Posts about Binance
Kevin O Leary just lied in front of the Senate, with the whole world watching.
Here is his testimony under oath where he said this to the question "Why did FTX fail": https://twitter.com/Benzinga/status/1603076399593844736
Lets get this straight - he said FTX didnt fail because of fraud, laundering user deposits into personal accounts or into their own hedge fund to make risky trades, bought expensive condos with customer deposits and just ran the most incompetent bucketshop ever possible etc, but because "Binance put FTX out of business"
In stark contrast, the main bankruptcy professional and new FTX CEO John Ray told the House yesterday that FTX collapse was the result of old fashioned fraud. He was asked if Binance caused this, he flatly said NO.
In the testimony to House, he was asked by Rep Gonzalez (at time 2:43:30),
Rep Gonzalez: One of the things in Mr. Bankman-fried's testimony that has leaked, that wasn't submitted, is he spends time talking about Binance and how Binance created a run on the bank, suggesting that, had that not occurred, FTX was solvent and would have been just fine. Prior to that episode -- is it your belief that FTX was solvent?
Mr. John Ray: NO
You can listen to the testimony here and forward to the time mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ObdFaUL7nc&t=9795s
Also this entire testimony of John Ray pretty much outlines how SBF was running a fraudulent shop for months. John who has now assumed control of FTX and is in an authoritative position to tell us what went wrong at FTX quite simply states the whole enterprise was a fraud. The DoJ, SEC and CFTC have already filed charges against SBF, but here we have Kevin O'Leary telling the Senate that SBF is innocent but its Binance put FTX out of business.
Whats really dangerous is that Kevin knows this is not true, yet goes onto Senate to state lies under oath. He has worked his entire career in finance. He knows that John Ray has the best knowledge to put together what happened at FTX. He knows investigations of multiple agencies have put the blame on SBF. Yet he goes and tries to whitewash SBF's crimes.
Kevin O'Leary is a conman, who last week even said he would continue to do business with SBF. This week SBF got arrested, yet Kevin is still lying to the Senate. He got paid $15 M to be a shill for SBF. Its a shameful joke that he was even called up to testify in this issue. Its like inviting Ted Bundy's spokesperson to the Senate so that he can whitewash his crimes. Such actions dont make Ted Bundy or SBF look any better, but it just diminishes the respect of the Senate as an institution.
This guy deserves to be in the same cell as SBF. Every penny paid by SBF to this fraudster must be clawed back to make FTX depositors whole.
This is the clear example of hypocrisy at its finest! Seven month before their CEO Noel Quinn publicly announced that HSBC will not be offering any services related to Bitcoin and crypto entirely to its users and linked his decision to the "lack of transparency" and high volatility in the cryptocurrency industry. As per Quinn, it is impossible for an agency to tell who owns the crypto, and hence everything depends on whether the holders can be "trusted in regard to market integrity."
And yesterday karma hit them back, the same fucking swindlers are fined ยฃ64m for anti-money laundering failings. Actually, initially they were fined for ยฃ91m though since HSBC not disputed the findings and agreed to settle it was cut down to ยฃ63.9m. HSBC's failings cover a period of eight years, from 2010 to 2018, the FCA said.
The FCA's report into HSBC cites examples of poor controls, including failing to spot suspicious activity on the account of a construction director who also played a leading role in a criminal gang trying to steal millions of pounds by setting up fake companies. The person pleaded guilty to VAT fraud and went to prison. HSBC also failed to detect a customer imprisoned for smuggling cigarettes into the UK and ordered to pay ยฃ1.2m by the HMRC tax office, where the bank missed "a sustained period of unusual activity," the FCA said.
For those who did not know, in 2012 after an investigation by the US Department of Justice the same bank paid $1.9bn fine (ยฃ1.4bn) for laundering money of Mexican drug cartels, circumventing the rules designed to prevent dealings with Iran, Burma, North Korea and being financed by terrorists from Middle East.
So dump fucking HSBC shares if you have any and buy crypto and if you wonder, yeah this is financial advice.
Binance(through CZ) was the company that said that users should get their funds off exchanges. They claimed customer assets are fully backed on Binance. They said you shouldn't trust (other) exchanges and championed proof of reserves. Then they published their proof of reserves article on 10th November at about UTC 13:00:00 or 1PM UTC (the actual snapshot taken earlier obviously) . But only 20 hours after publishing, Binance moved 2.7 Billion USDT to another wallet. This wallet is not disclosed or tagged as a Binance wallet and not present in their "Proof of Reserves" publishing.
Then only just yesterday, 200 Million tokens were transferred back into a disclosed Binance wallet leaving around 2.5 Billion Tether left in the new undisclosed strange wallet.
There are also some additional funds missing from other wallets in their proof of reserves snapshot. The second Tron Binance wallet is missing around 2.4 Billion and the third is missing 500 Million(screenshots in Appendix). The bulk of these funds seem to have went missing on the 14th Nov.
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In the case of the second and third wallets, at least these funds might be explained by users actually withdrawing although this can be up for debate. Even then, there's no way to explain an exchange simple shifting billions in funds into some brand new undisclosed wallet in the case of the first wallet. And they did this only 20 hours after publishing their 'proof' of reserves snapshot.
Sure, companies have the right to manage and store their funds in whatever way they like. They aren't bound to keep it in any particular wallet. But that begs the question, why not just disclose their new wallet with a simple addition to their published proof of reserves statement. Why not properly organize and manage their funds so that they wouldn't look shady making such transactions after the fact(of publishing reserves). Why not even post something as basic as tweet to provide transparency to users in all of the chaos we are experiencing now as the CEO tweets about things of much less significance. They should know trust in the space is at an all time low. But instead, users like me have to dig through tons of data to figure out something they could have easily disclosed. Shady as heck. Whether this is funny business they are engaged in or just management incompetence, either way it is not good at all.
Appendix:
Proof of Reserves Wallets 2&3Binance released its Proof of Reserves (PoR) System โwhich is the next step in their effort to provide transparency on user funds in their eyes.
Kraken's CEO Jesse Powell takes aim at Binance's recently launched proof-of-reserves by calling it to be pointless.
Kraken CEO tweetHe also added that Binance is misleading consumers:
https://i.redd.it/1ccq35itg62a1.jpgJesse Powell is right in my opinion. These "proof of reserves" means nothing. It's just eyewash transparency. They are showing you one piece of the equation which are assets but it's meaningless unless you see liabilities, in this case to know if they have positive or negative equity.
Large amount of assets really don't mean anything without the context.