Coinbase is accused of holding the cryptocurrency industry hostage over stablecoin rewards, prediction markets face an onslaught of opposition, and a Stand With Crypto poll can’t even get enthusiasm from its own activists
SBF praises Trump from prison, his parents beg for a pardon on CNN, and his legal ethics professor mother files court documents claiming to be from him — prompting a judge to demand he swear under oath who wrote them.
The Binance crypto exchange has just filed a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its article reporting that Binance's own compliance investigators had found $1 billion in transfers to Iran-backed terror groups, and then were fired.
The article, and related investigations by the New York Times and Fortune, were cited in an inquiry over the alleged sanctions evasion by Senator Blumenthal, and a request by Sen. Van Hollen and others for an investigation by the Treasury and Justice Departments. Today the WSJ reported that the DOJ had opened such an investigation.
Binance spends much of the filing complaining that news outlets like the WSJ do not give them enough credit for how hard they're trying. I'm not sure bragging about stopping $131M in illicit transfers quite lands when the whole point of this article is that you allegedly allowed 10x that.
I have purchased the PACER documents so everyone can read the impact statements submitted by victims of Do Kwon and the 2022 Terra/Luna meltdown. Collapses like these ruin lives.
![described UST as a stablecoin that would always hold its $1 peg, and those protocols as safe, reliable way to earn 19–40% yield. It didn’t feel like gambling; it felt like the answer we had been praying for. We sold everything at discounted prices: the house, the business, the cars. We scraped together just over $190,000 — every dollar of seventeen years of sacrifice — and in late April 2022 I converted it all to UST and locked it into Anchor and Mirror, trusting the promises that had been repeated for months. Just two weeks later, on May 9, 2022, I watched UST fall off its peg. In panic, I almost sold everything to limit the damage, but then I saw Mr. Kwon’s tweet: “Deploying more capital— steady lads.”. The price started recovering that day. I trusted him again and decided to keep the UST locked. What followed were two weeks of pure terror. The Terra blockchain halted. Mirror Protocol liquidity vanished. I couldn’t withdraw a single cent. When the system finally let me out on May 23, UST was trading below $0.07. Our $190,000 had become less than $13,000. Seventeen years of our lives — gone in two weeks. People say you should never risk money you can’t afford to lose. But this never felt like risk. The founder of the project had called it “too big to fail,” boasted that the Luna Foundation Guard would protect every dollar. To a desperate father trying to feed two families in a foreign country, it sounded like the safest investment ever. The money was only the beginning of the catastrophe. Less than two weeks after the collapse, my wife packed her bags. She could no longer trust that I could keep her and her mother financially safe. A few months later the divorce papers arrived. Our teenage sons chose to stay with me and my parents, to hold what was left of the family together. College was never mentioned again. Both boys quit school and now work as car mechanics to put food on the table. Today I am [redacted]. I live in [redacted] with my elderly parents, taking whatever cash jobs I can find, waiting for a war in my home country to end. My ex-wife lives in another country, babysitting strangers’ children to survive. My sons fix cars instead of studying the engineering degrees they once dreamed of. I cannot return to the United States — there is nothing left for us there: no home, no business, no savings, no future. Everything we built over nearly two decades vanished in May 2022. I never imagined a person I had never met, never spoken to, could destroy my family so](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/bc295b997c4a6e98cf8e_Screenshot-2025-12-11-at-4.42.55---PM.png)
![Hi, i was a victim of Do Kwon’s terra luna scam. I am a carer for my Dad, [redacted] and i invested money into terra luna believing that it was a profitable strategy to support my Dad better with medical expenses and being able to sacrifice taking time off work to support him. When i lost all of my funds in this scam i was devastated. I had to take out loans to get by to fund my Dad’s medical bills and just to get by with food and necessities for us both. I am still in debt to this day paying back loans and credit cards. My family has been through immense suffering and i suffer from depression daily since the losses of my life savings. I urge the honourable judge to please hand down harse sentencing to Do Kwon for the crimes that he has committed, i sincerely hope that justice will prevail to recieve some sollace from the torment he has put my family and i through. Kind regards Paul Lynn](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/542695386b9c27632d06_Screenshot-2025-12-11-at-5.05.38---PM.png)
My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.
The judge has declined Justin Sun's motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Bloomberg, finding that Sun failed to establish that his case is likely to succeed on the merits or that he will suffer irreparable harm without preliminary relief.
Bloomberg has filed their opposition to Justin Sun’s renewed motion for emergency relief, arguing they never promised not to publish the information he and his team provided to them. They also argue that his demands they remove the article about him and prevent them from publishing a second one would violate the First Amendment.
After publication, Sun asked Bloomberg to reduce his supposed ownership of TRX from 60 billion (~63% of circulating supply) to only 8 billion. Bloomberg refused. “[W]e believe Mr. Sun may not want the public to know that he controls a majority of the TRX in circulation”
Also: I seem to have become an exhibit
(Answering brief, exhibit 5 to Hentoff declaration)
Prediction markets once lived on the academic fringe. Now they’re trading billions on politics, sports, and celebrity gossip — under rules never designed for retail gamblers.
Justin Sun has hired Baker & Hostetler lawyer Teresa Goody Guillén to represent him in his lawsuit against Bloomberg. Goody Guillén has previously represented the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, and she has lobbied for a presidential pardon for Binance’s Changpeng Zhao.
From an August issue of my newsletter:
![Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is still hard at work trying to secure a pardon for his 2023 money laundering conviction [I79, 83]. Zhao has personally spent $30,000 in the last few months on lobbying the president for “executive relief”, hiring BakerHostetler partner Teresa Goody Guillén (a former SEC lawyer from 2009–2011).31 Since March 24, Binance has also spent another $190,000 on Goody Guillén’s and other BakerHostetler lobbyists’ services to lobby Congress, the SEC, and the CFTC on “financial services policy issues relating to digital assets and cryptocurrency”.32 Goody Guillén simultaneously represents the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial project; she wrote the brief May retort from the company in response to Senator Blumenthal’s questions about Trump’s conflicts of interest [I83, 84].33](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/dfbc9c62fdc2132c3181_Screenshot-2025-09-12-at-3.13.39---PM.png)
Crypto billionaire Justin Sun’s renewed motion for a temporary restraining order in his lawsuit against Bloomberg seems to confirm my view that the lawsuit was sparked by the disclosure that he controls 63% of the supply of TRX.
Sun and Bloomberg had been “engaged in discussions that may moot the emergency relief”, but it sounds like Sun wanted more than they were willing to agree to.