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Tornado Cash founder Roman Storm is making desperate pleas for donations to fund his legal defense, as he faces the imminent possibility of years in prison. The founder of the crypto coin-mixing service for anonymous payments is asking for another $2 million after already seemingly expending millions over the past two years. In August 2023, the US government alleged that Storm and his co-founder made millions of dollars through Tornado Cash. According to Storm, seizures and subsequent legal expenses have depleted those resources. In August 2022, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash over its assistance with North Korean payments with suspected links to money laundering. However, as of November 2024, the powerful US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that OFAC exceeded its authority and removed Tornado Cash and over 100 of its crypto wallets from US sanctions. Nevertheless, the criminal trial against Storm continues. S...

On the 11th day of FTX founder Bankman-Fried’s historic trial , an expert witness reveals how several investments and loans were made from FTX’s customer funds.  Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial enters its 11th day, as the prosecutor calls multiple witnesses to testify. Today’s witnesses included Professor Peter Easton, who was employed by the litigation assistance firm Brattle to analyze the accounts of FTX and Alameda Research.  Testimony of Peter D. Easton, Professor of Accountancy at Notre Dame Easton is shown a balance sheet of funds going from FTX to Alameda.  47 Alameda accounts received money from FTX customer accounts in the presented balance sheet.  Several investments by Bankman-Fried were made from FTX customer funds. This includes:  Investments to Anthony Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital and $100 million in Dave Inc. from a venture by Alameda.  Nishad Singh took $1 million from customer funds to make donations to the political committee M...

Sam Bankman-Fried’s historic trial has started today in New York City, as the former FTX CEO is set to be tried on seven different charges of wire fraud and money laundering. The historic trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of a crypto exchange FTX, has started today with jury selection. The trial began today at 10 AM New York time at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse on 500 Pearl Street.  Senior District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan is presiding over the case, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos is leading the prosecution. The defense is being led by Mark Cohen. Here are the latest live updates from inside the courtroom:  Sam Bankman-Fried has entered the court with five lawyers.  SBF had received no plea offer from the prosecutor, affirmed by both lawyers.  Judge Kaplan indicates that the case might be decided in a couple of weeks (rather than six weeks, as believed by the lawyers) Judge Kaplan emphasizes that the Jurors must not read any posts, publ...

In a 158 document, the team behind Little Shapes alleged that NFT scammers utilized bot networks to rug-pull "$200 million+ out of the ecosystem.” Atto, the pseudonymous founder behind Little Shapes NFT has revealed that the project was actually a “social experiment” designed to shed light on large-scale NFT bot network scams on Twitter. Since late December, Little Shapes had been attracting a fair amount of attention from the media and crypto community. This is due to several semi-viral tweets detailing incidents in the founder's life that seemed too good to be true. Examples of such included him waking up from a five-month coma, finding out he had assets locked on FTX, telling his wife and then finding out she was cheating on him with other people in the NFT industry. Hey Little Shapes fam, this might sound crazy but I got into a car accident 5 months ago and just got out of a huge coma. I don’t know what’s been going on since then but we’re coming back harder than ever. Yo...