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. 🧵 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"

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. 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

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. 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.

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)?





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?

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.🧵





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.

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).

https://twitter.com/icebagz_/status/1703167545337848021

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)

1/ Yesterday Andrei Grachev announced DWF wants to purchase FTX’s assets. There are serious/credible allegations (and evidence) that he has been part of fraudulent ICOs & even had a suspended prison sentence of 5 years in Russia for a company he worked for between 2012-2014.


2/ Part of the problem is that many of the evidence has only been published in Russian and some websites have already disappeared. There are at least 4 ICOs that have his name associated with them: BuzCoin, GameCoin, ExportOnline & JOYS.

1/ Tether is the largest stablecoin owned by iFinex which also operates Bitfinex. As such, it’s a very important pillar underlying the crypto ecosystem. We mapped previous employment relationships of BitFinex/Tether’s CXOs and it shows a large network of financial fraud. A big🧵 2/ That both main founders of Bitfinex/Tether have a checkered history was already known. Devasini, a former plastic surgeon, was involved in counterfeiting, patent infringement & commercial fraud. JL vd Velde is banned from ever starting a Chinese company after financial issues.

1/ A week ago a new academic paper was released titled "Understanding Rug Pulls: An In-Depth Behavioral Analysis of Fraudulent NFT Creators" which analyzed more than 700 NFT rug pulls that occurred between June 2021 - December 2022. A quick thread showing some common patterns.🧵 2/ A relatively small number of individuals were responsible for the majority of rug pulls. The below charts show the number of times a founder of a project also created other rug pulls (e.g. Zagabond, the founder of Azuki, also created CryptoPhunks, CryptoZunks & Tendies).

1/ This thread shows there are deep connections between NFTs/crypto, Goldman Sachs, controversial financiers/investors, and some of the major FIAT frauds and financial scandals over the last years (e.g. Wirecard, 1MDB) that cannot be explained by mere coincidence. A thread. 🧵 2/ The sale of RTFKT (CloneX) to Nike at the end of 2021, which some estimate to be over $1 billion, was a great ROI for the VCs involved as their investment was only $8 million. One of the investors was Galaxy Digital from Mike Novogratz. His brother works for NFT company Candy.

The fact that MachiBigBrother (singer Jeffrey Huang) worked closely with the politician & Mayor of Keelung City George Hsieh who is accused of money laundering and Franklinisbored has active DoD secret security clearance is one of the more amusing things about their interactions. Already in October 2020 someone wrote a Medium article about suspicious activity and decision-making of CREAM Finance, a project headed by Machi Big Brother, and featuring some familiar names (Pantera Capital, Multicoin Capital and even Sam Bankman-Fried) milkovercream.medium.com/the-cream-team…

1/ Horizen Labs is in charge of Apecoin's staking platform and one of the board members is Dean Steinbeck. What is excluded from his bio is that he is also an investor in Yuga Labs via the VC "Friendly Trading" with Horizen's CEO R. Viglione. That could be a conflict of interest. 2/ Another VC partner is Sean Posner the grandson of Victor Posner, a pioneer of the leveraged buyout who became notorious for asset stripping. Sean and his brother Jarrett are property developers who purchased Pablo Escobar's former Miami beach property.

https://twitter.com/WPT/status/1597045993572552704

1/ One scientific paper that didn't receive as much attention as it should have is about the people who mined bitcoin in 2009 through 2011.

Using various clever address-linking techniques, it turns out only 64 (!) individuals mined a majority of BTC in this early period. 2/ An article by CoinDesk addresses some implications. Because nearly all transactions through the end of 2017 can be traced back to the Bitcoin addresses associated with this initial group of 64, it quickly undermine much of the pseudonymity of Bitcoin. coindesk.com/layer2/2022/06…

1/ In this thread we will dig deeper into the history of Azuki and how it’s connected to Valhalla, which is minting tomorrow & lead by someone who publicly admitted willing to do "quick rug pulls". The F1 season is over, but it’s going to be a wild ride so fasten your seat belts. 2/ Zagabond’s history is now reasonably well known, certainly after he published his “learnings” from his previous projects (Zunks, Phunks & Tendies) and after we doxxed him. The domain name for Azuki was even registered in his name.

https://twitter.com/NFTethics/status/1526534174357733377

1/ There are deep ties between both Binance and FTX, and BitFinex/Tether, and the latter has again deep connections with the gambling mafia, who used crypto to launder money via an internationally organized crime syndicate spanning the complete globe. 2/ FTX's Chief of Compliance, Dan Friedberg, was a crooked lawyer who used the be part of a big coverup in the gambling industry and has a close relationship with Stuart Hoegner, the general council from BitFinex, also part of a gambling association.

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/1591946406511935488

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).

1/ Dear @gainzy222, your identity was very easy to find because of your registered trademark, but when are you going to finally disclose your involvement in at least one major ICO scam (Obsidian, ODN) and stop being the immoral hypocrite that you are. 2/ Only in crypto you can steal someone’s money, hide behind a pseudonymous identity, and get your unknowing victims to applaud you when you brag about making huge bets with their money that you scammed them out of.

1/ We will still provide some additional information on Azuki. Zagabond himself said that he expects to be doxxed at some point and that that is fine, so we will do that. For storytelling & learning purposes of course, and to create a bridge between the physical & digital world. 2/ He has deleted his GitHub profile, his Medium profile, his LinkedIn profile and his personal Twitter profile in the past days, which is a bit ironic for someone who mentioned they are “dedicated to improving transparency & communication”.

1/ This is going to be a bit of a controversial thread, so just some disclaimers. We are free speech maximalists and “truths” can be inconvenient or politically incorrect, which could make them to certain people “offensive”, but it doesn’t make them less “true”. 2/ There are many interesting philosophical issues about what “truth” is, how it relates to the “law” and how it is affected by information asymmetries. Part of our perspective is quite well formulated by Christopher Hitchens here:

1/ Before our upcoming threads about VCs & Web3, we first thought to share with you the investors in @yugalabs that have not been publicly announced. They were part of the “Party Round” and include some well-known influencers. It might show you “(an)otherside” (pun intended). 2/ Via the OpenSea link below, you can see a select group of about 40 people that received “NFTs minted by Party Round for Yuga Labs investors to celebrate their investments”. We confirmed that these are genuine (seed) investors. opensea.io/collection/par…

1/ Some people contacted us to ask our opinion on @moonbirds_xyz that is minting tomorrow for 2.5 ETH, which would take out more than 75 million USD out of the ecosystem. As usual, many are afraid to speak out because they don't want to offend "powerful" Web3/NFT influencers/VCs. 2/ Some mentioned that we should check the purchases of proof collective, as many wallets only contains the proof collection and the floor is now 88 ETH. Wash trading is so common in so many projects these days that it's not even noteworthy anymore.