The crypto prices this week were again overwhelming across the board. Despite signs of increasing adoption and regulation, and little progress in crypto lenders Celsius and Holdnaut’s ongoing insolvency issues, it was another unnervingly slow week, but with relatively little loss.
But on crypto Twitter, things were much more scandalous. A self-proclaimed crypto-warning website called Crypto Leaks published a long and damning post last weekend uncover by a lawyer hired by the Avalanche named Kyle Roche.
The report includes clips from undercover videos of Roche in two separate meetings, in which he admits to having deep interests in Avalanche, owning both a percentage of the token supply and significant shares.
Roche admitted to regularly suing Avalanche’s competitors because lawsuits open up a process called “discovery” through an angle in the US legal system where Roche, the plaintiff, can access the target company’s confidential accounts, commercial data, emails, Slack, social media communications , and much more, while financially hindering the defendants and diverting their attention and resources away from positive blockchain projects.
Immediately after the leak, Roche withdrew from the lawsuit against Binance, Tether and many other crypto companies. At the start of the weekend, the price of Avalanche fell 10% in seven days; today is still weekly biggest loser among the top 60 cryptocurrencies.
Ari Paul, CIO of crypto investment firm Blocktower, was not surprised by the claims.
I assume this is accurate and that it is as bad as it looks. Fits with everything I’ve seen previously from both Sirer and Roche. From a lawyer friend at Roche a few weeks ago: “stupid version of mob lawyers. Bottom of the bottom of the barrel.”
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao shared Avalanche CEO Emin Gün Sirer’s official response to the allegations. CZ also wrote some tweets referring to the leak as he later deleted.
Sirer’s official statement downplays the extent of Roche’s actual involvement with the Avalanche. Sirer also claims that Roche’s lawsuit was filed without Avalanche’s knowledge, and that Roche’s firm, Roche Freedman, “is one of more than a dozen law firms we use for tax, corporate, regulatory and human resources matters.”
That same day, Roche himself tweeted a Medium post dismissing the Crypto Leaks article as “many incorrect false statements and illegally obtained, highly edited video clips that are not presented with accurate context.”
Finally, when Decrypt broke the news later this week that Roche had withdrawn from a lawsuit against Binance, CZ was upset to see his exchange dragged into the dispute.
Speechless… Shall we thank someone? Is that how the world works now? Why were we dragged in? Anyway… That’s it!
Back to the building. 😆
» Crypto lawyer Kyle Roche withdraws from lawsuit against Tether, Binance and others – Decrypt
In other lawsuit news, Washington DC attorney Karl Racine announced that he was suing Bitcoin whale Michael Saylor and his cloud software company MicroStrategy for allegedly avoiding state income taxes by claiming to be a resident of Florida (which has no income tax), despite the fact that he spent most of the year in Washington.
NEW: Today we’re suing Michael Saylor — a billionaire tech executive who’s lived in the District for more than a decade but never paid any DC income taxes — for tax fraud.
Bored Ape Yacht Club made its worldwide television debut Sunday night at the MTV Video Music Awards in a metaverse-hosted performance by rap icons Eminem and Snoop Dogg of their song, “From D 2 LBC.” It was wide panned by NFT critics.
Eminem-loving/NFT-hating Redditors were equally unimpressed.
Kofi Kufuor (@0xKofi), a partner at crypto investment firm 1confirmation, did some number crunching and reported back with insights into the NFT industry, including the extent of Twitter’s influence.
1/ Twitter reigns as the best marketing channel in the NFT area.
Most of the traffic driven to NFT markets by social networks comes from Twitter. pic.twitter.com/vsdEeO8jus
On Thursday, crypto-spinner ZachXBT posted the second part of his investigation into over 600 compromised Discord servers and more than a dozen hacked Twitter accounts in the NFT space. It turns out that a notorious con artist named Cameron Redman was selling Twitter panel access to a fraudster, who then phished people and used the purloined funds to buy an Audemars Piguet. The address he paid for the watch with is linked to many Discord server hacks.
1/ Since December 2021 we have seen 600+ Discord servers compromised and 12+ NFT related Twitter accounts hacked as well. This has led to millions of dollars being stolen.
Welcome to part 2 about tracking down those responsible.
