"Crypto Mania"

Elizabeth Holmes has pleaded with a judge to overturn her Theranos convictions, citing “insufficient evidence”

In a 24-page filing, lawyers for the Theranos founder targeted her conviction of wire fraud, arguing the evidence provided did not amount to a guilty verdict.

“Because no rational juror could have found the elements of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud beyond a reasonable doubt on this record, the Court should grant Ms. Holmes’ motion for judgment of acquittal,” they said in the filing, which was first reported by Bloomberg.

Cooley Lawyer Elon Musk Tried to Get Fired Heads to Robinhood

A Big Law associate who drew the ire of Elon Musk for his prior work at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has left Cooley for an assistant general counsel position at the online trading platform Robinhood Markets Inc.

Walker Newell, a former senior counsel at the SEC, was part of an investigation of Musk that saw the self-proclaimed “technoking” of Tesla Inc. agree to a $40 million settlement. The case stemmed from tweets Musk made in 2018 about taking the electric automaker private.

Molly White is becoming the crypto world’s biggest critic

A 28-year-old software engineer who writes Wikipedia articles for fun, White is an odd figure to make the crypto industry cower. On her website, “Web3 is Going Just Great,” White documents case after case of crypto malfeasance: investments that turn out to be scams, poorly-run projects that collapse under mismanagement and hacks that drain supporters’ money.

As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto, White has led a small but scrappy group of skeptics pushing the other way whose warnings have seemed vindicated by the cratering in recent weeks of cryptocurrency prices.

ANALYSIS: NYC, Calif. Courts Emerge as Top Crypto Case Magnets

The SDNY was home to 58 of the 221 federal cryptocurrency complaints (26%) over the 2020–2021 time period. The Northern District of California had the next highest number of complaints, with 36 (16%). The Central District of California (17 complaints, 8%) and the Northern District of Illinois (10 complaints, 5%) rounded out the top four, which together had more cryptocurrency complaints filed than the rest of the federal district courts combined.

Making progress on decentralized regulation — It’s time to talk about crypto together

Crypto gives us a new opportunity to cooperate and do so publicly. As an initial step, we are calling on our agencies to hold a joint set of public roundtables to evaluate recent market events and risks, and to discuss how to regulate crypto responsibly. These roundtables would be open to the public, and panelists would include crypto users, investor and customer advocates, industry members, and other regulators. The goal would be to assess whether new regulations are necessary to protect the public and the markets, how existing regulations might be modernized to better account for innovation, and how technology is likely to reshape our markets. We could start with topics such as digital asset trading platforms, crypto derivatives, stablecoins, decentralized finance, and the balance between privacy and anti-money laundering measures.

We Need to Talk About Exchanges That Sell You Coins Like UST

But the post raised a much larger point: Do crypto exchanges like Coinbase have a responsibility to customers when they choose what tokens they offer for sale? Should exchanges warn customers about projects or tokens regarded as questionable by their own staff? Or is an exchange’s role more neutral, simply listing tokens and letting customers make their own choices?

That’s a particularly pressing question in the wake of the collapse of the Luna ecosystem with the depegging of the terraUSD (UST) stablecoin. There have been unsubstantiated Twitter rumors of a class action lawsuit that would target exchanges that sold the LUNA or UST tokens. That group includes many centralized custodial exchanges around the world and several in the U.S., including Kraken, Binance US, and Gemini.