1/ In this thread we will dox one of largest pseudonymous NFT holders and it will show you the deep but hidden ties between NFTs/DeFi and a major crypto exchange, in this specific case Binance. How transparent are they really?
2/ One of the more elusive NFT personalities is @dingalingts, who is considered to be one of the most successful “NFT investors”, owning more than 100 BAYC, over 70 Azuki, and received over 8 figures in airdrops (e.g. $APE).
3/ He was also an early investor in CryptoKitties, and one of the biggest investors in NBA Top Shots, to a degree that some people at Reddit asked the question who this insanely rich person is.
4/ He recently also put in the highest offer for Azuki’s golden skateboard auction (309 ETH), and is an “advisor” of LooksRare, famous for his view that “wash trading is genius”. But who is he?
5/ It was pathetically easy to find his identity, as his former Twitter handle corresponds exactly to his full name and it turns out that Dingaling is working at the absolute top level of Binance next to CZ (we mean: just under CZ of course :)).
6/ Most of his association with Binance has been removed from the web, but we found he is not only a director of Binance’s Bermuda’s offshore entity, but was even part of a FTX’s JV entity with Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and CZ himself.
7/ This entity is called “West Realm Shires Inc” (basically the owner of FTX) and when Binance invested in FTX, 2 trusted employees were part of this JV, including Dingaling. See: miamidade.gov/govaction/matt…
8/ It is funny that when the Miami authorities did a background check on Dingaling, they were not even able to determine where he is working. There simply wasn’t any information about him. Full PDF here: miamidade.gov/govaction/legi…
9/ In one of the few interviews he has given he mentioned he is Australian and is a basketball fan, which both match with his biographical profile.
10/ Dingaling is LooksRare’s most vocal supporter and his view about wash trading in the light of his role at Binance is interesting to say the least. But there is more.
11/ When we look at LooksRare’s private sale, we see besides some well-known “influencer investors” also a lot of newly created anon wallets that put in the max value of 37.5 ETH, all sourced from Binance and only for this purpose.
12/ Dingaling was LookRare's first investor on the blockchain. This makes it in our view likely that LooksRare could be closely associated with (and even largely funded by) Binance. We believe it could even a proxy for Binance.
13/ Our earlier thread seems to elude to that as well with Chinese proxies in Canada and the UK. LooksRare was created by two anonymous co-founders: Zodd and Guts.
14/ We believe it is actually likely that Zodd is the same person as Dingaling. Not only does he immediately help with any LR issues, has admitted to not being technical but he was also the first person to like an important tweet from Zodd.
15/ This tweet was about the accusation that tens of millions of dollars were TornadoCash’ed, and Zodd responded to the allegations. There is a near zero change to be the first person to like such a tweet when you are not connected to that person.
16/ Is Guts, who doesn’t have any social media presence, CZ? Time will tell. The NFTs from Dingaling were technically likely purchased by Binance, in order to create additional NFT hype which fueled the ETH price towards 4600 USD in Nov 2021.
17/ The fact that LooksRare is (in)famous for the insane amount of wash trading resulting in $LOOKS rewards, and its close ties to Binance, could put things also in a different light including the main NFT collections Dingaling trades in.
18/ It is well known that China has an underground banking system, as Chinese residents are not able to transfer more than $50k per year out of the country. Was LooksRare invented as a marketplace to circumvent this threshold with NFTs as utility? nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/pub…
19/ Or did Binance create it as a vehicle to “financially engineer” their balance sheet in a preferrable way? LooksRare proactively advises people to use TornadoCash, which makes the financial output as invisible as possible.
20/ The amount of LooksRare rewards is based on how many wash trading is going on, but what if Dingaling is the owner of the casino that he is playing in? He has access to all the (insder) information before making a trade there.
21/ Binance used to be one of the more rogue crypto exchanges, and if we have to believe Reuters, they are/have been involved in lot of shady/secretive things. And they might also be trading against you using 2 Swiss firms.
22/ That is of course not an exception: FTX uses Alameda Research (its automatic algorithms and order book spoofing ability will always beat you) and Coinbase has its rogue employees (wash)trading against you.
23/ Binance is also known to “buy” “not-bad” publicity. Forbes once published a very critical article about Binance, but since Binance invested $200 million USD in Forbes, no critical articles have appeared anymore at all.
24/ Binance has now also become a big investor in Twitter (just like a16z), and you can only hope that some more rigorous regulations are put in place than was the case, referring to the case of the Saudi Arabian spy Twitter employee.
25/ It is interesting to see Musk paying a large sum of money for Twitter to allow for free speech maximalism, while some of his (co-)investors have been paying large sums of money to achieve the complete opposite and to silence people.
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