WaPo reports on an ad for the SuperBowl:
Americans tuning in to the Super Bowl on Sunday will be inundated with ads from cryptocurrency companies, including the trading platform FTX, which plans to give away millions of dollars in bitcoin.
FTX has spent heavily on sports partnerships to try to make itself a brand name in crypto, including an ad with NFL star Tom Brady, a sponsorship with Major League Baseball and a $135 million deal to rename the Miami Heat’s stadium the FTX Arena.
Co-founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently moved FTX’s headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, says the ads are as much about courting U.S. regulators as getting customers to download its trading app.
“We want to make sure that we’re painting, hopefully, a healthy image of ourselves and the industry,” said Bankman-Fried, 29, who has a net worth of more than $24 billion, according to Forbes. “We’re optimistic that we’re going to be able to grow our U.S. business — a lot of that is working with U.S. regulators on bringing new products to market.”
There’s nothing more American than buying your way into consumer hearts via marketing. Doing so with fake money is a bit more unusual, though.
Which brings us to this CNN/Business story:
A New York couple has been arrested and charged with conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency funds. Law enforcement officials have seized $3.6 billion of those funds in what US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco called “the department’s largest financial seizure ever.
Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, are accused of trying to launder money taken in a huge hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.
The arrests and money seizure mark a win for US law enforcement amid a slew of heists from cryptocurrency platforms. Hackers have in recent years made off with hundreds of millions of dollars at time in attacks on virtual currency exchanges.
Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries up to 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the US, which carries up to five years in prison, according to Justice officials. An attorney for the couple could not be immediately reached for comment.
Besides illustrating the vulnerability of cryptocurrencies and the volume that can be lost, it leaves me a bit bemused to consider they’re trying to launder fake money. Oh, I know, the gold bugs would argue the same happens with greenbacks, but there’s a key difference: the US Government stands behind the greenback.
There’s nothing behind the cryptocurrencies but dreams. Or delusions.
Which means that today’s $4.5 billion could become far less tomorrow.
