amycastor

Podcast: ‘Target Letter, Tether’ (Amy Castor and David Gerard)

I did a podcast for “When the Music Stops” with fellow crypto skeptic David Gerard, where we discus...

The DOJ’s criminal probe into Tether — What we know

Early this morning, 2021-07-26 19:26:15 +0000 UTC View Post

News: Regulators zero in on stablecoins, El Salvador’s colón-dollar, Tether printer remains paused

My Patreon account saw seven new subscribers this month, so far. Than...

Binance: Italy, Lithuania, Hong Kong, all issue warnings; Brazil director quits

Ever since Germany’s BaFin and the UK’s FCA issued warnings against Binance, the dominoes have continued to topple. Global regulators are fed up with...

Binance: Fiat off-ramps keep closing, reports of frozen funds, what happened to Catherine Coley?

Last thing I remember,
I was running for the door.
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before.
“Relax,” said the...

What’s backing Circle’s 25B USDC? We may never know

Jeremy Allaire is taking his Boston-based company Circle public via a SPAC. Circle is best known for its stablecoin USDC, which now has a market cap of $...

Reggie Fowler, man at the center of Tether’s missing funds, ready for trial

It looks like Reginald Fowler, the man tied to hundreds of millions of dollars of missing Tether and Bitfinex money, has ditched plans for renegotiating a plea deal. Instead, he is planning to head to trial.

In a2021-07-08 03:37:16 +0000 UTC View Post

News: Tether printer on hold, China’s crypto crackdown, the world hates Binance, El Salvador’s Chivo wallet

In case you missed my tweet, I ended up sick at the end of June. I was chatting with a friend over Zoom when he noticed that I was tilting ov...

RSA Conference goes full blockchain, for a moment

RSA Conference, arguably the world’s largest gathering of computer ...

Binance: A crypto exchange running out of places to hide

Binance, the world’s largest dark crypto slush fund, is struggling to find corners of the world that will tolerate its lax anti-money laundering policies and flagrant disregard for securities laws.

On Thursday, the Cayman Islands Monetary ...

Michael Peterson, El Salvador, and Bitcoin Beach

On June 8, El Salvador passed a law to make bitcoin legal tender, alongside the dollar. Salvadorans were blindsided by the decision. Overnight, their president, Nayib Bukele, had turned into a bitcoiner, even adopting the 2021-07-02 20:22:05 +0000 UTC View Post

NFTs and money laundering, the perfect storm

In June, I wrote a story for Artnet 2021-06-10 23:36:29 +0000 UTC View Post

Rehost: A day in the life of Stuart Hoegner, General Counsel for Tether

One of my favorite Tether skeptics, Trolly McTrollface, had to take down a parody post about Stuart Hoegner today.

Trolly received an email from his hosting service this morning warning him that he had committed some kind of copyright infrin...

News: Tether—now 3% backed, Binance under investigation, Bitfinex shareholder charged, fickle Elon Musk

I’ve been inconsistent with my newsletters lately because I’m struggling to write this dang NFT book. It is slow going, and I keep falling down these rabbit holes. I feel like if I don’t hurry, the entire crypto market will collapse and NFTs...

Tether’s first breakdown of reserves consists of two silly pie charts

Tether, the world’s most popular stablecoin issuer, released a breakdown of the composition of its reserve...

News: Tether surpasses 50B, Coinbase lists USDT, reported $2B crypto scam in Turkey

Bitcoin is sitting at around $54,000, and Tether has hit a new milestone: 50 billion tethers in circulation, something it’s 2021-04-26 17:57:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Coinbase lists tether, the world’s dodgiest stablecoin

Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., just announced it is listing tether (USDT), the world’s dodgiest...

News: Coinbase Q1 earnings, Signal integrates MobileCoin, GBTC premium in the toilet, Reggie Fowler’s new lawyer

Bitcoin rose above $60,000 again. It only took 6 billion tethers to make that happen since 2021-04-12 04:50:35 +0000 UTC View Post

Signal adopts MobileCoin, a crypto project linked to its own creator Moxie Marlinspike

Many technologists today were disappointed to learn that Signal, an encrypted messaging service, is adopting MobileCoin (MOB), a new cryptocurrency that went 2021-04-07 20:36:22 +0000 UTC View Post

News: I’m writing a book, people are minting NFTs for the lulz, Chuck Tingle calls NFTs a ‘scoundrel plot’

I’m working on a book on NFTs and how they became the tulip mania of crypto. As of now, the plan is to self-publish on Amazon, hopefully before the bubble explodes like 2021-03-30 02:24:45 +0000 UTC View Post

BitClout’s social media experiment is one bad idea on top of another

BitClout, a social-media-on-the-blockchain project, is selling a type of token (called “creator coins”) tied to influential Twitter accounts—without account holders’ permission.

And folks are getting understandably pissed off.

...

News: Metakovan unmasks himself, FATF goes after DeFi and NFTs, Coinbase pays CFTC $6.5M over wash trades

I’ve been traveling the U.S., visiting friends on the East and West Coasts and in between, and this is my first newsletter in a few weeks.

This week has been a busy one, full of interviews and talking to reporters about nonfungible tokens....

WTF is an NFT?

NFTs are all over the news lately.

Recently, I was having drinks with a friend, who knows zip about crypto, and out of the blue, she started asking me about “non-fungible tokens.”

The next day, a musician friend posted an amateuris...

Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme

Last week, a crypto whale going by the moniker “Metakovan” bought a Beeple artwork via Christie’s auction for $69 million—$60 million in ETH and $9 million in fees—outbidding a surprised Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, in the...

Another QuadrigaCX documentary in the works

Dear Patrons,

I just wanted to drop a note and thank you all for your kind support— and share some news.

I’ll be in another film!...