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Molly White

Featured this week: Barbara Fried called up her son and asked if he could be a dear and dig around in the couch cushions for a spare $92k (in under 24 hours)

The Wall Street Journal has published an article alleging that Sam Bankman-Fried’s whole family was in on the illicit campaign finance activity that he and at least two of his lieutenants were perpetrating. The Journal describes an email in which Bankman-Fried’s law professor father, Joseph Bankman, appears to have knowledge that Ryan Salame was acting as a conduit for FTX donations to Republican causes, and writes about seeking to “categoriz[e] these [transfers from FTX to Salame] as loans”. The Journal also describes conversations between FTX employees and Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, and brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried.1 These are much like the conversations that have come out in various court proceedings, in which Bankman-Fried’s mother appears to solicit money for her various charitable organizations, and in which both his mother and brother seem aware of and even to advise the straw donations [Stones, FTX Trial Day 9]. So far, I haven’t seen anything to suggest impending criminal action against anyone else in the Bankman-Fried family, but there sure seem to be plenty of threads the Justice Department could pull on if they felt so inclined.
Bankman-Fried’s mother also directed spending from her son’s crypto fortune. “Hi Sam and Nishad: Can I hit you guys up for $92K (by tomorrow if at all possible!) to close the gaps on two projects we have committed to fund as part of our new Research Initiative?” Fried wrote in an August 2021 email.
6 July at 0:19 | Open on hachyderm.io
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Molly White

Not satisfied with only lying about how much their “grassroots” crypto advocacy group has raised, Coinbase is now also fudging the numbers around how many crypto pizza parties they prompted.

Not ones to let the truth get in the way of juicing the numbers, they simply moved on to the next thing to fudge. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced during the first presidential debate that “1600+ crypto debate watch parties are in full force right now!” and encouraged people to visit the Stand With Crypto Twitter feed to “see some posts from advocates hosting events”.10 However, an actual glance at these posts revealed that many of these “events” were just individual guys taking advantage of the organization’s offer of $50 in pizza vouchers, eating pizza alone in their apartments and watching the debate. Okay, maybe not entirely alone. Cute dog. (Twitter)
6 July at 0:22 | Open on hachyderm.io
Molly White

And finally, an Iranian official worries that the (Russian) Hamster Kombat crypto-clicker game is a part of the West’s “soft war” to interfere with elections by distracting Iranians.

A game called Hamster Kombat has taken the crypto world and Telegram users by storm, as an application that runs on the messaging platform’s new “mini-apps” infrastructure. As with most blockchain games, it’s more about money than it is about fun, and gameplay mostly involves mashing your hamster avatar, Cookie Clicker style, and spamming your friends with referral codes. The future of gaming that we were promised has finally arrived! Despite the fact that the in-game tokens can’t actually be traded for any other kind of currency — crypto or fiat — we’re beginning to see a similar story emerging around Hamster Kombat as with Axie Infinity in its heyday. Those living under challenging economic conditions in locations like Iran are turning to Hamster Kombat in desperation, hoping that the team behind it will actually follow through on its promises to launch a crypto token that could allow them to cash out actual money based on their in-game performance. The game has not been warmly received by the Iranian government, and an Iranian military chief has gone so far as to accuse the Hamster Kombat developers of harming the country’s elections by distracting its populace. “One of the features of the soft war by the enemy is the ‘Hamster’ game,” he said to local news.16
6 July at 0:25 | Open on hachyderm.io
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