Oh man, the Crypto Market has had a lot of updates over the last day and a half here. From Mutant Ape fraud to the SEC investigating Binance's Voyager acquisition, to what's going on with FTX and Sam Bankman fraud taking out money when he's not supposed to be doing it. What's going on with the Robin Hood Stake and Holy Smokes Bitcoins Stability In fact, that is exactly where I want to begin I Have to say it is a very impressive how stable Bitcoin has been Uh, since really the end of November here in the face of still relative Market turmoil I Mean, look at this. We bottomed out at about 15-4 and we've been sitting on a zero percent Phoebe lime but not falling further When we go, look at the NASDAQ for example.

Oh good old Weeble updates. gotta love those. We zoom out and look at the NASDAQ hey, we're off of that bottom that we had in October Great. But the markets really been suffering.

at least that's what it's been feeling like. And certainly if you look at a stock like Tesla Oh good lord. but BTC Stability in the face of all of this? Pretty impressive. Pretty surprising.

Now, of course we don't want to suggest that the decline it's faced is impressive, but then again, we've seen a decline of risk assets across the board and that's exactly what Bitcoin is. It is a form of a risk asset, especially if you invest in Nfts like the mutant Apes Nft. this is a derivative of the board Ape Yacht Club and this individual sold Nfts for approximately 500 a piece. ended up taking about 2.9 Million Dollars before rug polling.

using that mostly for personal purposes. living in Dubai a lot of people actually moved to Dubai because of their LAX extradition tradies with countries. Basically meaning if you get in trouble in the United States you can live in Dubai and Dubai might not kick you out because they kind of want more people living in Dubai Anyway, uh, and even if you're a criminal I guess Oh geez. Uh yeah.

I Don't know. maybe that's the exception. but anyway, uh, French guy living in Dubai here apparently landed in a JFK at the New York airport. well one of them there's LaGuardia and JFK But anyway, uh, JFK airport and boom government arrested him, individual blamed the toxic Nft community and the government said no Fu you are a fraud and a scammer.

So bye Felicia Speaking of Fraud and scams, we got to talk about well. Binance. Although this one's a hot tamale because a lot of folks think no, no, no, no they back their assets one to one. Look at those proof of reserves.

A lot of other people say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no. Proof of Reserves do Not show debt. There's a reason Binance is. Auditor Mazarus who prepares those Proof of Reserves reports has stopped doing them because they're frustrated that well, the people are realizing.

oh, wait a minute. What about liabilities? Now of course, Crypto Quant has been supporting Binance based on on chain data, but we still don't know what other derivative liabilities could be out there for Binance. But in the meantime, and maybe also what is spawning the Sec's investigation into Binance, the SEC has now intervened in a deal where Binance is trying to buy Voyager Digital. They announced about a month and a half ago that they were interested in buying Voyager digital for a billion dollars and about 20 million in extra residual value for the platform.

That's about a billion dollars in bailouts for customer assets, and again, 20 million dollars in value for the actual platform, which is basically nothing in in the scope of a billion dollar deal. Here, the SEC has now filed objections to Binance's acquisition, suggesting that the SEC has insufficient evidence to show how Binance would actually consummate the transaction and a transaction of this magnitude. In other words, how would customer assets be protected? What kind of liabilities does Binance have If they're getting a billion dollars of customer assets, Are those going down actually remain customer assets? Are they going to get used for something else? Now, we don't know, but the SEC is saying we're stopping this deal until we actually have transparency from Binance, which is quite interesting now. Finance So far has been weathering the storm.

They faced about 6 billion dollars of withdrawals in December, but they still haven't gone out of business Despite a lot of the drama that's been happening in the crypto space. consider that Genesis is now complaining saying they need more time to file disclosures. This led the Vinklevoss brothers to freak out sending an open letter to Uh while posting it on Twitter complaining that Genesis needs to provide answers and stop with their quote bad faith stall tactics for when they're actually going to provide people's money back through Gemini Earn. Okay, more detail.

so Gemini Earned was basically a way where you could deposit money and then get yield on the money you deposited when you left it in stable coins and enabled the earn platform on Gemini Now I've always warned against the yield on these stable coins as I don't know where this is coming from. It's very, very risky and this is an example of the risk. What Gemini did is they took that money and they basically gave it to Genesis Genesis could then try to invest and make a higher yield which work great in a bull market when prices were going up now the prices are not going up. Genesis has had to pause withdrawals and Gemini therefore had to pause withdrawals on Gemini Earn, which again was being fulfilled by Genesis Gemini is owed around 900 million dollars and they complain that policemen, firefighters, teachers, individuals of all walks of life have their money tied up and Genesis owes the money back as soon as possible.

Genesis is now laying off about 30 percent of its trading floor. About 60 people have been fired. They're trying to avoid bankruptcy at the same time you have drama over at Coinbase, which actually was seen as good news. But Coinbase finally settled with the state of: New York for anti-money laundering violations.

Know your customer violations and failures. 50 million dollars is going to go into a two-year program to improve their Kyc processes, and 50 million dollars is sort of of a punished punishment for, uh, weak compliance measures. Just crazy because. uh, Coinbase is one of the big ones.

But anyway, FTX Uh, and they're They're publicly listed, right? So it's like you're publicly listed and you screwed up boy. The big old fine. Uh, but anyway. Uh, FTX has officially uh had a trial date set for Sam Bankman freed via his Uh judge.

We expect there to be a four-week trial for the eight charges against him. The trial date is set for October 2nd so far sandbagment Fred has pleaded not guilty and you might wonder why does it take so long to get to trial? That's 10 months of him staying at home playing video games And that's because there's an expectation that thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of documents and subpoenas and searches and chats will be submitted to the court for evidence and this will all have to be reviewed. and Uh presentations will have to be put together by both the defense and the prosecution. That that takes a lot of time and costs attorneys a whole lot of money.

So far, though, the judge has also allowed the ceiling of evidence of whom the two individuals are who co-signed outside of Sambachman Freed's parents for Sam Begman Freed's bail. We believe that the bail uh, collateral requirement was about 25 million dollars. The parents of Sam Begman Freed have a home that they've pledged as collateral, which is only worth a few million dollars net of debt, maybe even less. So there are two others who have pledged a significant form of collateral to get Sam Begman freed out of jail and everyone's wondering who those individuals are.

But so far the judges sealing that data blockchain data is also noticing that around 684 thousand dollars of coins related to Alameda wallets have uh, suddenly been moved around. Uh Samba free does have a condition that is not to spend more than a thousand dollars without Court approval. and uh, it's unclear whether this actually is considered spending money, but this moving of hundreds of thousands of dollars when he claims to have no net worth is quite Sus and is frustrating a lot of folks as these could be customer assets that are being toyed with by Sam Begman Freed as he's out on bail. Pretty disgusting.

Silver Gate Uh, heavily exposed to crypto here obviously has fired 40 percent of its staff. customers withdrew four or sorry 8.1 billion dollars in the fourth quarter. They had to sell 718 million dollars of assets at a loss just to maintain cash liquidity. The new deposits are down 68 percent.

The stock ticker symbol s I is what's been uh, suffering the Silvergate Capital Group down another 10 percent. This stock, once trading for 239 dollars, is now trading for 11. You might have thought that Tesla's stock drop was rough, but this stock has lost over 95. Now in bad news: for earned tokens, a Celsius is earned Tokens have been called unsecured creditors by the Celsius bankruptcy judge.

That basically means that if you had deposits in Celsius Earn, you're not looked at as a depositor who's usually in the first line for getting your money back. You're actually an unsecured debt or like creditor. So in other words, they owe you a debt and uh, they get moved way back in bankruptcy proceedings in terms of when you might ever get your money back. So for Celsius coins not looking good on top of that, you've got uh, Ftx's Robin Hood stake getting seized by the government right now.

Sam Bankman Freed's Robin Hood purchase which was conducted mostly with margin from Alameda has been seized. It represents about 460 million dollars worth of shares in Robinhood stock. Robin Hood stock trading at about eight bucks a share right now and that money is now being held by the government. Who knows if that'll end up getting liquidated to help try to reimburse and help people recover some of their deposits that were on chain or or at the platform with um with FTX So we'll see.

But uh boy oh boy, you've got a lot of crypto happenings. and despite all of this, BTC Sitting at 16-8 Pretty dang impressive. You got to give BTC credit for that. Uh, you've got Ethereum sitting at 12-6 not as low as the 880 we saw in July But uh boy oh boy.

actual stability in Ethereum. And Bitcoin despite all of these crazy things happening. All Eyes Though of course on Binance to see how that story is going to unfold. Thanks so much for watching folks, and we'll see you in the next one.

Goodbye.