Activity tagged "crypto"

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Justin Sun has hired Baker & Hostetler lawyer Teresa Goody Guillén to represent him in his lawsuit against Bloomberg. Goody Guillén has previously represented the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, and she has lobbied for a presidential pardon for Binance’s Changpeng Zhao.

From an August issue of my newsletter:

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is still hard at work trying to secure a pardon for his 2023 money laundering conviction [I79, 83]. Zhao has personally spent $30,000 in the last few months on lobbying the president for “executive relief”, hiring BakerHostetler partner Teresa Goody Guillén (a former SEC lawyer from 2009–2011).31 Since March 24, Binance has also spent another $190,000 on Goody Guillén’s and other BakerHostetler lobbyists’ services to lobby Congress, the SEC, and the CFTC on “financial services policy issues relating to digital assets and cryptocurrency”.32 Goody Guillén simultaneously represents the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial project; she wrote the brief May retort from the company in response to Senator Blumenthal’s questions about Trump’s conflicts of interest [I83, 84].33
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The Trumps' World Liberty Financial project has frozen WLFI tokens in wallet addresses belonging to Justin Sun that contain ~$100 million (on paper) in unlocked WLFI. Sun is a major backer of the project, which the Trumps say they founded to stop "debanking".

The freeze apparently came after Sun transferred around ~$9M of his holdings to Binance.

The World Liberty team has been desperately trying to prevent the WLFI price from sinking, including by burning tokens to boost the price. They may be concerned that whales like Sun could further depress the token price by cashing out.

Sun is claiming he was merely testing exchange deposits (?) and not buying or selling. He seems to be responding to suggestions that he was the one tanking the token price, though it's not clear if this blame is coming from WLF directly.

Tweet by Justin Sun: Our address only conducted a few generic exchange deposit tests, with very low amounts, and then created address dispersion, without involving any buying or selling, which could not possibly have any impact on the market. (Autotranslated from Chinese by Twitter)

Prior to this, Justin Sun's HTX exchange was running a "high-yield event", offering people 20% APY if they deposited their WLFI tokens on his exchange.

Sun has in the past snapped at people questioning his high-yield products, admonishing them to "stop asking me questions like 'where does the yield come from'" and claiming it's fully subsidized by the company. As I wrote then:

Speaking of Justin Sun, remember last issue when I wrote about the Terra fraud: “Side note: If someone promises you a risk-free 20% annual yield if you just let them hold on to your dollars for you, the risk that you never see those dollars again is in fact very high”? Well, an hour after retweeting with the 👀 emoji a Reuters bulletin about the SEC enforcement “freeze” (a headline which did not make mention of the carve-out for cases, like Sun’s, alleging fraud), Sun fired off one of the most spectacular tweets I’ve seen out of the industry in a while: H.E. Justin Sun @justinsuntron USDD 2.0 is about to launch with a 20% APY, fully subsidized by @trondao. All interest will be sent in advance to a transparent address. There’s no other reason—it’s simply because we have plenty of money. So, stop asking me questions like “where does the yield come from.” (Tweet, archive) Stop asking questions! Why can’t you understand that we just have so much money that we want you to send us your money so that we can give you our money!
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Justin Sun v. Bloomberg

Justin Sun has just filed a lawsuit against Bloomberg, claiming they plan to “recklessly and improperly disclos[e] his highly confidential, sensitive, private, and proprietary financial information,” which he gave to them while they were verifying his assets for inclusion in the Bloomberg “Billionaires Index”.

Sun claims this will cause him “significant and irreparable harm—both financially and physically.” He says they plan to use the information in an article unrelated to the Billionaires Index. He also claims they plan to publish “granular details about his cryptocurrency assets, including a breakdown of his cryptocurrency holdings,” in the Billionaires Index, and that he wouldn’t have agreed to share the information had he known.

Sun sent a cease and desist to Bloomberg, and was informed they still intend to publish. He now seeks an injunction against the company.

The “agreement” Justin Sun says should prevent Bloomberg from publishing the amounts and types of crypto assets he holds seems extremely shaky to me (caveat: I’m not a lawyer, some images are missing).

It looks like Justin Sun and his team sent the information he now claims is confidential on or around February 28.

A month later, on March 27, Justin Sun posted terms including: “The data is solely for verification and may not be used for any other purpose (including reporting) ... Bloomberg must also agree to use the data strictly in accordance with our requirements — for example, to provide only a general assessment or overall valuation based on the data, without making any specific references or detailed reporting on the figures.”

Bloomberg’s Tom Maloney: “Nobody at Bloomberg agreed to the terms sent by Justin, weeks after the data was shared with us.”

Bloomberg says they will oppose a temporary restraining order, but also that a TRO is moot because Bloomberg already published.

It seems Sun is objecting to VERY rough estimates of his crypto holdings (~60 billion TRX, heavily discounted; 17k BTC; 224K ETH; 700K Tether).

Confidence rating: 1 star The majority of Sun's net worth comes from cryptocurrency he owns. Sun owns more than 60 billion Tronix (also referred to as TRON or TRX), the cryptocurrency native to Tron, according to an analysis of financial information provided by representatives of Sun in February 2025. A 75% liquidity discount is applied to the value of the token because Sun controls the majority of its supply. Tron has more than 300 million user accounts as of June 2025, according to the Tronscan website. Sun also owns about 17,000 Bitcoin, 224,000 Ether, and 700,000 Tether, according to the same analysis. No discount is applied to these because his holdings represent less than 1% of the total supply. The analysis only includes tokens that are on-chain. Tokens that are held on exchanges such as HTX and Binance are not included in the analysis because the holdings could not be verified. Sun owns the cryptocurrency exchange HTX. It's calculated to have had revenue of about $1.3 billion in 2024, based on its spot and derivative trading volumes and fee schedules. It's valued using the average price-to-sales multiple of Coinbase Global Inc., Galaxy Digital Inc. and Riot Platforms Inc. Sun is credited with about 90% of the company, based on information provided by his representatives in May 2025. A 50% liquidity discount is applied. Confidence rating: 1 star The majority of Sun's net worth comes from cryptocurrency he owns. Sun owns more than 60 billion Tronix (also referred to as TRON or TRX), the cryptocurrency native to Tron, according to an analysis of financial information provided by representatives of Sun in February 2025. A 75% liquidity discount is applied to the value of the token because Sun controls the majority of its supply. Tron has more than 300 million user accounts as of June 2025, according to the Tronscan website. Sun also owns about 17,000 Bitcoin, 224,000 Ether, and 700,000 Tether, according to the same analysis. No discount is applied to these because his holdings represent less than 1% of the total supply. The analysis only includes tokens that are on-chain. Tokens that are held on exchanges such as HTX and Binance are not included in the analysis because the holdings could not be verified. Sun owns the cryptocurrency exchange HTX. It's calculated to have had revenue of about $1.3 billion in 2024, based on its spot and derivative trading volumes and fee schedules. It's valued using the average price-to-sales multiple of Coinbase Global Inc., Galaxy Digital Inc. and Riot Platforms Inc. Sun is credited with about 90% of the company, based on information provided by his representatives in May 2025. A 50% liquidity discount is applied.

My guess is that his fury here is at the revelation that he controls 60 billion TRX (63% of the total supply, and it’s not clear to what extent they’re counting TRX held by companies he owns). It’s always been known he owns a lot, but estimates I’ve seen are lower than that.

The other explanations that I’ve brainstormed don’t really make sense. The estimates likely aren’t specific enough to be identifying, as he claims. And I doubt it’s an ego thing at having his net worth shown to be lower than he wants — Bloomberg puts him at $12.4B, higher than Forbes’ $8.5B. (Though maybe he wants them to say his 60B TRX are worth $21.6B, idk)

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Kevin de Patoul, chief executive of crypto market maker Keyrock, says investors should be realistic about what this is. “You’re injecting a huge amount of risk into a system that, in the end, has almost nothing backing it except the continued appreciation of the asset.”
Screenshot of I Think You Should Leave episode, where the focus group man states “Oh my God, he admit it!”
“Why struggling companies are loading up on bitcoin”.
Nikou Asgari in Financial Times.
“My main problem with this strategy is that I don’t really understand where it ends,” adds Benoist. “The company is in a loop where it has to continually feed that loop with additional purchases, go back to the market to purchase more — this cycle has to continue to justify the premium.” The biggest risk is how deep the damage will be if — or when — the price of crypto collapses. Inevitably, a crypto downturn means companies whose share prices are linked to tokens will slide too.  Those that have raised debt face greater risks as they will need to pay interest to investors, and may be forced to raise more money or then sell their crypto holdings in order to meet debt obligations.  “Structurally this is very unhealthy if you’re paying your existing debt by raising other debt. That makes me very uneasy,” says the head of a crypto hedge fund, adding: “You may end up with systemic risk as there are too many of these weak structures which have to unwind fully or partially, and that creates pressure on the market.
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August 7: Stablecoin issuer Paxos reaches $48 million settlement with New York financial regulators over due diligence, anti-money laundering failures

August 11: Paxos applies for national trust bank charter

🙃