NFT Ethics Profile picture
Nov 8, 2022 25 tweets 13 min read Read on X
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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More from @NFTethics

Jun 27, 2024
1/ This is a thread about Jeffrey Epstein and 13 ways he was connected to an interrelated network of people that created the foundations of today’s crypto space. This could indicate that the crypto ecosystem after 2013 (or even earlier) was part of an intelligence operation. 🧵 Image
2/ In 2017 Epstein shared his thoughts on Bitcoin and a WSJ source mentioned that he “claimed to work for the U.S. Treasury Department on cryptocurrency”. We decided to analyze Epstein’s crypto connections, in light of and taking into account his criminal/financial “track record"


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3/ In the 1980s, Epstein was involved in one of the largest Ponzi schemes: Towers Financial. Its CEO, Steve Hoffenberg was jailed for 20 years while Epstein escaped justice. They were introduced via a British arms dealer, Douglas Leese (son Nick is listed in Epstein's black book)


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Read 35 tweets
May 9, 2024
1/ This is a thread about the largest money-laundering casino on US soil that ever existed and its deep connections to Bitfinex/Tether, FTX, Donald Trump, US elections, Russia, Wirecard, intelligence agencies & the most powerful/dangerous gangster in the world: Semion Mogilevich. Image
2/ In 2014 the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, Mt Gox, went bankrupt after having lost 744,408 Bitcoin in a theft by 2 Russians. Alexander Vinnik pleaded guilty to laundering $9bn. His exchange BTC-e (WEX) is now controlled by Konstantin Malofeev/Russian security agency FSB


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3/ Vinnik has ties to FSB-linked Semion Mogilevich, “the boss of all bosses” of the Russian mafia, whose crime organization has immense global power/reach & is connected to intelligence agencies/politicians around the world. He made alliances with Italian, Chinese & Japanese OCGs


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Read 31 tweets
Feb 1, 2024
1/ Today @0xFoobar launched a new universal name service, which might be an appropriate occasion to dox him using his universal ENS name that he once registered via an alt wallet. His role as dev allowed him to extract money from DeFi/NFT projects in often hidden ways. Image
2/ We have previously mentioned his role in RevestFinance, where he did a bit of work, and then left the project by dumping $720,000 USD worth of coins to his anon wallet. That seemed to be part of his modus operandi and way of working; he did exactly the same at another project.
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3/ More recently he came in the news because he made a wrapper for FriendsTech, but didn’t disclose that he added a 2.5% fee. And he allegedly got $13k for an audit of MangoFarm which turned out to be a rug. He generally deletes his tweets and blocks everyone with any criticism.

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Read 7 tweets
Oct 6, 2023
1/ Dear @OpenSea, what do you think of the fact that your Head of Ventures, Kevin Pawlak, has been involved in various very dubious business dealings (e.g. Anubis) and pump & dump schemes under his pseudonymous identity @0xSisyphus (& 0xMagellan)?


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2/ He also tried to influence decisions at OpenSea using his account without disclosing that he was an actual employee who would benefit from those decisions. Were you aware of this and do you approve of this behavior and these obvious conflicts of interest?
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3/ When he was dealing with Alameda Research and telling them to buy Anubis ($ANKH), was that in a private or professional capacity? Was OpenSea ever involved in any of his “side projects”? How do you regulate potential conflicts of interest and insider trading of your employees? Image
Read 7 tweets
Sep 28, 2023
1/ In Oct 2021 the famous Anubis rug took place where an attacker was able to transfer $60m of ETH to a wallet, using Tornado cash to siphon off the funds. We provide an alternative theory of what happened: a premeditated rug by Sisyphus&Co with money being laundered via $PEPE.🧵


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2/ The day before the Anubis rug Sisyphus AKA OpenSea’s Kevin Pawlak hyped the project in Discord & someone recorded it. He mentions he bought $420k and would buy more the next day, and that the worst case scenario is that everyone gets their money back if things don’t work out.


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3/ Sisyphus writes the project is in safe hands and “cannot rug”. At that time all funds are in the hands of 1 person, Beerus (Ethan Cheung), who was fully doxxed at the time, a 19 year old kid, son of Mike Cheung Shun Ching, a prominent figure in the Hong Kong horse racing scene


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Read 25 tweets
Sep 17, 2023
1/ A while back we did a quick investigation to see who @0xSisyphus was and we came to the conclusion that it’s Kevin Pawlak, the head of OpenSea Ventures. The timestamps on the pawlak.eth and sisyphus.eth addresses perfectly match (see next tweets).



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2/ Here you can see that they both minted Zorbs (ZORB) within 1 minute of each other. They also minted sismo.eth DAO (SDAO) within 10 minutes of each other, but that was the 1st time Pawlak.eth became active again after 16 days (and his only action for another 21 days)


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3/ Also the following timestamps perfectly match up, and given the very limited activity of pawlak.eth, we have now accounted for most of their actions that are perfectly in line with sisyphus.eth.
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Read 7 tweets

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