BRF #54 Bigger Picture
There is a bigger picture to catch up on here in all this fallout and crypto madness and that is that legacy banking is in the midst of a hostile takeover spanning from exchanges to lending platforms.
Who is leading the charge? Well FTX of course
If you have been around, this should sound familiar, like 2008 all over again. JP Morgan was the one in that room beating down Bearn Sterns, because they wanted to scoop up their silver short position on the cheap along with other assets.
How is this any different? Low ball offers being presented to desperate exchanges and platforms. Now that all of the insolvency issues are public, these companies have all but no choice to take these rotten deals in order to save face and stay in business.
Sad to see, FTX is pretty much the dominate leader now as I predicted back when sam first came on the scene.
If the rug over this past month wasn’t bad enough, it turns out Coinbase has been sticking it to us all this whole time.
The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, has been reportedly selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement tools to track and identify cryptocurrency users, a stunning new report from The Intercept revealed this week.
The company "sold a single analytics software license to ICE for $29,000" back in August 2021 for $29,000, the report says. The next month, however, it sold software worth $1.36 million to the agency, the report says.
A contract involving the sales revealed that ICE "now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer", the company's internal intelligence tool.
The contract revealed that ICE is now able to track transactions over a dozen digital currencies. The contract also revealed that “historical geo tracking data" was being provided to ICE, though The Intercept said details about what this data entails are fuzzy.
Basically if you ever used coinbase (I have not) and you lied on your tax report about holdings, then you WILL be getting audited and pay penalties (assuming they can find your cold wallets). I wonder just how crazy it is, does it heatmap for buttons/pages/clicks you do and collect/organize that data into a profile with all your information too or is this just to track address/bank activity?
So far Coinbase spokesperson Natasha LaBranche denied it, while vice president of global intelligence John Kothanek said earlier this month in front of Congress: “If you are a cyber criminal and you’re using crypto, you’re going to have a bad day. … We are going to track you down and we’re going to find that finance and we are going to hopefully help the government seize that crypto.”
I guess that means yes this is all true, but no we don’t’ do that.
Resources & Tools
Tools and resources to help you better build your Empire! If you want to support us and the work we do in anyway this is the easiest way to do it.
Nordvpn:
Regardless if you trade crypto or not, you don’t want your regular IP exposed for data providers to sell off to marketing firms and/or further down the road be used against you. Protect your geo-location with at least one layer VPN with Nord. 2yr deal currently 68% off!
Tip me Crypto! Tip me on Cashapp: $JamesonBrandon