. If you'd like to support ETH daily, please consider donating to our grant by visiting ethdaily .io forward slash gitcoin. The Optimism Collective is now accepting applications for its third retroactive public goods funding round in which a total of 30 million OP tokens will be distributed to projects that have contributed to Optimism. Optimism contributors and builders can apply between now and October 23rd. Batch holders, which are members that have been selected to be part of the Citizen's House, will vote on the allocation of the 30 million OP tokens in November. The Citizen's House is a 1 % one -vote based governance system. 20 % of the OP token treasury has been allocated to retroactive public goods funding. Base introduced Pessimism, an open source monitoring system designed to improve security across the OP stack and Ethereum ecosystems. Pessimism can be used to detect protocol threats and security vulnerabilities specific to the OP stack and EVM compatible chains. Developers can use Pessimism to monitor network performance. The system consists of three primary subsystems coined as ETL, risk engine, and alerting. Coinbase plans to expand Pessimism's coverage to include bridge monitoring, including withdrawal safety and detecting potential faults. Users can make any feature requests and contribute to Pessimism by opening an issue on GitHub. Arbitrum announced the return of Arbitrum Odyssey, a seven -week initiative that rewards users with NFTs for completing protocol -specific tasks on the network. Initially launched in June of 2022, the program was paused after its first week due to high traffic and higher than expected gas fees. Arbitrum partnered with Galaxy for the new initiative. The new Arbitrum Odyssey is set to commence on September 26 and will encompass tasks involving 13 different protocols. Arbitrum explicitly stated that participants will not receive airdrops apart from the NFT badges earned. Arbitrum also announced Hop Protocol as the winner for Bridge Week. Users who used Hop Protocol during Bridge Week can now claim their NFT badge. And lastly, SAFE introduced ERC7512, a proposed standard aiming to bridge the gap between smart contract audit reports, which are typically in PDF form, and smart contracts deployed on -chain. The standard simplifies the discovery and verification of smart contract audits. ERC7512 allows auditing firms to cryptographically sign the reports using EIP712. On -chain smart contract audits can then be parsed to extract audit details such as auditor information and verified standards. Audit firms can also build their reputation through on -chain attestations facilitated by Ethereum attestation service. ERC7512 is currently open for community discussion. In other news, HAI released V1 governance talks, Eclipse introduced an Ethereum layer too powered by Solana VM, Eigenlayer partnered with Cubist, and Dan is now live on base. For the full list, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io This has been a roundup of today's top news stories in Ethereum. You can support this podcast by subscribing and following us on Twitter at ethdaily. Also subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow.
Crypto Banter
A highlight from 3 Altcoins I'm Buying This Week! (Insiders Are Accumulating)
"Insiders are accumulating. At least that is what some of the on -chain indicators were showing us overnight. But in today's video, I want to break down exactly how the market is looking in what has been super interesting price action and give you the main altcoins that I am watching this week. As you guys know, it is a Monday stream which means it's an altcoin watch this show where I go through my favorite plays of the week, one of which is actually Bitcoin this week given the recent price action that we're seeing. And I'm actually live this week. So a lot of you guys that have been watching my shows over the last week or so would know I've been pre -recording. But now I'm back in the studio which means I'm back to live streaming most days. So yeah, I can interact with comments today, do a bit more of, you know, interacting with comments, talking about alts. So if you guys have any questions that you have about any of the plays that I'm setting up for this week, ask me in the comments and I'll get to them and we can make it more of a collaborative show. Welcome back all of my loyal viewers. I noticed we have some regulars here. We've got BlackSales, Rob, Crimson, you guys are back even though I haven't really been that consistent. So thank you guys for joining. Luigi says he's present as well. And let's get straight into the show. So before we get into the alts that I'm looking at this week, the first thing I want to do is look at Bitcoin because there are a few major things happening that I saw in both the on -chain data and the centralized exchange data. The first thing to note is that Bitcoin pivoted nicely off this horizontal range support at 25k. We know that structurally 25k is the key level to keep your eye on. Bitcoin actually responded pretty well in this region and I mean if you really want to simplify the market right now from a TA perspective, all you really need to know is that you have this major 25k support. You break below and Bitcoin is looking bearish from a momentum perspective. You break above the 31k zone and that puts Bitcoin into bullish territory. Maybe people don't really like simplifying things too much because we all love to know what's going to happen in the short term. But if we take a macro lens approach to viewing the market, we can assert that these are the two major ranges and any kind of price action in between then, although it would create opportunities, is not going to come in the way of a definitive bull market or a definitive bearish breakdown. So I think that's an important thing to note as well. Now going into more of the micro here, so going into the daily, going into the four hourly charts to look at what happened with Bitcoin, things start to get really, really interesting. We can see on the daily chart, we pivoted off the 25 .2k level. This was the level that was the initial structural level before the entire BlackRock ETF speculation. So when we got news that BlackRock was filing for an ETF that resulted in a strong pivot from this area at the 25k level, that was in correspondence with a bounce off the diagonal as well as the horizontal support. We pivoted recently off that level and now find ourselves chopping in a new range, which is being formed between the 25k level and the 27k level. Super interestingly, on the four hourly chart, Bitcoin showed like an extremely aggressive move yesterday to the upside and actually pumped into resistance at the 27k level. As you can see here, that was an area that acted as temporary support back in late August before it resulted in an eventual breakdown, therefore a test of the 25k region before Bitcoin actually reversed. And now we get another test, but instead of a support test this time, it's a resistance test into 27 ,300. Now this test was failed, but we can currently see right now Bitcoin is making up its mind on the four hourly chart, whether it wants to close above the 26 ,800 level or not. I still view this as a fairly key level, as it was the initial marking of the range that was initially set out in August. We can kind of hold above there that I think there's a large chance that we can actually smash the 27k level. But of course that's wishful thinking because right now Bitcoin is currently reversing and looks like it does want to close below, which would simply mean more chop over the next few days. So definitely keep your eye on that as well. In terms of open interest, this is where the tile and the title of this video comes in, at least at the time of recording. We might end up changing it later. That's the massive spike that we saw in open interest. So open interest is indicative of the total futures positioning in the market, both long and short for, in this case, Bitcoin. And what we saw last night was the largest open increase amount in a single day with a 15 % increase in the total open interest level. You can see here that's exhibited by this flurry of green candles to the upside. This is the open interest chart, which shows like insiders or someone like a big whale presumably was starting to position themselves. Because from a retail perspective, there wasn't much of a general catalyst over the weekend, over Sunday and Monday. But we still saw a massive increase in open interest. So this raised a lot of questions. Are insiders positioning themselves? Is there going to be a spot ETF approval this week? Is something happening behind the scenes? And although those questions are like extremely hard to answer, what we do know is that open interest was essentially faded in the 12 hours preceding the spike in open interest. So what does this tell us? Well, as I said, it's hard to get a definitive answer what the pump caused. It is likely that some sort of like big whale institution fund decided to open a position. I mean, that's what the volume and the open interest increase is suggesting. There was rumors flying around at the time, like by runner expertise, a few other traders, even I did mention this on my Twitter. Like, is this a potential ETF decision coming this week that insiders are starting to position themselves for? I maybe would have been leaning more on the side of yes yesterday. But given the fact that the move got really quickly faded and wasn't able to sustain, I would maybe now err on the side of no. And this was just irregular market movement or someone positioning themselves ahead of what was an eventual flush out. This doesn't mean that open interest can't recover again. Let's see what happens over the next day and see if it comes back. If this was just a short term leverage flush out after the finance news came out, which we're going to get into now. But let's just see where open interest tracks. It still was a huge spike though. And if we do look at open interest aggregated for Bitcoin over the last week or so, we could still see that even though we did have a massive reversal, we're still sitting higher. So we are kind of making higher lows on the open interest if we look at the month of September as a whole. In terms of the Binance news, we did get news that Binance US, the auditor of Binance US, found it very difficult to ensure the company was fully collateralized at specific points in time. Which led to a lot of FUD on Twitter and a lot of FUD online that Binance may in fact be insolvent. And I mean, this is something that has been floating around on Twitter for quite some time. And it seems to be every time the market gets a pullback, it seems to be some sort of Binance news. I mean, I was just a token 2049 in Singapore, by the way, amazing, amazing conference. But most of the negative like headwind -esque reasons why people thought the market could come down were mostly related to Binance. So although we have a lot of catalysts, a lot of tailwinds, the Bitcoin's body tip being one, the Bitcoin halving being one. Maybe like a positive liquidity injection sometime next year if the Fed's forced to pivot being another. So there's a macro argument both for the bull and the bears. Like the overarching bearish headwind that most people referred to was Binance. So it's quite interesting that in terms of just like retail and investor mindshare in general, this Binance FUD seems to be encapsulating the masses. And that is, I think, one of the reasons why every single time we get a pullback or every single time we get Binance news, because it goes hand in hand, right? News can cause price or price can sometimes actually cause news, even though that might sound counterintuitive. That's, you know, results in a Bitcoin dip. BlackSale says don't forget to hit the likes, of course. Remember to smash the like button. If you're watching the show, show me some support on my first livestream back in a while. I did do one last month, but I haven't been too consistent with it. But yeah, but I'm back to livestreaming now. So yeah, we could see the Binance news came out, and this is one of the reasons why Bitcoin decided to reverse. And this is just a topic that we're going to need to keep our eye on. I don't think there's some sort of kneejerk reaction we need to make, because just in order to say that it's difficult to ensure Binance is fully collateralized, that's not asserting that Binance is insolvent. Maybe that's hinting on the fact that their financials are skewed or their financials are ambiguous, but ambiguous financials don't necessarily imply any explicit wrongdoing. So I would be careful to make assertions. Adam Cochrane is definitely not careful in terms of making assertions, because he's asserted for some time now that Binance isn't solvent. If he does turn out to be right, obviously that would be pretty devastating for the market if the market was to realize and we saw some sort of Binance collapse. But people are certainly aware of it, and people are certainly positioning themselves in some way, shape, or form, whether that's in terms of their actual net positioning or just their mindset, that there could be some negative Binance news coming out over the next few months. And maybe that happens sooner rather than later, but I did think that was a contributing factor behind the OI and price reversal today. Someone said recession is coming. This will happen when everyone's unexpected, rates at an all -time high, debts at an all -time high, price at an all -time high. The economy is never the same as before. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like that. However, you've got to remember, every single time we've kind of called for a recession throughout history, I mean, it's a very common thing, right? Pretty much every single year that people are calling for a recession, the market has just gone higher and higher and higher over a wide enough standpoint. Does that mean we can't get downside because of recessionary fears this year? No. Does that mean the market couldn't correct next year? No. All I'm saying is that over time, people tend to assert that a recession is coming and it does come, recessions eventually do come, but a lot of the time they take longer and they come when people least expect it. And right now, I wouldn't say it's least expected. I would say most people are expecting a recession. The thing with recessions is you can't really time them. So even if you know they're coming, there's no real way to actually prepare yourself because even the best fund managers in the world, even the best analysts in the world, they can't pinpoint a recession. So there's no real tangible way to even trade off this. If you think a recession's coming, well, when's it coming? Next year? The year after? The year after? If you're waiting for a recession and there's a huge rally in the interim, then you're giving up potentially the best year of gains in the market, right? Just because you're waiting for a recession. We saw this in years like 2007, which were great years, 2006, leading into recessions, even though people thought the recessions were coming in 2003, 2004, 2005, because they didn't buy them, they gave up the gains over the next five years or three years in that case. Then by the time the recession came, sure, they were right, but markets pulled back to the levels that they were when they were first anticipating the recession. So it's a very difficult one to time. And yet that's why I'm kind of skeptical of letting these narratives infiltrate the way that I trade. The best way to prepare for a recession is to make sure you're adequately diversified.
THE EMBC NETWORK
A highlight from Private Capital Markets and Private Equity Simplified with CEO and Co-Founder of KoreChain and KoreConX Oscar Jofre
"So I want to be here where they're, you know, buying it in a dollar a share, not at a hundred. I wanted a dollar. So it's exciting. But with all the companies being created, yes, there are those who need capital, but it doesn't matter if you're a startup, you're already an operating company. It doesn't matter what stage you're in. Capital is a requirement in order to keep growing your business. Even if you're profitable, even if you're cashflow positive, in time to where you need to expand, you need access to capital. It'll make it much easier for you. You have more choices in how you structure the capital, but nevertheless, you need capital. You want to buy another company where you need capital because you can't take it from your existing cashflow, which is paying for the operations of your existing business, but you need it in order to acquire this to make you even bigger. So these are all the things. So capitalism is a constant element of the growth of your business, regardless of what size you're in. Sometimes we just don't know that we can do it. And now what I'm letting everybody know, you can, and it's not easy. I didn't say it was easy. It's not something that is a rocket. No, but if you have the right team to do it, you can. And most of it is done through technology. So therefore use the internet. We're a perfect example of that. When COVID hit us, we were a team of nine people in the company, nine. From then to where we are now, we're a team of 60. That's all because of COVID. So COVID, it depends on what business you're in. Why? Because everybody went online. When we're at home, online investing was on the rise and it has never gone down ever since. So it means that companies need to think of online. Oh, I see. So everything's on. Yes, you do the presentations online, just like I'm doing this show with you. I'm talking to millions of people online, simultaneously broadcasting my message. I'm doing a presentation to everyone on what we do and what the value proposition is and why you should believe in me and what I'm doing. So what we've done at Core Connects and Core Chain is provided in a technology infrastructure that a company can utilize in order for them to do things compliantly. So what does that word compliant mean? It means that you do it in such a way that one day you're not wearing an orange outfit, meaning you're not getting arrested. So the rules for me are black and white and orange, and orange is not a color I like. So black and white is the rules. So you follow the rules. And so we have enough of an ecosystem, meaning people who are committed for the growth to educate you, lawyers, auditors and so on that are going to provide you that guidance, how to use the regulation, how much money can you raise? What do you need to prepare for it? What documentation? We have so much education. Like if you go to our website, we have videos, we have checklists, everything. And even if you have a problem there, we'll even walk you through it. We'll get on a call with you to walk. Every single company is important, regardless of size, stage or anything. Why? Because everybody needs to know what is possible in front of you, not to think that, Oh my God, I didn't get venture capital. I'm dead. I'm done. I got to shut down. You should never have to do that. That's the whole point of the JOBS Act. It was to give you a choice in what, you know, I don't want to say the word alternatives, but it was just different choices in how you can raise capital for your company. So we provide that. We have an ecosystem of all these partners. We also took another undertaking as a company is that we knew how crooked business world is. And when I say crooked, I don't mean it in a way that everybody's like that, but I just mean it that I know what it's like being an entrepreneur. And I meet John and Hey, John, look at my company. I love your company, Oscar. I think you're great. I've got some investors that I want to introduce you to. Oh, that's fantastic. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And then next thing you know, he's got his hand out like, uh, how can I help you? And he goes, well, I'll give you the lead. How much are you going to pay me? And this has been this problem that the whole industry has had is that there's always someone standing in the middle. And so it's standing in the middle or in the way of me getting to there and I want to get there. So I pay them and you know, to get there and not, not knowing that what I just did was illegal because the only people that can be paid are a broken dealer. But nevertheless, you, whether it's a consulting fee, you pay them for introduction only to land on a dud or something that didn't even exist. And that's the problems that the industry has been played with. So we've removed all that. We're not here to promise anything, but we have no financial relationships with any of our partners. We don't take fees. We wanted you to talk to the people who know what the heck they're doing and that's all they do. So instead of you spending a year trying to figure it out, you can start and finish within weeks and raising your capital if you have everything ready. And if you don't have things ready, we have people who know how to get you ready and we'll point you to them and give them to you and they'll help you. And then, but why do we do that? Because at the end of the day, all of the people that you're working with, they're human beings, they're professionals. They need a technology in order to transact. So what does that mean? As I said right at the beginning, I said, imagine I'm here today. Hello, everyone. My name is Oscar Joffrey. I'm the co -founder and CEO of CoreChain. I am so excited to tell you today that I have a live offering on my website. And you can simply go there at corechain .io, click the invest button, put in all your details, and you can pay using your MasterCard, your Visa, American Express or your ACH account. Sign the subscription agreement and voila, within a few days, you'll be fully completed and you'll be a shareholder in my company. To do that on thousands of websites all over the place, because there are thousands of companies raising capital is what we build. And that infrastructure has broken dealers, has ID, AML tracking. It's all the things that are needed in order to keep everybody compliant. But most important, keeping it on your website with your look and feel, your brand, so you're building a relationship with the person that came to visit you, to look at your company and to say, you know what, I really like this company. I want to invest. And you click the invest button, voila, the journey begins. And the journey doesn't end from there. From there on, everything is done at the company website, meaning managing their shares, transferring them, trading them, everything is happening there. And that is technology in the background. We're one of those things you don't see. You don't need to see us, but we exist. We exist because we understand how everybody needs to move the information and how everybody needs to do it compliantly, because there's so many different pieces involved. And for a company who is raising, I don't know, $5 million from the general public or 75 or whatever month it is, they're going to have a very large base of stakeholders that they need to communicate with, keep them aware of what's going on, keep them engaged, because that's part of the key. Just like you would customers, right? You buy a CRM software to keep track of customers. Well, these are like they are your customers, but you have to manage them a little bit differently because of regulatory rules. But it's all doable. It's not impossible anymore. People go, how on earth can you manage 5 ,000 shareholders? Technology? It could be a million, it could be two. I mean, it doesn't really matter. I mean, the numbers are irrelevant, but the reality is it can be done. And that's the exciting part for companies of any size. And so when you're out there as a company, you can look at all the opportunities and see what others are doing, whether you're in manufacturing, building homes, cannabis, drinks, alcohol, technology, AI. I mean, I've done just about everything. And here is the other goodie that you're going to love. So the security regulators in the United States not only allowed the companies to raise capital from literally anybody over the age of 18 and around the world. So your market opportunity is 4 .7 billion people. 4 .7 is to incentivize you to invest more in my company. So here's an example. You come in and you make an investment and you're making an investment for 200, but you see right here, hey, if you put in $500, I'm going to give you a free ticket to the show with Hurricane. If you put in $1 ,000, I'll make sure you're in the show. If you put in $2 ,000, I'll make sure you have a dinner. So the regulars allowed us to incentivize. So the company can incentivize you with things. I've had people give away vodka, beer, I mean, knapsacks, pins, Starbucks cards. It depends on their business type or something. Exactly. Exactly. The imagination is open for, and we saw people in one car, one company we had, oh, this one's my favorite, where if you invested over $100 ,000, you would get to use the electric truck for nine months. We saw these people popping in 250 grand under American Express. Let's do it. And people go, and their credit card? Isn't that high? I go, well, if I was ready to make 250 grand, the chances are he's got that in the bank. And if he's smart enough, he just got enough points to take the family out for a Christmas holiday. And he got the use of the truck for nine months, two times over. What a whammy.
The Breakdown
A highlight from How Impactful Will FTX Estate Selling Be on Crypto Markets?
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, September 15th, and today we are talking about how much pressure FTX selling will put on the crypto markets. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, happy Friday. We have lots to catch up on today, starting with what has emerged as a key narrative. That is, of course, that FTX has been granted approval to begin selling their crypto assets. On Wednesday, the bankruptcy judge ratified the sale plan, which was filed in late August. Galaxy Digital has been appointed as the selling agent. At last count, FTX said it had $3 .4 billion worth of liquid crypto assets to sell. Galaxy has been authorized to sell $50 million worth of crypto this week and next week, then $100 million per week after that. Creditors can agree to increase this amount to $200 million per week on a temporary basis before seeking court approval. Galaxy has also been given permission to hedge their sales using Bitcoin and Ethereum derivatives without sizing limits and at their sole discretion. Staking of assets will also be allowed if Galaxy deems it necessary. During the hearing, the judge questioned the need to sell crypto rather than distribute it directly to customers. FTX lawyers explained that there was no meaningful segregation of customer assets and balances held didn't line up with customer accounts. They said, quote, it's all part of one pool. There are assets that are associated with the exchange we call the dot com customer pool and the US pool, but they don't necessarily match customer entitlements. So when we dispose of this, we'll be turning it into cash effectively and the cash will be available for distribution pursuant to the plan. Now, all parties appeared concerned with getting this liquidation moving quickly while also limiting the price impact on the portfolio. A lawyer representing the ad hoc creditors committee said, the sooner we can get this process rolling, the better. Now, the speculation all over Twitter has of course been that this would lead to incredible downward price pressure across the crypto markets with any asset that was being sold. However, Jeff Dorman, CIO of ARCA pushed back on notions that this liquidation will be an uncontrolled dump. Here's a summary of his Twitter thread. He pointed out that Galaxy Asset Management, not their trading desk won the bid. They must act as a fiduciary and sell gradually and opportunistically. He pointed out that Galaxy is receiving massive amounts of reverse inquiry already, some from real funds and some fishing expeditions, but over the counter sales will dominate the buying. In other words, we're less likely to see a lot of selling on exchanges or via TWOPS. As good bids come in, they will engage. Hedging, he points out, will be opportunistic, i .e. long puts to offset a large drop in the portfolio. And he points out that people thinking that Galaxy will rush to sell $3 billion in futures right away is crazy. The goal, he points out, is to outperform a static portfolio, not turn the estate into a long short fund. He reminds that Galaxy cannot front run the sales and profit internally, that that is very illegal and that their asset management business is completely walled off from their prop desk. Finally, he points out that this is not some half -baked plan. It involved months of working with the courts to win this business, and that the point of bankruptcies is to maximize the upside of the estate, not speed of distributions. In other words, this may be capped short -term gains due to opportunistic sales and to strength, but it is not a fire sale into weakness. Now getting even more granular, much of the speculation in recent weeks has specifically surrounded how sales of the hefty FTX Solana portfolio will impact that market. In their most recent accounting, FTX said they hold $1 .1 billion worth of Solana, which is able to be sold. That would be around 14 % of the current market cap. It was previously believed that much of this supply was staked and would be unlocked between 2025 and 2028, although the latest FTX filing threw this into question by lumping all of the Solana holdings in together. FundStrap published a report earlier this week detailing the FTX crypto holdings and claimed that less than $150 million worth of Solana is liquid and able to be sold off. Now, ultimately, no matter what people say, it's going to be very, very hard to get people away from the concern that this amount of selling will impact the market. Liquidity is incredibly thin right now, and probably the best that we can hope is that some of the negative price action over the last few weeks has been in anticipation of this and trying to front run it. But ultimately, the only way out is through, and so we just have to deal with this as the next thing we have to deal with. Now moving over to that other big exchange, two more Binance US executives have joined the exodus from that embattled company. The head of legal, Krishna Juvadi, and the chief risk officer, Sidney Majalia, are leaving the company according to WSJ sources. Juvadi was one of the firm's main contacts for communicating with the SEC, which is currently in active litigation with Binance. This makes three executives reported to be jumping ship from Binance US in less than a week. Remember on Tuesday, sources said that Binance US CEO Brian Schroeder had left his position. Now, Schroeder has not been active on social media since February, leading some to speculate on whether reporting was simply catching up on events that had quietly transpired much earlier. According to a company spokesperson, chief legal officer Norman Reed has stepped in as interim CEO. Bloomberg ETF analyst James Safart said the obvious thing when he tweeted, well, this cannot be a good sign for whatever is going on at Binance. On the flip side, crypto has at this point, I think, written off Binance US as a going concern. The Flow Horse writes, why does anyone care about Binance US employees leaving? They don't have a job to do. The exchange is a placeholder and no one uses it. Proof of Talent founder Rob Hayon writes, Binance US doing $9 million in 24 hour volume right now. At what point do they shutter the doors? Gotta be soon, right? Now, staying on the Binance train for a moment more, the SEC have accused Binance US of refusing to cooperate during the discovery process of their ongoing lawsuit. A court filing made on Thursday noted that only 220 documents had been produced by the exchange. Binance US had signed a consent order regarding the scope of discovery in June, but the SEC are claiming that many of the documents produced in accordance with that order, quote, consist of unintelligible screenshots and documents without dates or signatures. The SEC noted that Binance had refused to produce essential witnesses for depositions, including former CEO Brian Schroeder. Instead, they unilaterally limited the list of witnesses to just four employees. The SEC said that Binance US quote, has responded to requests for relevant communication with blanket objections and has refused to produce documents kept in the ordinary course of its business, claiming those documents do not exist only for the SEC to later receive such documents from other sources. Now the bulk of the SEC's filing related to SEFU, the wallet custody system at Binance US, which is provided by Binance International. The regulator called attention to contradictory statements about Binance's involvement in the management of US customer funds. They argued that the usage of SEFU violates the terms of a prior agreement that Binance US customer funds would not be diverted offshore. The heavily redacted filing also included information obtained by the SEC with the cooperation of a former Binance US auditor who has provided over 6 ,500 documents related to Binance's accounting. The SEC are treating the lack of disclosure of these documents from Binance US directly as evidence of a lack of transparency. Now continuing on the cleanup theme, three Eros Capital co -founders, Kyle Davies and Suzu have been slapped with a nine year ban from the regulated financial services industry in Singapore. The pair have been prohibited from taking part in the management of or being a major investor in any regulated firm involved in capital markets. Now MAS, the Monetary Authority of Singapore handed down the ban after concluding its investigation into the collapse of the once high flying Singapore based crypto fund. They found that 3AC had failed to notify the regulator of the appointment of a new fund manager, falsely claimed that this manager wasn't conducting regulated activities and failed to have in place appropriate risk management. MAS assistant managing director of policy payments and financial crime said in a statement, senior management of fund managers are required to implement robust risk management measures to protect the interests of investors. MAS takes a serious view of Mr. Zou and Mr. Davies flagrant disregard of MAS's regulatory requirements and dereliction of their directors duties. MAS will take action to weed out senior managers who commit such misconduct. Now, alongside spending much of the last year ignoring requests to engage with the 3AC bankruptcy process, Zou and Kyle launched a new offshore exchange based in the Seychelles. However, that crypto and bankruptcy claims marketplace was recently reprimanded by Dubai authorities for advertising within the emirate. They were issued a $2 .8 million fine, which big surprise remains unpaid. Moving on to yet another hanging chat on Wednesday, Digital Currency Group formally proposed their Creditor Agreement as part of the Genesis bankruptcy. The agreement seeks to refinance a $630 million intercompany loan owed by DCG, which fell due in May and remains unpaid. According to DCG, the plan could offer, quote, all unsecured creditors a 70 to 90 % recovery with a meaningful portion of the recovery in digital currencies. DCG claimed the repayment of loans over time using crypto would allow creditors to, quote, capture the appreciation of cryptocurrency up to $85 ,000 for Bitcoin and $8 ,500 for ETH. We'll come back to that in just a moment. DCG called the deal a, quote, remarkable outcome for any liquidating Chapter 11 case, let alone one in the volatile cryptocurrency industry. Now, the deal will, of course, require the agreement of creditors before moving forward. DCG have secured the consent of the unsecured creditors group. However, the major creditor, Gemini, have so far been silent on the deal. Gemini claims to be owed approximately $1 .1 billion in the bankruptcy on behalf of hundreds of thousands of their customers. The Gemini claim is in a much stronger position than unsecured creditors, as Genesis posted about 31 million GBTC shares as collateral when taking loans from Gemini customers. This collateral has appreciated significantly since the bankruptcy and represents about 60 % of the total balance owed to Gemini. DCG indeed claimed that Gemini customers could see an excess recovery of up to 110 % under the new agreement. They wrote in their filing, at current pricing, the Gemini user collateral is worth approximately 607 million. If Gemini agrees to provide 100 million to Gemini earned users under the proposed agreement as it previously did, or to distribute even a small portion of the Gemini user collateral to Gemini earned users, there would be little doubt Gemini earned users would receive a full recovery. DCG then contended that Gemini is failing to, quote, put its money where its mouth is. The filing stated that Gemini, quote, is not contributing a single penny to provide Gemini earned users a better recovery. Now, the crypto community was not as convinced as DCG made it out that this was a great deal. Lumina Wealth CEO Rama Lawalia writes, The deal between DCG and Genesis reeks of self -dealing at worst and incompetence at best. The deal presumes an $85 ,000 for Bitcoin and $8 ,500 for ETH. The defaulted party should make the creditors whole, not speculate yet again on a risky gamble on behalf of creditors. Creditors lent money expecting credit risk, not volatile equity -like risk. If DCG truly believes those numbers, they should ensure that outcome for creditors through an options contract. Genesis creditors should seek the removal of the Genesis CEO, who was conflicted in a party to the alleged fraudulent balance sheet statements, petition the judge to have a new trustee, pressure Genesis to focus on the turnover motion and resume litigation. What a mess. Now, speaking of Genesis, Genesis will also cease all trading services according to a company spokesperson. If you're surprised to hear that Genesis's trading services were continuing, you're not alone. Although the crypto lending arm of the firm declared bankruptcy in January, many other DCG subsidiaries which shared the Genesis branding continued to operate throughout this year. Earlier this month, the Genesis company which handles US -based over -the -counter trading announced it would be shutting down throughout September. At the time, it was believed that Genesis would continue providing offshore OTC trading from their British Virgin Island companies, but with this announcement, Genesis has signaled their exit from OTC and derivatives trading globally. A spokesperson for the firm said, this decision was made voluntarily and for business reasons. With this termination of services, Genesis no longer offers trading services through any of its business entities. Now, while this was highly expected, it still marks something of a big moment. Wayne Vaughn tweeted, the former largest OTC crypto trading desk is officially closed. Genesis announced today that they are no longer offering trading services through any of its business entities. Seems like a juggernaut falls with every cycle. In this cycle though, friends, I think we can agree that numerous juggernauts have fallen, but perhaps it is just to clear out the way for companies who will use that juggernaut status a little more responsibly. Anyways, friends, that is going to do it for today's episode. I appreciate you guys listening as always. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from UNCHAINED: With Execs Leaving and Market Share Declining, Can Binance Survive?
"This is a lot for one particular exchange, any company really, but an exchange as consequential as Binance to deal with. Binance US, obviously the first thing on their mind is sort of trying to fight the SEC and figure out a way forward. I mean, there is a world where Binance can exist where it's not quite as big as it was before. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no -hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto eight years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, I was the first mainstream media reporter to pick up a cryptocurrency full -time. This is the September 15th, 2023 episode of Unchained. Today's episode is brought to you by Overtime Markets, your premier Web3 sportsbook. The innovative protocol is changing the game one match at a time. Powered by fails, explore more at OvertimeMarkets .xyz. Arbitrum's leading Layer 2 scaling solution offers you ultra -cheap and lightning -fast transactions, all with security rooted on Ethereum. Visit arbitrum .io today. Toku makes implementing global token compensation and incentive awards simple. With Toku, you get unmatched legal and tax tech support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Make it simple today with Toku. With the Crypto .com app, you can buy, trade, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code LAURA. Link in the description. Today's guest is Stephen Ehrlich, editor of Forbes Crypto Asset and Blockchain Advisor and director of research at Forbes Crypto. Welcome, Stephen. Thanks, Laura. Thanks for having me. Just a heads up, everyone. I have a sore throat, in case you can't tell. So you might hear a slightly scratchier voice from me today. There have been a number of news events related to Binance over the last several months, to the point where there are now a number of questions swirling around the exchange in its future about potential regulatory and possibly even criminal actions against the exchange and its founders. And then, of course, what all of this could mean for the crypto industry if the exchange that has been the biggest crypto exchange for the last six years either falls or at the very least loses its top spot. So, Stephen, can you start by giving us kind of the main events or highlights of what has been happening with Binance over the last several months, including, you know, another big, you know, event this week that have brought Binance to really what feels like an existential point in its story? Sure. How much time do you have? Because I think this is just a 30 -minute show. But no, I mean, in crypto, we kind of feel like every day is a week, every week is a year, every year is a decade. And for Binance, there's been no shortage of big news. When FTX collapsed in November sort and of left CZ as like the big 800 -pound gorilla that really was kind of lording over all of crypto, there were a lot of thoughts that, hey, maybe this is Binance's moment. It was already the biggest exchange in the world by a large margin, and it just became so much bigger and even more systemically significant. It's been a very difficult year for Binance. I mean, just beginning with the fact that in the 60 days post collapse of FTX, more than $12 billion worth of customer deposits left the exchange. A colleague of mine, our terrific Director of Data and Analytics, Javier Paz, put together a report just talking about these massive investor outflows that Binance has really worked to try to stem ever since. I mean, then the hits kind of kept coming. I believe it was in February that the New York Department of Financial Services forced Paxos, which was the issue of Binance's stablecoin, BUSD, which at one point I believe reached over $20 billion in market cap and was seen as a legitimate competitor to Circle's USDC and the biggest stablecoin of all, Tether, which has a market cap of $83, $84 billion or so. But DFS forced them to with something that came out of the SEC as well. And that was a really big hit for Binance. It might not have been quite as flashy as the suits from the CFTC and SEC that came in later. But if you're just talking about dollar terms and financial impact, it was massive because Binance was really trying to make BUSD the biggest stablecoin in the world. They had incentives to encourage trading with BUSD. And in particular, think about what people do. And obviously, Lara, you know this and many people in your audience do as well. When you have $20 billion or $40 billion or $80 billion in cash, you can invest it in treasuries or money markets that are paying 5 % annual returns. And that's an incredible amount of money that you can make virtually risk -free, especially in a market like today where trading volumes are dwindling, reserves are dwindling. It's a really nice way to sort of supplement assets. So, that's one thing that happened. In March, the CFTC sued Binance for a suite of charges. A lot of it stemmed from the CFTC's allegations that Binance was operating as an FCM, a futures commodity merchant, basically saying that they're offering options and futures contracts at various digital assets without registering with the agency, which is required to do in the United States. And then in particular, and this much like the SEC's suit, which came out in June, they both talked about efforts Binance went to not only let US customers participate on the exchange, but actually help them find ways to get around geo -blocking activities that they put in to make sure that the best customers could still trade on the exchange. So, there's the CFTC lawsuit in March. There is the SEC lawsuit that came in June. There are rumors that the DOJ is investigating Binance and they would bring criminal charges. CFTC and SEC are sort of civil endeavors, which would kind of lead to fines and maybe bars from trading and certain activities. But obviously, DOJ could bring criminal penalties if they bring such charges and are able to get CZ into custody. And then, I mean, there's other aspects too as well. I mean, Binance has been losing payment and the banking partners around the world. Binance US in June had to become a crypto -only exchange because they lost their banking partners in the US, so they couldn't handle US dollars anymore. They lost their auditor in January. And then on top of that too, just a wave of executive departures going from the C -suite to country managers. So, this is a lot for one particular exchange, any company really, but an exchange as consequential as Binance to deal with. It's really been just an onslaught of bad news after bad news. I mean, there's been a few glimmers of new product initiatives and things like that. But a few other steps I want to throw in there are that spot volumes, like in terms of its market share, it had about 60 % of all crypto exchange volume market share at the beginning of the year. Now, for the last few months, it's been at 45%. And they laid off a thousand people. And then actually, let's also now mention the executive departure this week that was at Binance US. Tell us about that. Right. So, Binance, as you rightfully said, has been losing market share. They remained the largest crypto exchange in the world, but they are losing market share in this dwindling market. I actually believe the latest numbers that came out from CC Data put Binance's spot market share at least at around 37%, 38%. And if you're just looking at their spot volumes, I mean, they were comfortably still above $20 billion daily, even at the beginning of the year. Now, it's down to about $5 billion. At the peak 2021, it was over $60 billion. So, I mean, just think about exchanges make money by taking small cuts of every exchange. And if your volume goes down 80 % or whatever, I mean, that's money that you're no longer getting. And obviously, that's very consequential. And then with the executive departures, as you said, that's something that I know CZ has tried to gloss over. I know when we've reached out to some of the departed executives and they've either responded to us or to just public Twitter postings, et cetera. I mean, they kind of said things like, we want to take care of our family, the time is right. There was no acrimony involved, so on and so forth. But at some point, all of this takes a toll. And at least with regards to Binance US, which is the US I think franchise is the term that they like to use for that particular exchange, they're in a very tenuous situation right here. I mean, even before, and I'll talk about Brian Schroeder's departure in a second. I believe right now, I just checked the numbers before we recorded this, they're averaging about 20 million, not billion, not 200 million, but $20 million a day in transaction value. 10 million of which is Bitcoin. I believe that I think they charge something like 10 basis points per trade. So if you think about that, like 20 million times 0 .1, I'm not really good at doing math in my head. I use a calculator for that despite the fact that I'm a financial journalist, but you can just think about how little money that actually is coming in. And then obviously since Binance US was created in 2019, there's always been issues and questions about its independence from the larger exchange and would it actually be able to find that sweet spot of separating itself in the eyes of regulators while maintaining the super sauce that is made by Binance, a love brand by many customers. And they've gone through three CEOs at this point, Brian Schroeder just resigned. I was speaking with some sources familiar with Binance US and I was basically told that this was not a planned departure, that the 100 person layoff was, but the removal of CEO Brian Schroeder, the exit of him was not. I've also been told that it's important to kind of keep an eye off some of his key lieutenants now, because remember when he joined, one of the first things that he did was raise a $200 million actually seed round at a $4 .5 billion valuation. That's something Brian Brooks, his predecessor had wanted to, but he wasn't able to finish it. Brian Schroeder did. And then for part of that, that kind of saw Binance US as a growth company, he brought in some key lieutenants, chief legal officers, chief risk officers. And I think that now that Binance US is kind of moving away from obviously growth, like any exchange to sort of conservation, it's important to look at some people he brought in and they may be looking to leave. And actually one of the sources I was speaking with told me that their chief risk officer is Sydney Majala, and I want to look at my notes to make sure I don't get the names wrong, and head of legal, Krishna Jubelty, have actually emails that have been sent to them by some of the other rank and file, have started to bounce back. So I don't know if that necessarily means that they may have already left, but it certainly, I think it's important to, now that Brian has gone, see if some of people that he brought in after he raised this big round with a lot of high expectations, if they are going to follow suit. In a moment, we're going to talk about some of the potential regulatory or potentially even criminal actions against Binance and its executives. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
Unchained
A highlight from With Execs Leaving and Market Share Declining, Can Binance Survive? - Ep. 544
"This is a lot for one particular exchange, any company really, but an exchange as consequential as Binance to deal with. Binance US, obviously the first thing on their mind is trying to fight the SEC and figure out a way forward. There is a world where Binance can exist where it's not quite as big as it was before. Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no -hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto eight years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full -time. This is the September 15th, 2023 episode of Unchained. Today's episode is brought to you by Overtime Markets, your premier Web3 sportsbook. The innovative protocol is changing the game one match at a time. Powered by fails, explore more at OvertimeMarkets .xyz. Arbitrum's leading Layer 2 scaling solution offers you ultra -cheap and lightning -fast transactions, all with security rooted on Ethereum. Visit arbitrum .io today. Toku makes implementing global token compensation and incentive awards simple. With Toku, you get unmatched legal and tax tech support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Make it simple today with Toku. With the Crypto .com app, you can buy, trade and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code LAURA. Link in the description. Today's guest is Stephen Erlich, editor of Forbes Crypto Asset & Blockchain Advisor and director of research at Forbes Crypto. Welcome Stephen. Thanks Laura. Thanks for having me. Just a heads up everyone. I have a sore throat in case you can't tell, so you might hear a slightly scratchier voice from me today. There have been a number of news events related to Binance over the last several months, to the point where there are now a number of questions swirling around the exchange in its future about potential regulatory and possibly even criminal actions against the exchange and its founders. And then of course, what all of this could mean for the crypto industry, if the exchange that has been the biggest crypto exchange for the last six years either falls or at the very least loses its top spot. So Stephen, can you start by giving us the main events or highlights of what has been happening with Binance over the last several months, including another big event this week that have brought Binance to really what feels like an existential point in its story? Sure. How much time do you have? Because it could take, I think this is just a 30 minute show. But no, in crypto, we kind of feel like every day is a week, every week is a year, every year is a decade, and for Binance, there's been no shortage of big news. When FTX collapsed in November and sort of left CZ as the big 800 pound gorilla that really was kind of lording over all of crypto, there were a lot of thoughts that, hey, maybe this is Binance's moment. It was already the biggest exchange in the world by a large margin, and it just became so much bigger and even more systemically significant. It's been a very difficult year for Binance. Just beginning with the fact that in the 60 days post collapse of FTX, more than $12 billion worth of customer deposits left the exchange. A colleague of mine, our terrific Director of Data and Analytics, Javier Paz, put together a report just talking about these massive investor outflows that Binance has really worked to try to stem ever since. Then the hits kind of kept coming. I believe it was in February that the New York Department of Financial Services forced Paxos, which was the issue of Binance's stablecoin, BUSD, which at one point I believe reached over $20 billion in market cap and was seen as a legitimate competitor to Circle's USDC and the biggest stablecoin of all, Tether, which has a market cap of I think $83, $84 billion or so. But DFS forced them to shut it down. I believe that order was also issued concurrently with something that came out of the SEC as well, and that was a really big hit for Binance. It might not have been quite as flashy as the suits from the CFTC and SEC that came in later, but if you're just talking about dollar terms and financial impact, it was massive because Binance was really trying to make BUSD the biggest stablecoin in the world. They had incentives to encourage trading with BUSD, and in particular, think about what people do. Obviously, Laura, you know this and many people in your audience do as well. When you have $20 billion or $40 billion or $80 billion in cash, you can invest it in treasuries or money markets that are paying 5 % annual returns, and that's an incredible amount of money that you can make virtually risk -free, especially in a market like today where trading volumes are dwindling, reserves are dwindling, it's a really nice way to supplement assets. That's one thing that happened. In March, the CFTC sued Binance for a suite of charges. A lot of it stemmed from the CFTC's allegations that Binance was operating as an FCM, a futures commodity merchant, basically saying that they're offering options and futures contracts at various digital assets without registering with the agency, which is required to do in the United States. Then, in particular, and this much like the SEC's suit which came out in June, they both talked about efforts Binance went to not only let US customers participate on the exchange, but actually help them find ways to get around geo -blocking activities that they put in to make sure that the best customers could still trade on the exchange. There's the CFTC lawsuit in March. There is the SEC lawsuit that came in June. There are rumors that DOJ is investigating Binance and they would bring criminal charges. CFTC and SEC are civil endeavors which would lead to fines and maybe bars from trading and certain activities, but obviously DOJ could bring criminal penalties if they bring such charges and are able to get CZ into custody. There's other aspects too as well. I mean, Binance has been losing payment and their banking partners around the world. Binance US in June had to become a crypto only exchange because they lost their banking partners in the US so they couldn't handle US dollars anymore. They lost their auditor in January, and then on top of that too, just a wave of executive departures going from the C -suite to country managers. This is a lot for one particular exchange, any company really, but an exchange as consequential as Binance to deal with. It's really been just an onslaught of bad news after bad news. I mean, there's been a few glimmers of new product initiatives and things like that. But a few other stats I want to throw in there are that spot volumes, like in terms of its market share, it had about 60 percent of all crypto exchange volume market share at the beginning of the year. Now, for the last few months, it's been at 45 percent and they laid off a thousand people. And then actually, let's also now mention the executive departure this week that was at Binance US. Tell us about that. Right. So Binance, as you as you rightfully said, has been losing market share. They remain the largest crypto exchange in the world, but they are losing market share in this dwindling market. I actually believe the latest numbers that came out from CC Data put Binance's spot market share at least at around 37, 38 percent. And if you're just looking at the spot volumes, they were comfortably still above 20 billion dollars daily, even at the beginning of the year. Now it's down to about 5 billion. At the peak 2021, it was over 60 billion. So, I mean, just think about exchanges make money by taking small cuts of every exchange. And if your volume goes down 80 percent or whatever. I mean, that's money that you no longer that you're no longer getting. And obviously, that's very consequential. And then with the executive departures, as you said, that's something that I know CZ has tried to gloss over. I know when we've reached out to some of the departed executives and they've either responded to us or to just public Twitter postings, et cetera, I mean, they kind of said things like, we want to take care of the family, the time is right. There was no acrimony involved, so on and so forth. But at some point, all this takes the toll. And at least with regards to Binance US, which is the US I think franchise is the term that they like to use for that particular exchange. They're in a very tenuous situation right here. I mean, even before and I'll talk about Brian Schroeder's departure in a second. I believe right now, I just checked the numbers before we recorded this. They're averaging about $20 million, not $200 million, but $20 million a day in transaction volume, 10 million of which is Bitcoin. I believe that I think they charge something like 10 basis points per trade. So if you think about that, like 20 million times 0 .1, I'm not really good at doing math in my head. I use a calculator for that, despite the fact that I'm a financial journalist. But you can just think about how little money that actually is coming in. And then obviously, since Binance US was created in 2019, there's always been issues and questions about its independence from the larger exchange and would it actually be able to find that sweet spot of separating itself in the eyes of regulators while maintaining the super sauce that is made by Binance, a love brand by many customers. And they've gone through three CEOs at this point. Brian Schroeder just resigned. I was speaking with some sources familiar with Binance US. And I was basically told that this was not a planned departure, that the 100 person layoff was, but the removal of CEO Brian Schroeder, the exit of him was not. I've also been told that it's important to kind of keep an eye off some of his key lieutenants now, because remember, when he joined, one of the first things that he did was raise a $200 million actually seed round at a $4 .5 billion valuation. And there was something Brian Brooks, his predecessor had wanted to, but he wasn't able to finish it, Brian Schroeder did. And then for part of that, that kind of saw Binance US as a growth company, he brought in some key lieutenants, chief legal officers, chief risk officers. And I think that now that Binance US is kind of moving away from obviously growth like any exchange to sort of conservation, it's important to look at some people he brought in and they may be looking to leave. And actually one of the sources I was just speaking with told me that their chief risk officer is Sydney Majala. And I want to look at my notes to make sure I don't get the names wrong. And head of legal, Krishna Jubelty have actually emails that have been sent to them by some of the other rank and file have started to bounce back. So I don't know if that necessarily means that they may have already left, but it's certainly I think it's important to now that Brian is gone, see if some of those people that he brought in after he raised this big round with a lot of high expectations, if they are going to follow suit. In a moment, we're going to talk about some of the potential regulatory or potentially even criminal actions against Binance and its executives. The first quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Data sanitization for the data nation, Verity ES Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller. And this is a special podcast for the ASCDI NTR publications. And I want to welcome Glenn Jacobson of Verity ES. Glenn, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Doug. And I also want to welcome Kevin Enders, also of Verity ES. Kevin, thank you for joining us. All right. Thanks, guys, for coming. And we're going to be learning a lot about ITAD today. We're going to be learning a lot about data erasure. We're going to be talking about some of the issues facing not only the ITAD and reseller community, but actually the broader reseller, possibly carry community, really everybody who has to manage or dispose of products that have had been exposed to data. So we're going to be diving into that in just a minute. But first of all, what is Verity ES? So Verity ES is a data erasure software application that was born out of a parent company called Revert Inc. Revert has been a, it's a company, the core competency is data sanitization and it's founded in 2007. They've been doing these types of services since then. And a primary foundation of that service was to perform onsite services because data sanitization is really about protecting customer information, personal, personal identifiable information. And one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of a data breach is to do everything on site. So Revert got its start doing, delivering services to large financial services companies, healthcare organizations, telcos, and other highly regulated industries that have to perform the erasure of data to meet specific standards. So for financial services, it would be something like Sarbanes -Oxley or FISMA from a healthcare perspective, you've got HIPAA high tech, and you have the various PUC rules and regulations around utilities. And by doing this on site, and over the 20 some years that Revert has been doing this, they're not only doing data sanitization, but they're also doing ITS at this position at the enterprise. So they're handling assets that go all the way up and down the information stack. So all the way from tablets and mobile phones, which are really important now in our environment after coming out of the pandemic with bringing your own device, you've got a lot of hybrid working environments, but we're hybrid cloud, public, private cloud, and how are you managing the data and the assets that are within all these different disparate data processing environments. And over these 20 years, what Revert did in doing data sanitization is again, doing this across the information stack, all the way from the desktop, laptop, all the way to the enterprise storage system, even including virtual tape libraries. And one of the things that was found is that with the proliferation of storage media, you've got spinning disk, you have flash disk, you have solid state disk. Even in printers, you have hard disk drives, you have solid state disk drives. In network devices, you have SD cards or compact flash cards. Smart TVs have built in storage, and even cell phones. So smartphones, Blackberries, they have SIM cards. All of these different storage mediums store personally identifiable information. They can store TCP IP addresses, they can store customer information. They can store account numbers, billing information. And all of this is wrapped into how do you protect this data across different industry regulations. We talked about HIPAA and high tech, but there's also European regulations, GDPR. California's new data privacy laws are based on the EU GDPR regulations. And so our business to go and sanitize those assets and either prepare those for the customer to either return to the vendor, if it's like a lease return or something like that, a technology refresh, or to pass down to an ITAD to perform their activities, we found that not one single data sanitization application worked for every single situation, every single storage medium. So what Revert ended up having to do is literally take a toolkit of all different types of commercial off -the -shelf data sanitization applications, all different types of downloadable applications, tools, utilities, methodologies, even the use of low -level SCSI and ATA commands to be able to sanitize various different types of storage media. And so again, about five years ago, the company said, you know, rather than having all these different disparate tools and processes and procedures, wouldn't it be great to develop an internal tool that could do it all itself? And that's how Verity ES was born. So Verity ES was developed to be able to handle all types of different storage media, all different types of IT assets, again, from the laptop, desktop, all the way to the enterprise storage array. It can handle disk drives coming out of printers and fax machines. It can handle smartphones and tablets and things like that. So that again, doing it on site, the assets are sanitized before they ever leave the four walls of the facility. Again, part of our business is also ITAD. So in doing the work that an ITAD does in terms of performing data sanitization, being able to, for example, grade assets based on their marketability. How do you refurbish it, remarket, resell it to maximize the residual value recovery of that asset when it's being sold? One thing that's very important is the storage media. If you're not able to sanitize the storage media that comes out of, say, a five drive server, you automatically, without those drives, the resale value of that asset automatically drops anywhere from 25 to 35%. So if you're able to sanitize the drive without doing anything else to the drive, without impacting the firmware or the specific configuration associated with that server, it maximizes the residual value recovery for the ITAD. It makes it easier for them to be able to resell those assets at its highest value. And that allows an ITAD to do that. The other thing we find with enterprises is that some of them want to do it themselves. And so Verity ES is able to actually be that one application that they can use for all of their information lifecycle assets throughout the enterprise to do it themselves. So that's where Verity ES comes from. So Kevin, it sounds like there's a sort of known unknown, as they say, and there's almost even the unknown unknown. And it's not just for ITAD. It's not just for the people in the reseller community. Glenn brought up very significantly that lots of other companies, especially enterprises, might be disposing of equipment. I was fascinated by learning how many things could be exposed. Monitors, something that was used basically for TV or videos. Printers, fax machines, possibly, I guess. It could be, or even phones. A lot of stuff that's basically... And the reason I'm bringing this up is we live at a moment when a lot of large enterprises are reconfiguring basically their office spaces, are rethinking what they need and don't need. So I know that there's a lot of stuff out there, and it sounds like there may be some landmines people could easily step on. You know, there's a lot of old, and we could spend a long time talking about those. But the overarching challenge, I think, that a lot, especially the enterprise spaces, and the ITAD to a certain degree, is this is something they have to do. Legally, they're obligated to do it. It's not really sexy. They don't really want to. They only do it because they're legally obligated to do so. We always think about when we go into the data centers, they're really obligated to do that. So if you're replacing a device with something cool and new, nobody really wants to deal with the one that's going out. So as these companies are dealing with this, they don't want to be experts on this. They don't want to know all the details associated with it. So what they need to do is to partner with somebody that does. So they need to look for a company that can provide them not only with software, but with the knowledge of what those blind spots really are. Like I said, again, they don't want to be good at this. It's really not something that's in their core wheelhouse. It's not something they can define as a differentiator to their customers. So one of those things they need to do is have a higher expectation for the companies that they're engaging with. So those companies can help them understand what those blind spots are, and either execute to close those blind spots, or help them understand how to close those blind spots themselves. Now, Kevin, with that said, this is the IT market, right? And it's filled with IT people who love doing it yourself. A lot of our readers and listeners probably started a long time ago going to Radio Shack and getting a whole bunch of components and putting together their own computer. So they're going to go out there, and they're going to do this on their own. So both you guys are basically telling me that, well, I guess you could kind of do that, but it may not be such a great idea, and you might not really be doing yourself a favor. Actually, it can be. You can execute it yourself. The challenge then becomes, right, you need all the devices, you need all the know -how. So really, if you're going to do it yourself, when you're out there engaging with a company that's going to provide you with the software to execute the process, the expectation is you should be looking for a company that can through how to execute that process. Historically, the software companies in the space will dump software on you and say, go ahead, it's yours. Let me know when I can start billing them. The expectation of those enterprise companies in the IT edge should be, listen, I need more than that. I need software, yes, but I need somebody that's going to help me understand the nuances and help me understand the things I don't know right now. Because like you said so eloquently, there's a lot of blind spots, and only one blind spot can screw you over. So again, we don't want to dissuade people from doing it themselves, but I would make the argument have an expectation of the companies you engage with that help you do it yourself, that they're going to be there to help you with the nuances associated with it. Yeah, I can just add on to that. Why that's important is because as the software was built, a lot of the expertise and know -how in having to comply with data center policies, processes, and procedures in how you perform a process and have transparency throughout the entire workflow from receiving the asset all the way through to disposition the asset, that's all built into how the software and the solution is performed. So as Kevin said, it's not only software, but it's also 20 plus years of data center experience in putting together a process and methodology and workflow that allows not only an enterprise to communicate this to their auditors, but also an ITAD to communicate to their customers who then communicate to their auditors. And then with the ITADs that have auditors themselves, whether it's R2 or e -Stewarts or ISO, et cetera, that they can have that womb to transparency and view throughout their entire workflow exactly what asset, if a drive is associated with a server, where that goes throughout the process and the standards from the data standardization that it's complied with, that's all built into the solution. And what Verity also provides is this analytics dashboard that allows commercial enterprises and ITADs to make educated decisions on what makes sense within their process to spend time on versus not. So, for example, if you have a high failure rate on a specific drive type, hey, maybe it doesn't make sense to continue to try to sanitize that. It may make sense just to shred those instead of putting more time and effort and resources and sanitizing them. That's the kind of process that we've built around the solution. So Kevin, who needs Verity ES? One of the target markets that needs Verity ES is the ITAD space. The software was developed, like we said before, around our services business. And that is very much a we got to get in, we got to get out. That maintains our markets. So with the software, we built in a lot of functionality to improve the overall performance, not only with the speed of the erasure, but the yield that the software can get. That's very critical to the ITAD space. They don't really want to do this. They want to get it done. They want to get going. They want to get the residual value out of it. The other thing that we really built into it was a big wrapper around it to help ITADs with the transparency challenges that they're seeing right now. A lot of companies that they're engaging with are demanding more transparency of the overall process. And so ITADs are being forced to think about developing an overall front to end process that they can then share with the customers from which they're taking the gear and then returning whatever they do, either the residual value or demonstrate that they've taken care of those assets once it's done. So we've built a lot of that functionality into the software, viewing it far more as a business tool than just a, this software erases hard drives, it erases solid state disks. It is really a wrap business tool. So Glenn, you know, having heard all this, I still have sort of the same question for a lot of people. Why can't I just go off and do this on my own? The beauty of Verity ES is it now enables you to do just that. Verity ES is able to you provide with a process that's been vetted in doing this type of service in the data center for over 20 years. So you now have a process that's going to enable you to not only save money because you're going to be able to optimize the amount of drives that you're going to process. It's going to allow you to optimize the number of drives that are successfully going to be sanitized and according to the standard. It's also going to allow you to make more money because if you sanitize more drives faster, you can get more assets qualified and re -marketed and resold out the door. It's going to, from a drive perspective, you're going to have more drives available to you, not only to replace in the assets that you're selling, but also that gives you a spares pool so that you don't have to go out on the open market or to the vendors to buy spare drives in case drives, assets are coming to you that need drives replaced. But the biggest thing is it's having a auditable process and the reporting and all of that information available to you through that transparent workflow. It's going to prevent a data breach, which is the biggest thing that we're trying to do is we need to ensure that person identifiable information is not compromised. It's not accessed from any unauthorized parties. The first step is to do it in the four wells of your facility. So that's why it makes sense to do it yourself. The second part of it is to make sure that software, the and it should be a given, the software actually does what it says it's going to do. It's going to sanitize those drives. It's going to erase the drives to meet a specific data sanitization standard so that you know for certain, and it's audible, it has an audit trail that supports it, that every drive that you sanitize using Veri ES in this process and workflow protects your company and your customer from a data breach, which again, it's going to protect your reputation. It's going to protect not only your company's reputation, but the reputation of your industry as well. Well Glenn and Kevin, thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting. It's been a very nice introduction to Verity ES. I hope we're going to do more. I know we're going to do more podcasts. We're going to sort of maybe over the coming months break down some of the issues we've opened up, but for now I want to thank you. Where can we learn more about Verity ES? www .verityes .com v -e -r -i -t -y -e -s dot gov. Well again guys, thank you for joining me today and I'm looking forward to the next one. Hey, thanks a lot Doug. I really appreciate it.
The Breakdown
A highlight from WSJ Says Binance Facing Trouble Over Sanctions Violations
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, August 23rd, and today we are catching up with all the latest intrigue around Binance. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, welcome back to The Breakdown. When we survey the landscape, the wreckage, some might say, of this industry after the last year or year and a half, it is pretty clear what the biggest hanging chad or threat left is. One might argue that there's still contentiousness around DCG and whether it will be able to successfully get itself out of this Genesis situation. There's obviously a lot of jawboning about that and recriminations flying back and forth between Barry and the Winklevosses, but the bigger threat, at least that most people identify, or perhaps not threat but concern, is whether Binance is really doing as okay as they say they are. CZ has been quick to wipe away story after story with his customary four, indicating that everything is just FUD, and it is certainly the case that there has been an extraordinary amount of leakage from various US government offices around their investigations into Binance in ways that have led some to assume that they don't actually have the goods on Binance and so are just trying to try them in the court of public opinion. This week we got even more of all of that when on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance is still facilitating large amounts of Russian transactions, raising the question of whether the exchange is flouting Western sanctions. The article claimed that, quote, via layers of intermediaries, clients can turn funds at sanctioned banks into balances at Binance, while Binance also enables peer -to -peer trades of rubles for digital tokens that frequently involve banks that are on Western blacklists. A spokesperson for Binance said, Binance follows the global sanctions rules and enforces sanctions on people, organizations, entities, and countries that have been blacklisted by the international community, denying such actors access to the Binance platform. They added that in operating their peer -to -peer service, Binance has, quote, no relationship with any banks whatsoever, in Russia or elsewhere. Now, of course, US sanctions have not been imposed on Russian citizens generally. However, most of the Russian banking and financial system is subject to sanctions, which prohibit US citizens and firms from dealing with them. The EU and other US allies have similar levels of sanctions in place. In October, the EU tightened restrictions on crypto transfers to Russian wallets, removing a 10 ,000 euro limit to prohibit crypto transactions to Russian residents and entities entirely. The claim made by the WSJ is that Binance is facilitating international transactions for Russian citizens who have been cut off from the global financial system through their peer -to -peer platform. According to the Bank of Russia, around $428 million in peer -to -peer crypto transactions are taking place each month. The reporting claimed that there are hundreds of active peer -to -peer sellers willing to buy and sell rubles for crypto with a significant market for Tether. The main centralized exchange is also seeing significant volume in rubles. Volume is massively down from its peak of $80 billion per month in May of last year, but still processed $8 billion in ruble to crypto trades in July according to data from CC Data. Tatian Maksimenko, a Russian businesswoman who formerly worked at a crypto exchange, said, Now, according to a recent review of Binance's peer -to -peer services, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the platform allows Russian clients to receive payment at at least five sanctioned Russian banks. Crypto sellers on the platform provide payment details to Binance, who allegedly disbursed funds out of escrow after the on -chain transaction has been completed. The article raised further concerns that payment provider Advanced Cash continues to facilitate ruble -denominated transactions with Binance through additional intermediaries. The Belize registered payments provider said it had severed ties with sanctioned Russian banks in March of 2022. However, its website provides links to, quote, Now, of course, the report comes after months of speculation that the DOJ is investigating Binance for money laundering and sanctions evasion, but to date, no charges have been filed and it's unclear whether any charges will be forthcoming. The reaction from the crypto community is basically one of, if this is true, it's a big deal. Investor Adam Cochrane writes, Can you imagine the sheer level of chaos if Binance is hit with OFAC violations? Like how do they deal with that seizure? If they blacklist the hot wallet, then your deposits are effed would be way worse than any regular DOJ action. Travis Kling writes, Sheesh, $428 million per month of P2P ruble to crypto, $8 billion per month of ruble to crypto trading on the main exchange. If you think the US government isn't going to drop the hammer hard on that kind of scale of sanctions violations, you've lost your mind. Now, as with basically every story that we've had on Binance this year, there are two possible explanations. One is, though, where there's smoke, there's fire. And these things are leaking out because there's just so much to leak out that it's coming out of all sides and that we're still just in the period before some action comes. The other possibility, however, is, as some have claimed, that because the DOJ or OFAC or whomever don't actually have a good enough case to bring charges, they're instead trying Binance in the court of public opinion and in so doing feeding sourcing for these types of articles. I don't know what the case is, and I think everyone is right, especially after the last 18 months, to be extraordinarily skeptical. A default position at this point in crypto of assuming there's fire where there's smoke is definitely sensible. But we're coming up on a year now of rumors of DOJ or criminal action. We still haven't seen anything yet. So I guess for now, we just have to wait until the next article comes out with all sorts of its accusations, just so that CZ can say four. The people who are concerned can say they are concerned. The people who are Binance stans can just say four as well. And we're right back to the beginning where we started. Now elsewhere in the Binance empire, some customers are reporting difficulties withdrawing euros. In response to a user complaint on Sunday, the Binance help desk responded that, quote, we have temporarily suspended euro withdrawals and deposits via SIPA. SIPA is the Single Euro Payments Area Network, a bank transfer protocol similar to ACH. Now Binance later deleted and revised this public statement, stating that the SIPA deposit and withdrawal service will continue until September 25th, as originally communicated. The customer service message was sent in error. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we will have alternatives for our users in place before then, so stay tuned. Making their feelings known, the user experiencing the problem simply replied, lies. The issue comes a few months after Binance informed users that its European banking partner PaySafe would be discontinuing services on September 25th. A Binance spokesperson addressing the specific users issue said, some users may occasionally be asked for more information as part of routine compliance checks, which could lead to early closure of their accounts. They said that Binance will have alternatives for our users in place before the end of the SIPA service. Now, trouble processing euro payments comes just a few days after news broke that Binance were also being cut off by London -based credit card processing company Checkout .com. Binance were the single largest customer for the payments firm. Forbes reporting cited letters sent in early August, which cited concerns over anti -money laundering, sanctions, and compliance controls at Binance. The letters said termination of service would occur on August 17th, and a Binance spokesperson said that the exchange disagreed with the reasoning for the cutoff, but stated that it would have, quote, no impact on our services. Finally, making everything so much the worse for Binance, their native token BNB has been on a renewed slide. The token reached a low of $204 on Tuesday, but has since recovered and is now trading at around $217 as of Wednesday afternoon. Tuesday's level was BNB's lowest point since June of last year and represented a 14 % drawdown in under a week. Part of the downwards pressure on BNB relates to a massive $150 million loan on Binance smart chain lending platform Venus Protocol. The position was opened up by a hacker in October of last year. After exploiting a cross -chain bridge to mint a half a billion dollars worth of BNB, the hacker took a loan against some of the fraudulently created funds, presumably as an exit strategy with no intention to ever repay the debt. In November, a governance vote was taken on how to avoid a massive impairment accumulating on Venus Protocol. The BNB core team proposed becoming the sole liquidator of the position to ensure they could prevent any liquidation cascades. On Thursday night, the liquidation began with $33 million worth of BNB cleared to shore up the loan. Venus Protocol tweeted out that the account was quote, made healthy, but there's still another $126 million in outstanding debt sitting on the Venus Protocol waiting to be liquidated if the BNB price continues to fall. Now, summing up all of the chaos, Travis Kling, who it should be noted is warning, and intentionally so about Binance after being caught up in the FTX collapse, tweeted, Pretty wild price action in BNB. Not sure what's going on. It's almost as if Binance was sued by the SEC on numerous charges with damning evidence, Was sued by the CFTC on numerous charges with damning evidence. Had three senior executives quit in the same week? Had a billion -dollar -plus collateral hole in Binance peg BUSD? Had Paxos forced them to wind down BUSD? Got kicked out of Canada, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium? About to be charged by the DOJ's strong evidence of massive money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions violations? Under investigation in France for aggravated money laundering? Had their auditor quit and remove attestation? Lost multiple banking partners and payment processors can't process fiat in most countries? Had Binance US effectively closed? Laid off thousands of employees? Cut benefits for remaining employees? Dot dot dot. Oh. Wait. Like I said, I don't know what the truth is. The fog of war is thick. But a default position of defensiveness, and assuming that things are as bad or worse than they seem, is probably the safest approach right now. Speaking of things being as bad or worse as they seem, let's close on a quick Sam update. Sam Bankman -Fried has pleaded not guilty to a superseding indictment. Prosecutors formally presented the indictment during an arraignment hearing before a magistrate judge. The fraud and money laundering charges remain the same, but the campaign finance charge has been dropped. The details of campaign finance violations will be folded in as evidence for the remaining charges. Prosecutors said they were required to drop the campaign finance charge due to complications with their extradition arrangement with the Bahamas government. This was Sam's first appearance in court since he was remanded to jail earlier this month. The judge has not yet dealt with Sam's request to be released to prepare his defense at the However, Sam was allowed to meet with his lawyers on Tuesday until 3 p .m. when he was transported back to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. During Tuesday's hearing, the issue of Sam's inability to review documents due to a lack of internet was raised, with his lawyer stating, Prosecutors noted that the matter had already been briefed to the judge overseeing the case. The magistrate responded to Sam's lawyer by noting that, Sam's lawyers also bemoaned conditions at the jail. He said that Sam had been denied vegan food options and stated that, The lawyer also noted that in the past 11 days of confinement, the jail has not provided Sam with Adderall, a drug for treating ADHD, and according to his lawyer, Sam is also running low on his supply of MSAM, which is a depression treatment. Prosecutors quibbled over the suitability of the jail conditions to enable Sam to prepare his case ahead of an October 2nd trial date, with ultimately the magistrate saying they would look into the issues once the hearing was adjourned, hoping to resolve them that day. Sam is still yet to provide details of legal advice regarding his conduct at FTX, despite prosecutor requests. He is seeking to rely on this as an advice of counsel defense. The judge set a deadline of documentation of this advice to be submitted by Wednesday. Now also the night before the arraignment, prosecutors and Sam's lawyers submitted competing sets of jury instructions for trial. The DOJ's document laid out the basis for each charge in detail and explained the difference between substantive crimes and crimes of conspiracy. Prosecutors outlined what jurors would need to determine if they decide to convict, specifically that there was a scheme to defraud, that Sam knowingly and willfully participated, and that the defendant used interstate wires to conduct the scheme which includes the internet. SPF's filing suggested that he may argue that he had an honest belief that use of customer funds was not unlawful. The filing suggests that his behavior amounted to honest mistakes in judgment and errors of management rather than crimes. It leaned heavily on the idea that unregulated crypto firms are in something of a gray area. Sam's filing said, If Mr. Bankman -Friede acted in good faith with respect to the use of FTX customer funds and with the belief that as a business matter FTX would be able to cover all customer withdrawal requests, he did not act with specific intent to defraud. It is also not relevant whether you believe certain conduct should have been regulated even though it was not regulated at the time. Now to put it mildly, the community does not have a lot of sympathy. However somewhat more sympathy is being extended for Nate Chastain, OpenSea's former head of product who was convicted of fraud and money laundering in May and has now been sentenced to three months in prison for insider trading. Chastain was responsible for deciding which NFT collections would be featured prominently on OpenSea's homepage. The scheme involved him purchasing NFTs ahead of them being featured on the website. All told, Chastain was accused of making over $50 ,000 in profits from this scheme across dozens of trades in 2021. At the time of his arrest, authorities referred to this case as the first ever insider trading scheme involving digital assets. Chastain's lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed because NFTs are not securities and Chastain leveraged information that was not confidential. The judge however was unconvinced and allowed the case to proceed to a jury trial in May, ultimately ending in his conviction. In addition to the three months behind bars, Chastain has been ordered to serve three months of home detention, to conduct 200 hours of community service, to pay fines of $50 ,200 and to surrender 15 .98 ETH, the spoils of his crime. US Attorney Damian Williams said, Nathaniel Chastain faced justice today for violating the trust that his employer placed in him by using OpenSea's confidential information for his own profit. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading in any marketplace will not be tolerated. So there you have it friends, that's the update from here. Another set of dreary but important events as we try to close the door on the last chapter of this industry and move to something hopefully a little bit better. Thanks for listening as always and until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.
The Breakdown
A highlight from Crypto and the Major Questions Doctrine
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, N .L .W. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, August 7th. And today we are talking about the latest in Coinbase's fight against the SEC. A quick note before we dive in. Sponsorship is back open again on The Breakdown. You've heard over the last few weeks a number of sponsors of the show, and we are currently booking out for the fall and into the beginning of next year. If your company is looking to reach easily the smartest audience in the crypto space, shoot me a DM or send us a note at sponsors at breakdown network. And with that, let's get into this show. Now, this morning, a really significant thing happened. And that is, of course, PayPal's announcement of PiUSD, which is their new stablecoin offering built on Ethereum. Right now, the leading contender for the most important trend of this bear market is TradFi muscling in on the territory that was seeded by crypto native companies behaving badly. And this could obviously be another big example of that. Now, this news just happened after I had already prepared today's show, so we will get all into that tomorrow. But for now, we have some big things from the end of last week to catch up on. On Saturday, CoinFund CEO Jake Brookman tweeted, This might be one of the most important documents ever produced that explains why digital assets are, in general, not securities. The document he was talking about came from Coinbase, and it was a request from that company to dismiss the SEC's case against them. Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal wrote, Today Coinbase filed our brief asking the court to dismiss the SEC's case against us. Our core argument is simple. We do not offer investment contracts as that term has been construed by decades of Supreme Court and other binding precedent. By ignoring that precedent, the SEC has violated due process, abused its discretion and abandoned its own earlier interpretation of the securities laws. By ignoring that precedent, the SEC has trampled the strict boundaries on its basic authority set by Congress. So there is a lot in here. And even in that short thread, you can see that there's really at least two big things going on. The first is an argument about what is or isn't a security, and the second is about where the SEC's authority really begins and ends. So let's take a step back and get into it. Coinbase has officially asked the court to dismiss the SEC's lawsuit against them. On Friday, they filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings, which raised questions about the validity of the lawsuit and indeed whether the SEC even has the jurisdiction to police the crypto space. The Coinbase motion argues along two dimensions. First, they argue that cryptos are not securities. Now, the argument for Coinbase rests on the familiar Howey test analysis, which we've seen across all token cases to date. Howey, you'll remember, identifies investment contracts as a class of security sales which are subject to SEC regulation. And for a sale to be considered an investment contract under Howey, it has to satisfy a number of different elements. It must be an investment of money. That investment of money must be in a common enterprise. There must be the expectation of profit, and specifically the expectation of profit must be derived from the efforts of others. In other words, this isn't something that you are putting work into yourself and expecting to benefit from thusly. In their motion, Coinbase argued that sales of tokens on their platform, quote, do not involve contractual undertakings to deliver future value, reflecting the income, profits or assets of a business. They are commodity sales with the obligations on both sides discharged entirely the moment the digital token is delivered in exchange for payment. Now, of course, they also discussed last month's decision in the Ripple lawsuit. In essence, the judge in that case decided the tokens in and of themselves are not securities, but they are sometimes sold alongside promises from an issuer, which would make those particular sales subject to SEC regulations. Coinbase argued that the facts in Ripple were, quote, substantially identical to those alleged here. Specifically, one of the key decisions in the Ripple case was that anonymous sales of the XRP token through an order book were not considered to be sales of investment contracts. For that reason, they were not found to be under the SEC's jurisdiction. Coinbase are arguing that the 13 tokens named by the SEC in their case are substantially similar to Ripple's XRP and should have the same results from Howie analysis. This would mean, of course, that sales conducted through Coinbase's exchange should not be considered the sale of securities. Coinbase relied on similar arguments to claim that their staking and wallet products were not subject to registration under securities law. They claim that customers are simply using their commodity tokens within software products offered by Coinbase. This would, of course, distinguish these Coinbase products from more traditional asset management services, where profit is derived from the skill of the asset manager. Now, within the whole security discussion, there is one particular analogy that's getting a lot of attention. Austin Campbell tweeted, one of the interesting parts of the SEC interpretation for me is that, if correct, I don't really see a dividing line between crypto and many other activities. Are limited edition Nikes now securities? I think Coinbase lays bare some of the issues well. Now, the specific analogy in the Coinbase argument is actually around baseball. They write, one can invest in a baseball or other trading card company through an instrument that imposes obligations on the company, and that will be a security. Or one can buy baseball cards on the open market, hoping they appreciate in value, and one will have bought a commodity. That remains true even if the company makes representations about plans to create a premier trading card platform to drive up the value of the cards it sells. Those representations can't turn baseball cards into securities. Baseball cards are not shares in the baseball card enterprise. This principle applies equally here. Coinbase goes on, the transactions over Coinbase is platform and prime are not and do not involve contractual undertaking to deliver future value reflecting the income profits or assets of a business. They are commodity sales with the obligations on both sides discharged entirely the moment the digital token is delivered in exchange for payment. The SEC's complaint does not allege otherwise because it does not and cannot plead the required elements of an investment contract. The SEC's Exchange Act claims should be dismissed. Now, still, even with colorful analogies like this, the in many ways more significant part of Coinbase's argument involves the major questions doctrine. And this is something you've heard me reference a number of different times on this show, but let's give a little bit of background. This is a legal doctrine that has been relatively recently developed by the Supreme Court. The major questions doctrine, or MQD, holds that administrative bodies, such as regulators like the SEC, require explicit guidance from Congress when tackling issues which have a major impact on the U .S. economy. It was recently used to strike down the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness program as it exceeded the authority of the White House. More classic cases include subjects like the tobacco industry and emissions reduction within the energy sector. Now, the point of MQD is not that regulators are never allowed to take on new areas of responsibility, but rather that Congress needs to be very specific when expanding a regulator scope. In a way, MQD is a statement about how regulatory legislation should be interpreted. In the original Supreme Court case, Whitman versus American Trucking Association from 2001, Justice Scalia said that Congress, quote, does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions. It does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouse holes. For the Coinbase lawsuit, the argument is that Congress did not intend to hide widescale jurisdiction over the crypto industry for the SEC within the Securities Act of 1933. In their brief, Coinbase claimed that, quote, the major questions principle applies directly here. The wholesale regulation of secondary markets for trading digital assets qualifies as extraordinary, and the digital asset industry worth around one trillion dollars is a, quote, significant portion of the American economy. Now, digging a little bit deeper into this from, you know, an actual lawyer, Morrison Cohen's Jason Gottlieb wrote a really good thread about this exact MQD issue. He writes, Coinbase's brief is fantastic. No surprise, given the strong arguments in their favor and great lawyers in -house and outside working on it. One point, though, the major questions doctrine, I think Coinbase actually undersold just how major a question this is. As background, the major questions doctrine is basically that when an agency claims the, quote, power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy that has, quote, vast economic and political significance, it must point to clear congressional authorization for that power. A different district court judge in the same courthouse recently found that the crypto industry, though certainly important, falls far short of being a portion of the American economy bearing vast economic and political significance, unlike, say, energy or tobacco. I think that judge and other folks, even within crypto, vastly underestimate the majorness of this industry. I often see references to it being a, quote, trillion dollar industry, which is basically just the headline market cap of all crypto. Coinbase's brief skillfully lays out the base case. The industry is worth around one trillion, one in five adults in the U .S. is on crypto. Hundreds of millions of people globally use crypto currencies for myriad purposes. But this is an underestimate that one trillion dollars is just the market cap of all the tokens. The value of the industry isn't just the market cap of tokens any more than the value of the smartphone industry is the stock valuation of Apple and Samsung. What about all of the people, the productivity of all the engineers, programmers, designers, lawyers, accountants, auditors, all the IP, the network of companies that don't have tokens but support the ecosystems, the interconnections with companies outside the U .S.? And most of all, our lives are becoming more digital with no clear line between cryptocurrency and other digital assets. So when the SEC says, quote, all tokens are securities, it is aggregating authority not just over crypto, but the entire digital asset economy. The market cap of all crypto tokens may be one trillion dollars, but the value of the digital asset economy is certainly many multiples of that. It is literally the future of the entire economy minus a few necessarily analog portions of analog industries. Coinbase was right and smart not to go into this depth and a motion for judgment on the pleadings. It's not the right legal or procedural place for it. But in future arguments on the major questions doctrine in crypto, let's not understate or undersell the majorness of the questions. If everything is becoming digitized, this fight isn't just about cryptocurrency. It's a much larger battle for the right to your digital life and whether the Securities and Exchange Commission is the proper regulator for the entire digital economy. Spoiler alert, it is not. Now, one of the things that really stands out in this whole engagement is Coinbase not really being super solipsistic in their fight. This is not a document that reads like an exchange fighting for its survival or even just asserting that they are in the right in a particular case. Instead, it's about these much bigger questions about authority and how authority is determined. It's fundamentally about questions of administrative power in America and what the limits on that should be. In many ways, crypto is just serving as the next logical battleground for that legal point. Now, tactically, right from their initial defense filing, legal commentators have suggested that Coinbase may be rushing to get a major questions doctrine decision on the books in a lower court. This would allow Coinbase to take the issue before the Supreme Court ahead of other crypto cases that also might deal with the major questions doctrine, including the Binance and Terraform Labs lawsuits. Some have speculated that Coinbase is concerned that having an MQD fight with those much less favorable lawsuits will be an extreme negative to the industry. In any case, the SEC will have until October 3rd to file a response. And overall, I think that the tweet that best captures the vibe of this weekend was Zcash founder Zuko tweeting, I never knew it could be so fun to read legal filings. Anyways, that is the big one that we wanted to explore today. But real quickly, before we get out of here, just one more from the rumor mill, New York Attorney General Letitia James is reportedly locking horns with Barry Silbert as the digital currency group empire comes under additional scrutiny. According to an article from Bloomberg, the AG's office is conducting a probe into DCG. According to anonymous sources, investigators have requested information from former Genesis executives. Genesis is, of course, the crypto lending arm of DCG, which filed for bankruptcy in January. That bankruptcy stowed controversy when it was revealed that the largest creditor was a group of Gemini customers who had lent out their crypto. Early during bankruptcy proceedings, it was also discovered that DCG had taken out 1 .6 billion in intercompany loans from their subsidiary. At the time, DCG had given the public impression that Genesis losses from the bankruptcy has been extremely acrimonious. The Gemini co -founders, the Winklevoss twins, have publicly called out DCG numerous times for failing to do enough to refinance the loans, along with a whole other slew of accusations. Now, the SEC has already sued both Genesis and Gemini for offering unregistered securities for sale in relation to the lending arrangement, and there had been rumors of a Justice Department probe in January, but nothing appears to have come from that investigation. According to this new Bloomberg report, former Genesis chief risk officer Michael Patchen has already been questioned in the AG's investigation. That investigation is rumored to have taken place over recent months, and according to one anonymous source, the DCG loans are a critical part of the inquiry. Particularly, it seems like the AG is interested in how they were characterized to investors in the market. Of course, DCG CEO Barry Silbert has remained adamant that the loans were, quote, always structured on an arm's length basis and priced at prevailing market interest rates. Following the Bloomberg article, a spokesperson for DCG said the company is assisting regulators and investigators upon request and that, quote, DCG has always conducted its business lawfully and with the highest ethical standards. So, my friends, that is going to do it for today's episode. There is a lot coming up this week. I tease the PayPal stablecoin story, and then there is also a lot of smoke around Huobi, although it may take a few episodes to really understand exactly what's going on there. In any case, it appears that we are not in for that quiet August that so often happens in financial spaces. So, as always, until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from Was the Curve Finance Exploit a Failure of DeFi Self-Regulation?
"This is Carpe Consensus. Join hosts Ben Shiller, Danny Nelson, and Cam Thompson as they seize the world of crypto. Hello and welcome to Carpe Consensus. This is a podcast from the CoinDesk Podcast Network and I am Ben Shiller. I'm the features editor here at CoinDesk. And joining me today is Danny Nelson. Hi, Danny Nelson. Hello to Danny Nelson indeed. You are indeed Danny Nelson. Can you confirm that very fact? I think so. I don't know. I haven't gotten my orbs. I'm sorry. I haven't gotten my retina scanned yet by the orb coin people. So who knows if I really am who I say I am. So you just have to take my word for it. That's true. I mean, what would we do with that world coin as to prove our identity? We have no idea who anyone is. If we couldn't prove it, Danny could either be in Binance court or he could be doing some NHL practice. You know, too many Danny Nelson's out there. I abide by the laws of quantum mechanics and I am in all places at once. That slightly higher sounding voice was the voice of Cam Thompson. Do you exist Cam Thompson? I don't know. Could just be a glitch in the crypto simulation. But as far as I know, I am here ready to talk about some crazy crypto news that's happened in the past week. So none of us can prove we exist, but we are here to talk about crypto news and everything that is included in that innocuous sounding phrase. So, Danny, the latest news today is about curve, which is a decentralized finance protocol, and it's in some hot water. Do you want to explain about that? Yes, it is. Now, Curve is one of the, let's just say, big four, big five, blue chip DeFi protocols like Compound and MakerDown, Aave, Uniswap, one of those places where everyone goes to to make their trades on the Ethereum network because they just believe, well, this is built stronger, this is built better. It's not prone to the hacks that we see on the smaller DeFi protocols. Well, over the weekend, that presumption collapsed. A zero day in how the smart contracts of these different pools was set up was exploited and a hacker and or hackers, we're not sure which, got away with maybe 70 million dollars in various cryptocurrencies by draining the pools. Now, how the hack itself happened, that's a little techie, but the most important thing to remember here is that everyone's assumptions of safety fell apart because these pools had one little vulnerability and they were exploitable. So it just is another moment where you have to look at DeFi and think, how are these systems set up? Who am I placing my trust in? Because even if we're trusting that these are trustless systems, which is to say, no one person is controlling them, well, we believe that they're trusted that these parties have vetted the code. And that hasn't been the case here. So some of this hacking was apparently down to MEV, which is a very controversial front running activity on Ethereum. Do you want to explain some of that controversy, Danny? So I'm not entirely, I'm not an expert on MEV, but in this case, there are actually two ways that MEV has worked. Well, for starters, what MEV is is basically, you know what, I am not good enough. I can't even attempt to describe how MEV works. It's monkeying around with the unfinalised transactions in the mempool. With MEV, these bots can understand the transactions that are going to occur, the ones that are in the mempool, and they can execute them before those transactions have occurred. So let's say an attacker is attempting to drain a pool. Well, that it takes a transaction and that transaction is in the mempool before it is executed. So in theory, and in practice here, MEV bots saw that and front ran and withdrew some of the money before the attackers were able to. So some of that money is now just stuck with the MEVs. In some cases, though, some of these people who are running these bots have actually returned some of the money. They realise that their bots possibly did an unintentional public service. And I think there was one account, coffeebabe .eth, that has returned $7 million. So there's an upside and a downside to always getting front run by the bots. Mason. Right. Taking a look out here, I mean, everyone says that DeFi is a feature of finance, but these protocols keep on being hacked. I mean, what is the feature here? Abhay Among many things, if I knew the answer to that, I would not be a journalist. But one outcome of this occurrence, in my opinion, should be that everyone takes a step back and thinks, how are we evaluating these systems? And what do we need to change about that? Because you really can't have a situation where one of the big protocols that everyone trusts is falling victim to what really is a simple hack that should have been stopped. So Danny, as you just mentioned, Curve is one of the more popular, more trusted DeFi protocols out there. And as regulation is coming into the crypto space, eventually it'll get to the DeFi space, but DeFi has kind of stayed away from that. But in this case, how do you think events like this hack within Curve, as well as other malicious attacks on DeFi protocols, how do you think that might play into a future of trying to regulate these kinds of protocols and services? Well, what I think is most important to remember is that this is a failure of self -regulation. These entities, the people running them, because there are people who are more influential in contributing to the Coinbase and executing and adding and whatever it is, the people who have some oversight, they need to be trusted to be doing a good job. And the code needs to be very carefully vetted. And that's not happening here. So I don't think the answer is we need to give this to the SEC or some other federal entity to oversee it. There needs to be, I think, some sort of standard setting in the industry where you have a true team of auditors that not are just some company of people in their basement, but actual professionals people could trust when they look at it and say, this thing is good. And they're not just saying it because you paid them to say it. But when looking at who's going to do that, a lot of times these regulatory agencies will try to take that responsibility upon themselves. Obviously, they might not be able to understand the code or what MEV even is or how so many of these intricacies operate. So who do you think is best fit to kind of establish this standard among DeFi? I don't know. It's a big question. I have no idea, right? I don't know. I assume maybe some comp -sci academics, to be quite honest. Definitely not AI, though. I think some people are saying that AI should be used to audit smart contracts. Sure, maybe if you want to get a first pass take on whether or not your code sucks, maybe ask the AI. But you really need someone to dig in to who knows what they're doing in order to catch these before they become a problem. So Dan Kuhn in an op -ed today was speculating that this hack might lead to some changes in how DeFi is done. One of those would be taking some of the crypto trading off -chain. So apparently the new version of Uniswap, which is a key protocol maker, Uniswap X is using something called best execution, which takes some of the transactions, as I say, off -chain. So would that have helped in this case, Danny? Well, I mean, if trading is happening off -chain, it basically means that the money is in a spot and it doesn't leave that spot, but whoever is the ownership over it changes, basically. I don't know if it would change the outcome here. It depends how that setup is in the first place, right? If the money is, if the crypto is in a vault somewhere, it is not leaving the vault. Well, ultimately at some point it might leave the vault for whatever reason and you still have to make sure that the input output is safe there. So yeah, it probably would protect one attack vector, but I'm not enough of an expert to know for sure whether it would have stopped this specifically. Okay. I think this is a good place to leave this discussion. One step forward, two steps back, as usual. Pretty much as usual. Thank you, Danny, for giving some insight there. I will say though, one final note on this. My favorite meme in all of crypto is the crypto hacks calendar, which without fail every month, we have a different logo that you add to the month to just to demonstrate, oh, well this week Olympus fell, this week whatever fell, this week SushiSwap got hit, Euler got hit. Well, in the month of July, we had three. We had, I don't even remember the first one, but it was big. We had Conic and we had Curve and the others were pretty big, but Curve takes the cake because Curve is, like Uniswap, one of those big, respected, long in the tooth DeFi protocols. So good job crypto, keep it up. You can fill out that bingo card.
Northwest Newsradio
"auditor" Discussed on Northwest Newsradio
"No significant rain, however, insight in the couple for Weather Center. I'm meteorologist Shannon O 'Donnell. Sunny skies 2 right now in Seattle. The state's largest transit agency has a list of improvements to make following an update of its improvement project spending. Northwest News Radio's Ryan Harris, the King County Auditor, finds that Metro Transit has lofty goals and big budgets for new or improved facilities, but that setting goals that are too big when they're short staffed and not taking lessons from past projects are among the reasons they come in behind schedule, says Elise Garvey with the auditor's office, which means it's not building or improving the capital assets that it estimates it needs to support operations and reach its goals. Available data indicates that this is primarily due to projects being behind schedule. Mark Ellerbrook, Metro's capital improvements director says they agree with the auditor's conclusions, especially on the need for improved processes. He says they need to follow for every step. And I think that will have a positive impact on our delivery and allow I think us to realistically say what we are able to do. The auditor's office says Metro has agreed with all 19 of its recommendations that it's already implemented some of them and that it expects Metro will continue down that road. In King County, Ryan Harris, Northwest News Radio. Higher income drivers don't hesitate to use toll lanes while low middle to income drivers are more likely to avoid them. The findings may seem obvious, but Northwest News Radio's Ryan Haake reports a straight transportation study also uncovered some surprises. Working with income and a collected from cell phones. The study examined who is paying to use the state's five toll roads. Mark Hollenbeck is director of UW State Transportation Center or track, he says. Unsurprisingly, people more with money pay more often. We see a reasonable amount of total avoidance at the moderate income level, and that's good. At the higher income level, we see a reduction in people who use who total do avoidance. And while that is especially true of the five twenty bridge and the highway ninety nine tunnel where free alternatives exist, he says the toll matters much less on state route one six seven used by many more or moderate income drivers and weirdly on the one six seven variable toll hot lanes. When we raise the price, more people get in the lane, which from an economics perspective makes no sense. notes Hollenbeck the toll is usually modest and there are no restrictions on getting in or out of the one six seven hot lane. So using the lane is an easier decision to make. Corwin Haake, Northwest News Radio. Paine Field and Everett is getting a new name. Propeller airports announced that Snohomish County
Northwest Newsradio
"auditor" Discussed on Northwest Newsradio
"Metro says it agrees with all the auditor's recommendations. The auditor says Metro is already putting some of them in place it and expects to see continued improvements. The Pierce County Council is hoping to accelerate its response to the homelessness crisis. More from Northwest News Radio's Jeff Pajalup. The Select Committee on Homelessness was created by a vote of the council last week. I am grateful that the council is willing to take up this responsibility. That's council member Ryan Mello during final debate. The idea is the for committee to meet twice a month for the next year and a half to speed up the county's response to the homelessness crisis. The committee's first meeting is on July 26th. Jeff Pajalup, Northwest News Radio. A stabbing area in the of 2nd Avenue and Cherry in downtown Seattle this morning leads to gunfire. Assistant SPD Chief Todd Kibbe says officers found the suspect a short time later in the area of 1st and Spring. An officer was found contact in with the suspect. An officer involved shooting occurred. 39 year old suspect was treated for his injuries and transported to Harborview Medical Center. The knife was recovered at the scene. The stabbing victim also taken has to Harborview for treatment. The officers involved in the shooting will be placed on standard administrative leave as the investigation continues. Washington's childhood vaccination and immunization data programs are at risk due to federal cuts. The Centers for Disease Control is reducing its funding for child vaccination programs, cuts that will result in the state losing about $2 .5 million. The Seattle Times reports that's about 20 % Department of the of Health's budget for immunization work statewide through 2024. The cuts could mean the programs to order and distribute vaccines and track immunizations are disrupted. The CDC has not provided further information about its funding decision or other potential cuts. The local who won it all on the CDC's American Idol this year was honored by the King County Council. Northwest News Radio's Ryan Harris was there. Take my hand and don't let me go E .M. Tongi, the guitar -playing Hawaiian transplant from Federal Way received a special recognition from King County Councilmember Pete Von Reichbauer. love E .M.'s of music came from his late father Rodney who gifted him with a guitar when he was 13 and always told him that singing the was only thing meant for him. E .M. tells me he's very happy his family, friends and members of the Pacific Islander community were there to support him but the pain of missing his father still shows clearly in E .M.'s eyes whenever comes his dad up. Still E .M. says he's sure his dad would be proud. I feel like he would be happy and just very supportive and yeah well yeah I would like to think so. E .M. is out on tour with a slew of dates in California starting next week. In King County, Ryan Harris, Northwest News Radio. From the Beacon Blumbing Sports, that's America's try to double up the visiting Minnesota Twins right now at the bottom of the first tied up to appease Blue Jays and Swifties make for enormous crowds in Seattle this weekend. More from Bill Swartz. Canada's Major only League Baseball team has come into town. Thousands of Toronto Blue Jay fans make their pilgrimage from C, B Alberta and the Great White North. The Mariners tell us there are just limited tickets remaining for the three series. game The Jays and M's play ball at 1 10 both Saturday and Sunday. Hopefully enough time to clear out the south downtown in time for Taylor Swift concert goers at Lumen Field. One more day of practice for golf's Open Championship at
AP News Radio
AP Sports SummaryBrief at 5:47 p.m. EDT
"Retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre is ending a lawsuit against sportscaster pat McAfee after McAfee publicly apologized Thursday for his previous on air statements that Favre had been, quote, stealing from poor people in Mississippi. In a welfare miss spending case. Favre and McAfee both announced the settlement, McAfee, a former NFL punter, apologized during the pat McAfee show on YouTube and said he did not have to make a payment to Favre to settle the suit. Farb still has defamation lawsuits pending against former NFL player Shannon Sharpe and Mississippi auditor SHAD white. I'm geffen coolbaugh.
AP News Radio
IRS pledges more audits of wealthy, better customer service
"As the tax filing deadline fast approaches, the IRS is vowing to provide better customer service and conduct more audits with a big boost in its budget. The IRS is outlining how it plans to use an $80 billion cash infusion that came from the Democrats inflation reduction act. Critics have suggested without evidence, the money could go for creating a mob of armed auditors who would harass middle class taxpayers. So the new IRS commissioner Daniel werfel explains the IRS will invest in better technology, hire more customer service representatives and expand its ability to audit high wealth taxpayers. Officials vow they will not raise audit rates on small businesses or households that make less than $400,000 a year. I'm Jackie Quinn
WTOP
"auditor" Discussed on WTOP
". And out of the top stories we're working on at WTO. Well, D.C. wanted to have zero traffic deaths by next year, and now an auditor is saying why there's been a lack of progress toward that goal. Yet another area of school system is turning to artificial intelligence technology to detect weapons and lawyers say they're now seeing trouble troubling video of a death at a Virginia hospital that's led to charges for 7 deputies. Keep it here for full details on these stories in the minutes ahead. It's now 5 48. Traffic and weather on the 8s let's check in again with Jack Taylor. Sounds like we've got trouble in Virginia at a Hamilton on route 9 out in your Hamilton station road a crash may have traffic alternating follow any crew direction on scene. 66 is fine at a front royal. You move an east through Gainesville all the way to Rosalind, 95, good to go coming into and through Fredericksburg, rolling out of woodbridge north into Springfield. Three 95 still quiet, leaving edsel road all the way up toward the 14th street bridge. You'll find some police activity on 18th street in northwest, district authorities have blocked the roadway between L and M streets, no crash activity or just being turned around. No big issues as of yet across the freeway. D.C. two 95 south is a little busier. She rolls south towards east capital street. Also in Maryland, we're a little heavier on two 70. We refined getting out of Frederick. There's a little delay down near one O 9, nothing that'll cost you any time. That way still fine. Through Montgomery and prince George's counties, and we're wide open between the beltway still on 95, and the Baltimore Washington Parkway.
The Breakdown
Crypto Clients Flee Silvergate
"All right guys, jam packed end of the week. First of all, a quick follow-up on silvergate. Obviously they were the main character of yesterday's show and what started as a trickle of crypto companies leaving the bank has now turned into a flood. By Thursday, the list of companies that had cut ties with silvergate included coinbase circle, paxos, crypto dot com, bit stamp ledger X, CBOE digital markets, galaxy digital and Gemini. Silvergate share price dived about 58% dropping to an all time low. For those who haven't listened to that show, silvergate had announced on Wednesday that it would be delaying filing its ten K annual report, and the notice of delay stated that the bank was answering questions from its auditors and accountants needed to assess the impact of ongoing regulatory and DoJ scrutiny and needed to reconsider its ability to quote continue as a going concern. It's assumed that kraken is the only major crypto exchange continuing to use silvergate, having cut ties with crypto banking rival signature bank on Wednesday, although kraken have not commented on whether they still have significant business with silvergate or not. Now, one of the other subplots of the silvergate revelations was speculation around the status of micro strategies $205 million Bitcoin backed loan from the bank. Some breathless short sellers have speculated that the loan might be called in if silvergate declares bankruptcy. Catalyzing a micro strategy margin called that some have been speculating about since the beginning of this bear market. Micro strategy calm this speculation on Thursday afternoon, tweeting, we have a loan from silvergate not due until Q one 25. There are market concerns regarding silver Gates financial condition. For anyone wondering the loan wouldn't accelerate because of silvergate and solvency or bankruptcy. Our Bitcoin collateral isn't custody with silvergate, and we have no other financial relationship with silvergate.
Mark Levin
$60 Billion in COVID Fraud? Try $4 Trillion
"60 billion in COVID fraud they write triforce trillion And this is what the party of the left and many of the rhinos this is where they drag us and take us And this is why there is now resistance in the house among conservatives and hopefully the majority To keep paying for this stuff we don't even know where this money is As auditors and congressional investigators try to figure out just how much federal COVID relief went to fraudsters They're missing the trillions Trillions of dollars in fraud committed by the federal government itself In a war that had no chance of winning Last week the government accountability office reported that fraudsters took about 60 billion in unemployment checks That's on top of the tens of billions in fraudulent claims made through the paycheck protection program that tens of billions handed out through a small business administration program and on and on So you might wonder where's the FBI They are vigorously chasing down people all over the country who were parading on the lawn of the capitol building They're busy chasing down Racists Who aren't white Cops 5 black cops who killed a black young man They have the civil rights division looking into this This Wednesday the House committee on oversight and accountability will hold a hearing to investigate rampant waste of taxpayer dollars Representative James comer the chamber of the committee said we owe it to Americans I like this guy comer a lot To identify how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent under the guise of pandemic relief for lost to waste fraud abuse and mismanagement
The Jimmy Tingle Show
"auditor" Discussed on The Jimmy Tingle Show
"When you take on an issue like that, which is kind of uncharted territory in terms of the auditor's job historically, do you think you're going to need to get partners, for example, in the transportation sector that are on board philosophically with this approach? Because I imagine there's a lot of folks there that might not be as that up to date with carbon. And do you have any influence with those type of appointments, do you think? Well, look, I have a collaborative leader and I want to always welcome people into the conversation. The role I'm running for is independent. It's elected by the voters and it's very important that it doesn't report to the governor reports only to the voters. So I'll be proud of that independence and I'll use it to its full potential, but I don't think anyone can succeed in this job if they're just a bomb throw. Because the role doesn't have direct policy making ability have to work with people and that means you can sometimes disagree, but you can do it without being disagreeable. That's always been my approach and it's the approach that I'll take in the office, it will mean that there are some tough conversations, but I truly believe that we can do anything we put our minds to in Massachusetts, especially when we're working together and more following the facts and the data. And I want to be a leader for us in the Commonwealth and doing that through the power of the auditor's office. Do you think we'll be able to use some of this federal money for, say, ramping up with electric vehicles and ramping up with charging stations and all that sort of thing? Well, we have to. I mean, we've got this one time pot of money in. I'm proposing in that first plan I mentioned to try to track those dollars in as close to real-time as possible. Most state programs are budgeted on an annual basis.
The Jimmy Tingle Show
"auditor" Discussed on The Jimmy Tingle Show
"Many times I will just be forthcoming here as a senator, many times, I will not even be given an hour to read and reflect on a piece of legislation that I'm expected to vote on. Before we have to take the vote. Now, if I as a senator, I'm not given ample time to consider legislation or funding priorities for the Commonwealth for my district, what does that say about how working families are being treated regarding this process. So my issue here has been. You know, regardless of where we're spending the money or how we're spending the money, we need to first start with allowing families in our communities who are the taxpayers who are funding these budgets that we are voting on, we need to allow those taxpayers a seat at the table where the decisions are being made. And right now that's not happening the way that it could and the way that it should. And that's one of the reasons why I'm running for state auditor to help to open up the process and whatever way I can and make sure all working families regardless of our family background. Bank balance or zip code have a seat
The Jimmy Tingle Show
"auditor" Discussed on The Jimmy Tingle Show
"So this is why we have so much more work to do, not just on that issue, but on so many other issues concerning transparency and accountability. And as a state senator, I've been standing up and speaking out about things like the holyoke soldiers home tragedy, for example, where we lost 77 veterans due to mismanagement at that home. I've been calling for investigations and oversight into that situation, but as the auditor, I'll be able to look into that a lot further, and I'll be able to audit that situation. Okay. It's very compelling, how long did you serve as state rep? 6 years. 6 years, and how long did you serve as state senator? Four years. Four years. Okay, so now you're running four years in total. What were you most proud of as state senator in why are you running for auditor and what does the auditor do? Because I want to know and I know my listeners want to know. Some of the things I'm most it's hard to pick one thing, right? But some of the things that I think were most proud of has been our ability to help increase transparency accountability and equity. Those are things that have been important to me since day one. I've learned through the years, you know, about the need to make sure that we have the support of our colleagues to make sure we're passing some of these things into law. And I wouldn't have been able to do any of the work that I've done on this and get anything done. Without the support of my colleagues.
The Jimmy Tingle Show
"auditor" Discussed on The Jimmy Tingle Show
"And your listeners about why I'm running for state auditor and share a little bit about my personal journey and what I'm passionate about and what I think we can do in the state auditor's office a little bit about myself first. My name is Diana dizoglio. I am a current state senator representing portions of the merrimac valley in north shore, very humbled to have served for ten years now. I'm currently in my tenth year of service in the legislature. And just a little bit about my background. I was born to a 17 year old single mom in the city of methylene, grew up housing insecure. We moved around quite a bit during my childhood. Mostly between the cities of Lawrence and methuen, depending on where my mom could find work as a young nurse's aid back then. I went through the public school system end up graduating from high school and then going off to our local community college where I was able to obtain an associate's degree that was affordable thanks to our legislatures investments in families like mine. From there I ended up earning a seat at wellesley college where I was so grateful to have earned a seat at that the only reason I was able to actually attend was because of a full financial need based scholarship and knowing that Jimmy is really what inspired me to give back to my community in whatever way I could.
KLBJ 590AM
"auditor" Discussed on KLBJ 590AM
"Moving in accounts. It's unbelievably ridiculous. There are more efficient ways to do this than to have every American's data sent to the IRS for $600 transaction. I hope moderate Democrats rule the day and tell the Biden administration. This is totally unacceptable. Look, we want taxes to be paid. We want taxes to support our country, but there are more efficient ways of doing it. Then the intrusive violation of privacy of every American's right for all their bank accounts. And the first thing that comes to mind as if you want this. If you were trying to scrape up the money to pay for your ridiculous over budget ideas, then you do that in Congress. If you're wanting to get it off of the taxes, you sure up any loopholes that are being used by these big? Um Entities. And you make sure that they can't use them and that they are paying their fair share. I mean, it has to hit you wrong that they want to look at any transaction you do. If you have more than $600 in your bank account, and then you look at what Amazon paid in taxes. They didn't pay in taxes. Because the way that the tax bill is written, they have a loophole to which they can not do that. Yes, and the other remedy has spent less money. There's always that, but we know that's just a pipe dream. Never going to happen. It's always about more money, more money, more money. I think what Biden and Elizabeth Warren may really be up to here is floating this proposal and getting people worked up and scared. And people are going to come back and say, Okay, put more money into the I R s auditors. U N I. R s Increase your budget. Hire more auditors collect that tax revenue that maybe what they're thinking here. Well, then they don't do their research because again that doesn't help with the business like Amazon, who can use the current tax laws to not pay any taxes. So once they Let's say they go that route. They hire more auditors, and they're able to do this. These companies are still legally using what's on the books to not have to pay these taxes. So where then? Are they going to get that money Because they're not gonna be able to force that because it's legally on the books until Congress does something about it. So then it's going to be like, Oh, no, we weren't able to get the money that we thought we were going to get off the ridge. And here we have this big package that we still can't pay for. Guess where they're going. They're going to forget any promise that they made to you about $400,000 are not going to see an increase in your taxes after the George Floyd riots, you may remember the Minnesota Freedom Fund. This was backed by Kamala Harris and other key Democrats. They put up the money to bail out protesters and then just kept on rolling. Bailing out people charged with crimes. Yes, even violent crimes, and they have continued their operations. But now there is a report focusing on a 48 year old man by the name of George Howard, who they bailed out. He is now charged with murder. In a road rage incident in Minneapolis. He had already been charged with domestic assault. And this group backed by Kamala Harris bailed him out on the domestic assault charge on August 6th. And then just about 12. Days later, he turned around and was charged with murder in this road rage case. This to me is more to do with, um The judges than it does with this. This fund that is is paying the bell for these individuals. Um, if the judge didn't allow there to be a bell, there would be nothing for these individuals this group to pay and allow this to go through and time and time again. We are seeing these judges. Granting a low bell amount, maybe even personal recognizance that they get out for. For people that have done violent things. Well, the Minnesota Network that has been putting up this money says Based on news reporting now by local Minneapolis TV stations, the Minneapolis Freedom Fund says we're now going to change our methods. We're going to be more careful and looking into these cases before we decide to put up the bail money for these people. What a concept. Raise your hand. If you believe that's actually going to happen. I don't nobody's hands are up. No. But that let's just take them at their word that that's how they've been operating. Oh, we see somebody in jail. Let's get him out. Just pay their bell. Yes, well, that sounds like how they've been operating and it Again. I don't agree with that. But it really to me comes down to these judges that are even allowing to to have a bill that can be paid by. You know anyone for Crimes that they that were violent. All right, let's go to South Austin as easy. Good morning. You're on K. L B. J. I understand You have family in Afghanistan. Is that right? Good morning. Yes, This is easy. Yeah. Do you have family in Afghanistan? And the reason I'm calling? I just want to know why. I just want to let you guys know that here is there There is more than What you guys here on the T V or on the radio or on the media. I got a family in Afghanistan and I'm a U. S citizen. She's my wife. She went to the airport three times, and she was about to get killed at three times the first time she passed out. She was allowed to get shot by the Taliban. The second time she went there and likely she left the airport just half an hour before that exclusion that happens. That took the life of hundreds or thousands of Afghans and civilians. And there's so many Afghans, American citizens green card holders. And and also the X ivy holders. They are all trend that in Kabul and there is no one to help them. Basically, I know like If they the evacuation that happens, they brought up like a Almost 11 120,000 people, But most of those people are even not HIV holders. They are not the ones who, basically they were. They were able to get through. The crowds are skipped through the barriers and get on the plane. And and somehow, you know, they got out of that can be but the ones that they are really eligible. They're still trying to buy the Taliban and I I'm we're kind of lost. We are lost. We don't know who is going to Was going to take care of this because Now they are kind and call and Kabul and all over the place is but No one can help them and I tried my best. And even I was about to risk my life to go and and and bring her, But I didn't get any help from the State Department or from anyone. I reached him several times to email to call. I read that the U. S. I think the department of Defense Yes. As easy. Hang on their stay on hold. I want to get your contact Info. Uh, Congressman McCall's office, maybe maybe able to help on this. He's working with the Pineapple Express to get people out. Hang on. We'll get your contact info That'll do it for this hour. We're back Mark and Melinda this afternoon 2 to 4. Mark and Melinda on news. Radio K LBJ The great team at Nile Maxwell GMC in Round rock is keeping those savings rolling all.
NewsRadio KFBK
"auditor" Discussed on NewsRadio KFBK
"15th more news Now with Kate the case, Joe Michael's Kitty, the state auditor, again reporting on waste, fraud and abuse among state agencies, KFBK is Greg Fishman has the details. The state whistle blower hotline generates leads for the auditor's office to follow. Not all of them pan out. But Margarita Fernandez from the auditor's office as this time Caltrans was found to have overpaid some employees, and we did find over 200 instances where the employees may have received two payments. Caltrans failed to contact those people in time to get the money back, but notice the employees about that, Within three years they had lost. That opportunity? Yeah, that one incident caused the state $1.5 million. This report details other cases of waste, fraud and abuse Also found to be true John could Paul is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer's Association. Very little of it is intentional criminal conduct. There's some of that. Most of it's just incompetence or mismanagement. Greg Fishman News 93.1 Kfbk, a world renowned veterinarian and former UC Davis professor will be serving time for tax evasion but not before working at the Olympics this summer in Tokyo. KFBK is John Byrne, I see has details. Equine specialist Jack Ray Snider will spend six months in federal prison, followed by six months of home detention after pleading guilty. The charge relates to more than $200,000, an unreported income from the 2011 tax here. The five time Olympic veterinarian known up and down the state and beyond for his work with horses is said to report to prison on August 17th. Just nine days after the conclusion of the Tokyo Olympic Games, Snyder is also being hit with more than $160,000 in fines. John Brown eyes E News 93.1 kfbk, Sacramento County is considering some big changes to harden way between Ethan Way and Watt Avenue, the major suburban thoroughfare that has retail office. And housing all on the same stretch. The first workshop to introduce the ardent way Complete streets project is tonight and it's just getting underway. The county Transportation Department hoping for public input, you confined the link and more information at ardent way complete streets dot net. It's 5 34 on the kfbk. Afternoon news with Kitty O'Neil. All right, Thank you, Joe and round up of binoculars or telescope so you can catch a rare glimpse of a total lunar eclipse early tomorrow morning. Kpk Zandi. Asher tells us this isn't just any eclipse. This one is called the Super Blood Moon eclipse. The reason it has a reddish color and the whole moon gets this very eerie red glow, which is where we get the term Blood moon from sex tape. Planetarium Director Kyle Waters has a super blood moon eclipse. Lucky living in California because this won't be seen by anyone east of the Rockies. It's the first time that's happened in 2.5 years. If you want to see this sight, you'll have to get up early extra early Wednesday morning. Here are the times from 1:45 A.m. to.
The Successful Encore Career Podcast
"auditor" Discussed on The Successful Encore Career Podcast
"Popular but it that's really just making sure that we aren't claiming money that really isn't ours as a government entity. Is there a timetable on that that once you realize there's unclaimed funds. Is there a clock that starts not really really is a process though. Always get back really. Okay wow got to fill out some forms of course but now put the also. If i remember correctly i'm not i mean there's there's only one unclaimed for each county correct so when i was the director of the agency i had to fill out a form saying we don't have any unclaimed funds so even if we didn't have any still had to report it as a so for instance if somebody had Paid for a program and and didn't get a Didn't get the money back. When they didn't come to the program. I would could unclaimed funds. We didn't charge for anything so we didn't have any unclaimed funds so they just kind of trickle out there a yeah a night to watch that but i'm glad to hear you also aren't worried about delinquent tax list. No no no no no. No i sat one scares me more. Yeah no we do not want to go there so you know we we have. We did not want to make this confusing conversation but it was kinda hard to sort of get through all of the different pieces of the auditor's office so you know. Sort of. In retrospect what is there any message that you want to make sure the folks here. Yeah the commitment that started day. One that i learned in my household of giving out that Phone number or we're here to serve the public and so if there's any questions concerns on any function not only the authors but others across the county We want to be accessible and so courage anyone listening or going to the website. Feel free to email me on yano. Franken county ohio dot gov for free to call my cell anytime six one four two one nine nine two to four. Get myself to the office so it scares the staff to death because they know if they're not happy he's probably going to get a call in cellphone burner phone that we're to provide their services and given those different experiences that i shared in the bio of being at the state level and at the city level. We have good partners and are able to help get you. Maybe through some of the malays that people have experienced before. And so even if it doesn't fall or feels mundane about you know my dog's rabies situation. Let us know We've heard it all for the most part And look forward to anything new that we haven't heard before an nf. The listener is not in franklin county. This information is likely pretty close to what everybody is doing. And in our show notes. I've got information on how to check on other counties in the state The state auditors. Office and information there so just Again it kind of question. Educate yourself and that may that process may be. The first step is calling for two wonderful. Thank you so much joining us. This is great..
The Successful Encore Career Podcast
"auditor" Discussed on The Successful Encore Career Podcast
"Ten resigned from the board of elections turned around came back in and filed paperwork to run for the very twenty-fifth strict. It was central west southern franklin county Was successful one hundred percent the vote. Because my opponent withdrew either run scared or unopposed win. It's w. represent that district for two years. Found myself in a hyper hyper Gerrymandered situation So they combined six other reps districts to form the newly created eighteenth house district Put it in context. Twenty fifth house district was about one hundred and twenty square miles. The eighteenth house district was twenty two. They packed packed. Impact of voters But it was still the area that i had the largest portion so well other And i lived in And so was able to run for eighteen thousand district Ran tumor times But had the opportunity. When andy ginther decided to leave columbus city council and run for mayor to move to the local level. A lot of people wonder. Why would you go from state to the local at the state representative about one hundred twenty thousand people in the city columbus roy at large so gets represent eight hundred and fifty thousand and i got to go back. Let hilltop westside area that just because of a stroke of a pen i no longer was representing and so that was really appealing and enjoyed the opportunity to be a majority tackle. Some of the city challenges bring kind of some of the things that i value in public service so accessibility giving people my cell phone number putting my email out there And working at the local level in that regard but was approached about. What about the county. You can now represent one point. Four million people And that was appealing and having been In the legislative branch of both the state house and council for eight years opportunity to be account. Executive position was appealing my own team. Not having to kind of horse trade on votes Follow my vision and agenda and so been very fortunate. We're almost coming to our two year anniversary on march eleventh of serving as franken auditor. Mike we have so many different ways that we've like past either passed in the night ships passing in the night or or hit on on topics in whenever anybody talks to me about networking. It's real easy to network in columbus. 'cause we all have surrounded each other so you had the advantage of having a wonderful mentor in your debt Who i placed in turns with in one of my previous lifetimes you worked with judge brunner. I worked with judge brunner and placing interns with her when she was in franklin county court during the the Special docket program and then city council our age friendly columbus project that you spearheaded for us on city council which was phenomenal so And now i have a whole new respect for your abilities with all of this stuff they here. I mean for being the fifteenth. Hopefully eventually the fourteenth largest city. You're absolutely right in terms of the networking of my chief of staff and the auditor's office..
WNYC 93.9 FM
"auditor" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Author Morishima about one of the country's most controversial ongoing practices in criminal justice. The death penalty Following that conversation, we want to revisit another troubling practice that was part of California's prison system until very recently. Inmate serialization until the passage of a 2014 bill outlawing the practice. Many female inmates in California correctional facilities were being sterilized without their knowledge. Or without lawful consent. California state auditor, Elaine How found that from the fiscal year beginning in 2005 to the fiscal year ending in 13 2144 tuba legation performed on inmates and of those 39 were done without lawful consent. One of the doctors involved was confronted by a journalist. He said this sterilizations were saving the state welfare money. 35 incarcerated black women or sterilized during the period investigated by the state auditor. One of the victims is a woman named Kelly Dylan. Her story and fight for justice. And those lawyers who never gave up on her or this issue form the backbone of the documentary belly of the beast. Film is directed by Erika Cohn and produced by Angela Tucker, who both joined me when it premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival Last year. I started by asking Erica when she first learned about inmate sterilization in California. I was introduced to Cynthia Chandler in 20,010 through a mutual friend and was really inspired by Cynthia's compassionate release work. You know, she had represented the first terminally ill people who are granted released from prison in California. And there's no sort of Cynthia Chandler is an attorney. She's one of the attorneys who is a very big part of the story. Okay, continue. And she was a co founder of Justice. Now one of the only it's not be only US organizations with board members currently in prison who are leading strategy and kind of working collaboratively with those in the free world of those who are not incarcerated. I was really taken by their Let our families have a future campaign, which exposed the multiple ways that prisons destroyed the human right to family. One of the most heinous being that illegal sterilizations which to me really screamed eugenics. India had invited me into the organization as a volunteer, after which I became a legal advocate providing direct service needs for over 150 people in California's women's prison. And from there, I began collaborating with people inside on a project that became belly of the beast. Interesting. You're the second film maker. In the past year I've interviewed who started as an advocate in an organization. And then realize that they wanted to tell that story. When was the moment for you when you realize that you wanted to go from being a part of AH group helping to find a solution to using film is a way to tell the story. I think there is a tremendous last of resource is an intense attention and interest surrounding women's a cart incarceration. And I think that immense dehumanization and fear of retaliation often inhibits incarcerated women from women's voices from being heard. Which really Further marginalize is an already near invisible population. And I think that prison so far out of our sight out of our consciousness. So far from our physical reach. Were rarely granted access to the world behind the walls that isn't dramatized or sensationalized. So a couple of years into this process, I knew that this had to be a film and was Very grateful for the collaboration with people inside who had been directly impacted by the human rights abuses. Angela that the film does a good job of giving a historical backdrop for the story and explains the forced sterilization of relationship to eugenics policies in California. When did you learn about the state's history? And why did you think was important to provide this context in this documentary? Well, I think it is a lot to do with what you know, Erica said around this notion of so many people Don't know very much about what is happening within prisons in California. Um but also I think people think they understand what eugenics is, Um, it's not a new concept. Of you know, we have sort of Nazi Germany. People think of that specifically. But people don't actually understand how eugenics is playing out in the U. S right now. And so we needed to really give that context in order for people to Really be able to look back and see that this isn't something that's like far away from us. This is something that's happening every day on. That's why, you know this team had to take action. Erica. What did you want to point out about California's history with eugenics? Yes, we reveal in the film. California actually, with a From played a tremendous role in the founding of the eugenics movement. And actually, Nazi leaders actually came to California to study California's eugenics policies, and I think that's something that we really don't know on. It's something that we really need to confront as a nation. My guests are Erica Kona, Angela Tucker. We're talking about their new film belly of the beast. How long it sterilizations. The ones at your time on the film been occurring before the abuses came to light, Erica Yeah. Throughout the 20th century 31 states that actually passed eugenics laws, some of which remained on the books well into the 19 seventies, and so compulsory sterilization targeted those who are seen as quote undesirable people who are poor people who became pregnant out of wedlock people with disabilities. People in prison. People of color women of color were the most impacted by these Policies and Despite legislation in California, um in 1979, preventing sterilization. From continuing. We see that it's you know, uh, appears in other ways both, you know through the sterilization abuse in California's women's prisons..
KOMO
"auditor" Discussed on KOMO
"News Time 8 31 It's 47 degrees right now. Art Sanders top local stories from the camo 24 7 News Center. A personal information of more than a million people who filed for unemployment last year they have been hacked. State auditor Pat McCarthy says the data may have been exposed by a third party provider called Excel Leon, which temporarily held state file Our understanding is that the number of individuals affected is less than 1.6 million, but more than a million Additionally, the incident may have affected personal information of a smaller number of people, including data held by Department of Children, Youth and Families. She says the breach effects about 25 state agencies, McCarthy says her office was already looking into the estimated $600 million in fake unemployment claims filed last year. It emphasizes that this hack was not the fault of the employment Security Department. Doctors in our state are concerned. We don't have the full picture of covert variants in Washington. Cuomo's Ryan Harris has the story. Coronavirus mutations like the UK variant now here in the Puget Sound region, have doctors worried. We're not doing as much surveillance of those mutations as we should, because they do spread more quickly, and some can make people sick. ER, doctor Michael meant with multi care, told the Washington State Hospital Association briefing that the state and University of Washington have really helped get us ahead of the curve, but we still need Just awareness because if we do start to see these cases spread more widely, which is what we've seen in countries like the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. We would want to be aware of that early, Dr Mintz says. To add to their worries the South Africa and Brazil variants have been found to have less lasting immunity, so reinfection is more likely. But he says, even though the vaccines aren't as effective against them, there is some protection. And he says every little bit helps. Ryan Harris, come Oh news, all vaccination appointments set to take place. It can't show where center booked up for the next two weeks. King County Public Health says it's taking appointments at its Auburn drive through side and Booking out appointments for later next month, and Kent County executive doubt Constantine says they have enough supplies to vaccinate up to 500 people a day at each site. We're also asking to focus on South King County ZIP codes in these two South County facilities because there is simply less access to vaccine here. In the south part of the county, the vaccinations are open to South King County.
KIRO Radio 97.3 FM
"auditor" Discussed on KIRO Radio 97.3 FM
"Another data breach, which may have exposed your information details coming up after Cairo video, real time traffic. Here's Tracy Taylor, who just kind of swimming along for drivers right now, in North 25, for those of you that are trying to get into mount like terrorism and earlier crash near to 20th and whatever was blocking on north on four or five right around South Center. Looks like that's cleared out of the way, but it's left us a little bit of a line about side of the ball flavor highway in heading out that direction. It's a bumper to bumper commute south and four or five coming out of Bellevue through New Castle Valley freeways tied up between four or five out towards Willis. I don't see anything blocking, nothing reported, according to D. O T. Unless you're westbound on 5 to 2 and 85th, that's a rather some construction there that's taking up the right lane. Looks like we are going to be quite heavy on that South bound five drivers. We work our way after Highway 18 kind of working its way in towards theater comma Dom 18 westbound looks pretty good. Getting up to I five eastbound Not so good after the Valley Freeway and heading out towards rather auburn way. Looks like the bridges are in great shape and traffic brought to you by the state of Washington. Are you wondering when you can get the covert vaccine will find out if you can get it now or get notified when it's your turn. Find your phase dot or wh dot org's Let's find your phase w a dot or Cairo radio. Real time traffic. I'm Tracy Taylor. Now from the Cairo Radio New Center at my northwest Com. Another data breach could have exposed information about more than a million Washington residents cover radios nickel, Jennings explains. The attack happened on a third party server used by the state auditor's office. The state auditor says it could have exposed.
KNST AM 790
"auditor" Discussed on KNST AM 790
"Appropriations Committee, chaired by David Galan, who's a Republican senator from Father Arizona, does not have Know Garrett's been talking about. This does not have the repeal of the governor's emergency order on covered on their agenda for next week. And, uh, I don't know what's going on. David Galan. I've always thought he's a pretty good, courageous guy, but it's time for you to call him. And say, Put that on the agenda. It's scr 1001. It passed the government committee. But now it's got to come out of the Appropriations Committee and Senator Galan is that is the guy. And the chairman of those committee sets the agenda. So here's his phone number 6029265154 that 6029265154. And you know, I read that thing that Uh, Jon Kavanaugh wrote about the not supporting the repeal of the executive order because it would set the stage for mayors like Regina Romero and Chuck Huckleberry, the county administrator here and Pema to put their own restrictions on and And that and I read that and I understood what he was saying. But the thing that hit me is wait a minute. You're a law maker. You're in the majority. You can change that law. You can repeal the executive order and change the law at the same time. That's what you condo's So don't give me reasons why you can't do something because there if you're creative You can do it. Why is it the Democrats are always creative, but we just sit around to come up with ways not to do stuff. So you do need to call David Galan's office and tell him to put that repeal of the Override of Deuces Emergency order on the agenda 60292651. 54. Let's go to your phone calls. Robert. Welcome to Knsd. This is Ed Martin and forget Lewis. Good morning. Had, um I kind of just wanted a time. Bring across the point. Why or these people Wasting time and money and misdirecting energy, which could be used in a positive way and said, You're wallowing in all this negativity and pushing forward and impeachment for president who's no longer president. But I mean, it's just pure vindictiveness. You know, it's people need their heads examined. The guy you're dating allowed to do this. I mean, if you do not have somebody that can stop like, Hey, Enough is enough, You know, you know There is is there's only a couple of reasons to come to my mind. A one Maybe they're mentally ill. Number two. They are consumed by hate. Or number three. It's all the above or to them. It's like the end of the horror show to us. It was the end of a beautiful show. But for them, it's like an end of a horror show. They killed off the monster but the monsters calling out of the crawling out of the grave and coming back. I mean, these people are secular, and it's our money that they're wasting. And there are more important things for Congress to be doing that doing this. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, and then just to start off the new year on a negative note, I mean, can we leave all that stuff in in in the past year and started fresh with positive things? What I mean? What about all this talk about coming together? About unity. That is the biggest bunch of hooey. I have heard. How do you talk? Unity? I mean you immunity for them is to beat us over the head with clubs of into the ground and silence us. Oh, yeah, that's the social distancing, You know, they don't want people to be able to get to gather and talk and catch up and coordinate. You know, they want people disarrayed confused, Angry, scared so they could be you know, militantly did easier E re education camps. Well, the last guy that sent people that camps his name was a loft. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's what that's what I mean. I mean, how are these people even allowed to blatantly feeling election basically in front of your faces, and, uh, the, you know, deal out to proceed like as if as if there's nothing else like it was a legitimate election. I mean, this death I back in the days. If this would have happened 100 years ago, I guarantee those people would have been sent out on a rail. You know, in charge. This is this is what you need to do. Okay? We can complain about this last election. All we want. What we got to start focusing on is what's gonna happen in the next election. Well, we need to do is we need to call our state legislators, Republicans and Democrats call them all. And tell them tell them that a losing candidate should have the right automatically to request and obtain a full for independent forensic audit of the voting machines by an auditor of their choice. And if the auditor find something that it automatically goes into court for an independent assessment as to whether or not their election results are valid or not, You know, we need a way need to get rid of this nonsense where people have evidence, but no court takes it and no pork. No. No court actually wants to dig in and considerate. Or like what's going on America but county where they basically wanted Excuse the expression fixed the on it. You know these machines? These Dominion machines have the ability to put things into in adjudication file and the adjudication file. What we need to know in in in Arizona is what percentage of ballots ended up in the adjudication file in the machines.
NewsRadio KFBK
"auditor" Discussed on NewsRadio KFBK
"Today by the state auditor blasts e D D California's unemployment department or poor planning and ineffective management. 100 finds the Employment Development Department failed to prepare for economic downturns with poor call center management. The lack of qualified staff report says the department struggled to serve California's needing unemployment benefits. More than 800,000 claims paid late more than 21. Days after filing a D D has made changes to pay claims faster. But state Auditor Ellen Howl reports that some of those changes are temporary and opened E d D to fraudulent activity. Now, traffic and weather together and this time around, it is brought to you by release of Bel Air on our roadways, Fruit Ridge Road and Rico Boulevard. We have a report of a two vehicle crash. We have a pre ascended sedan blocking the westbound lanes there about injury ship South found 99 Calpine Road, The off ramp air traffic hazard couple of CHP units at the scene of this time, So you think you tell us what it is, but they haven't otherwise our freeways look good at the moment, but always subject to change without notice. Railings in Bel Air. Get a loaf of freshly baked French bread for just 97. Cents each and get creamy large hats, avocados only 97. Cents each and release in Bel Air Traffic on the tens, every 10 minutes mornings and afternoons on news 93.1 kfbk Next up on weather stumping up my sled watching high wind warning criminals knew 93.1 Hey, FBK. Free healthcare hundreds to more than $1000 per month and disability compensation and tens of thousands for college tuition. These are just some of the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Benefits that may be available to veterans via is focused on customer service, like never before, choose via and see why Veterans trust in via reached an all time high..
Newsradio 700 WLW
"auditor" Discussed on Newsradio 700 WLW
"And, uh, that's the way it goes, and I'm not going to criticize him directly. I'm not going to get in a war with him, and his words speak for themselves. And, uh, I've got a position and I'm gonna defend it as best I can. I think it's makes sense. Uh, I'm willing to hear the other side. Uh, I'm willing to listen to the other side. But the bottom line His biological males shouldn't be competing with women on and they shouldn't be in women's locker rooms, particularly impressionable young teenage girls that are getting enough stuff thrown at him from the society there. So the adolescence is hard enough is what you're saying. It's hard enough being an adolescent without the with the end, but But again, you know you sit down you talk about you have debates over these things. And and that's healthy but screaming people down and called them a holes and that you're a bigoted piece of trash is It really doesn't help your argument. If you're Chris Seelbach is a matter of fact. It undermines it. And a lot of gay friends of mine that will cringe anytime. Seelbach tweet something like that. He certainly not. He is not representative the gay community in Cincinnati. That's for sure. Anyway. Dusty appreciate the time has always handled county Auditor Dusty roads on the show this morning. Be well, Charlie. Good. Do you talk to you and take care? Take care friends. Let me get a time out, and we got news. The picture about four minutes here. I figure that one out. Uh, Chris Seelbach, who attacks cup cast dudes, attacks Nick Sand man. And refuses and doubles down and refuses to say, Hey, listen, what I saw first, like a lot of us. I got wrong. There's nothing wrong with saying I missed. You know what I miss that He doubled down on that and then to turn around saying you can't allow bullies have spread their hate. That's why he's fighting back against dusty roads in his opinion. You fight opinion, basic with fact and argue why it's OK for these things that happen. And that's why we have a healthy debate in America. And this guy wants to be mayor. We get what we deserve. 700 wlw the covert 19 vaccines, You hear stories about the government's inability to distribute it about warehouses of it. Just sitting there, even reports of pharmacists destroying batches of it. It makes you wonder who's in charge of all of this federal state local. They've had almost a year to plan for this. Why does it seem so disorganized? You have questions. That's why we're doing our best to give you the honest answers you need. 700 wlw. Free healthcare hundreds to more than $1000 per month and disability compensation and tens of thousands for college tuition. These are just some of the U. S Department of Veterans Affairs..