Defendant in Crypto Insider Trading Case Gets 10 Month Sentence

Ex-Coinbase Manager’s Brother Gets 10 Months in Crypto Fraud

The brother of a former Coinbase Global Inc. product manager was sentenced Tuesday to 10 months for his role in a scheme to trade on confidential information about when the cryptocurrency exchange was going to list new tokens.

Nikhil Wahi, 26, pleaded guilty in September to a count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors claim tips from his brother enabled Wahi and a friend, Sameer Ramani, to make more than $1 million on trades.

Third Bankman-Fried Associate Nishad Singh Met With Prosecutors

Former FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh met with federal prosecutors in a bid to become the third member of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle to seek a cooperation deal in the fraud case over the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse.

Singh, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, attended a so-called proffer session last week at the Southern District of New York US Attorney’s Office, according to people familiar with the matter. At such meetings, individuals are usually granted a limited immunity to share what they know with prosecutors.

Everything is securities fraud

When I write about this, sometimes I get complaints from securities lawyers who say “no, securities fraud doesn’t work that way: You are not required to disclose everything immediately, and it is only securities fraud if the company puts out some misleading disclosure. Just not mentioning a bad thing is not fraud.” 6 And so in fact the technical game of “everything is securities fraud” is that you have to find something that the company did say that turns out not to be true in light of the bad thing. A classic that we have discussed a few times is that, if a company has a public code of ethics saying “our executives are not allowed to do bad stuff,” and they do bad stuff, then you sue the company because its code of ethics is misleading. Or if the company has a risk factor that says “bad stuff might happen and that would be bad,” and the bad stuff has already happened, then that risk factor is misleading.

Or, here, if the company fires an executive for having an intra-office affair, and it puts out a press release saying that he “separated from the Company following the Board’s determination that he violated company policy and demonstrated poor judgment involving a recent consensual relationship with an employee,” but it doesn’t say that he had several consensual relationships with employees, well, I guess that use of the singular is misleading?

Robinhood Shares Worth Nearly $500M Seized in FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried CaseThe U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has seized more than 55 million shares of Robinhood (HOOD) stock owned – via a holding company – by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, according to a court document. The shares were worth just over $456 million based on HOOD’s closing price of $8.25 on Friday.

The stock had been held at an account at U.K.-based brokerage ED&F Man.

The “seized Assets constitute property involved in violations” of crimes such as money laundering and wire fraud reads the court document. Sam Bankman-Fried was formally charged with those and other crimes on Dec. 13.

Now I Know the Cryptocurrency Industry Is Here to Stay

As a long-time crypto skeptic, it may seem odd that I am helping organize a digital assets conference at Duke University on Jan. 20-21. After all, I once wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for a cryptocurrency ban. While I continue to believe that unbacked cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, provide no economic utility and impose societal costs that vastly outweigh the benefits, I also recognize that the broader digital asset industry is not going away.

How do I know this? Well, for starters I have been teaching and writing about cryptocurrency and digital assets at Duke for over six years. During this time, the sector continuously evolved and defied all predictions, including mine. This history suggests that those arguing the ongoing crypto winter signals the death knell of crypto will similarly be proven wrong.

I have also spoken with countless Duke students from across campus, including students in our groundbreaking Master of Engineering in Financial Technology program, who are passionate about digital assets and blockchain technology and want to make a career out of it….

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Finally, I know digital assets are here to stay because leading figures and firms from the traditional financial system say so.

Tom Brady, Gisele, Patriots’ Robert Kraft Among Celebrities Losing FTX Shares

Billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and star NFL quarterback Tom Brady are among those sharing in the pain of FTX Group’s sudden implosion.

Brady, formerly a prominent FTX booster, owns more than 1.1 million common shares of FTX Trading, bankruptcy court documents show. His ex-wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, has more than 680,000 shares in the same entity.

Goldman Sachs bankers have nickname for looming mass layoffs

Goldman Sachs is expected to fire about 3,200 workers starting on Wednesday — a massive bloodbath that bankers at the firm are calling “David’s Demolition Day,” The Post has learned.

Word of the layoffs by hard-charging chief executive David Solomon spread at the Wall Street giant’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan on Friday after a partner in the wealth management division was overheard telling a colleague that culling would begin the following week, sources said.