Zeke Fox
Appearances
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
This was one of the craziest things in that speech. And I was in the audience and I was shocked by just how closely the speech reflected the talking points of the crypto industry and the wish list of policies that they were pushing for. And this Bitcoin strategic reserve, it would just be Bitcoin, is one of the most out there of these plans. And it's something that Thank you for having me.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And the pitch essentially is that because the supply of Bitcoin is limited, its price is sure to increase. They've actually called this number-go-up technology, the idea being that as the price goes up, people get more excited, more people buy, and the price will go up more. But at this point, a lot of people have bought, and the price has gotten pretty high.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So you need to bring in new buyers with lots and lots of money. So... who's got more money than the United States? And the idea is that the United States would spend $100 billion of real money to buy Bitcoin and that this is a good idea because the price will go up and we will turn a profit. The only group of people that this is guaranteed to help are people who already own Bitcoin.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And just Trump talking about this has already helped them. It's driven the price of Bitcoin up a lot.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I mean, yes, but just because something has a limited supply doesn't mean that it's valuable. So Bitcoin supply is limited to 21 million. I've done some research on this, and actually there only were ever created 21 million VHS tapes of the movie Toy Story. Yeah. You can go on eBay and buy one of those for $3. You don't see anybody saying the U.S.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
should establish a strategic Toy Story VHS tape reserve. You know what? The factory to make those VHS tapes has probably long been abandoned. I don't know if we have the technology to make those anymore. So those should be a rare collector's item by this logic.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. I mean, the original idea of cryptocurrency, which was unveiled 15 years ago by an anonymous person or group who went only by Satoshi Nakamoto, was that this was going to be a new method of making payments around the world. decentralized financial system that would revolutionize how people transacted. However, in the 15 years since then, that really hasn't happened.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
For most of the biggest money players, the bulk of their wealth is not in cryptocurrency. I would rate them in general as being kind of crypto-curious. Elon Musk likes to joke about Dogecoin and... He has used the Dogecoin icon to represent this Department of Government efficiency that he'll be running.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
But in general, these guys care a lot more about their real businesses like, you know, Facebook or Tesla or Amazon than they do about money. whatever cryptocurrency they may hold. And the reality is that the crypto industry is really not that big compared to the real economy.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
It's just, it's a really well-funded special interest group whose finances are really directly affected by government policy. And so they were very motivated to throw their money around in this election, and they did with great effect.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Under Gensler, the SEC brought a number of lawsuits against crypto companies that were basically alleged that much of the activity that goes on today on crypto apps like Coinbase or Binance is illegal. He was saying that these cryptocurrencies that people are trading in the U.S. all day long, in fact, a lot of our traditional securities laws apply to them.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
They're not following those laws, and this activity should – either stop or be changed to fall into existing regulations. So the industry has been fighting these lawsuits. They've appealed. But Gensler's position basically represents an existential threat to the industry. So that was a huge applause line at Trump's Bitcoin conference speech when he said, I'll fire Gary Gensler.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
There's not. I mean, with Trump's new coin, we don't know who his business partners are on the Trump meme coin. There's like all sorts of details about it that you would have to reveal if this was a stock on the stock market. And that doesn't get revealed in the crypto world. And the crypto industry... likes to say that some of this stuff is outdated. It's not needed anymore.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I like to look at the example of WeWork. When that company tried to go public back in 2019, they had to file this big prospectus that said, here's all the information about our business. And investors could read this before they decided if they wanted to buy WeWork stock. And instead of buying the WeWork stock.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
In fact, people analyzed this and said, hey, this company, it seems like there's a lot of what's going on there is no good. Adam Neumann, its founder, was forced out and the IPO failed. If he'd been able to just launch a WeWork cryptocurrency, he wouldn't have had to disclose any of that information and he could have just sold it based on hype.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
The cases are pending. Trump's SEC is expected to settle or drop them. The position now is that the SEC is going to find some lesser way of regulating cryptocurrency, where there are some rules, but they are not as strict as this 100-year-old system of securities regulation.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
People don't really use crypto in the real world for much of anything at all, except for a new method of gambling. And Trump's new cryptocurrency is a great example of that.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So Tether is one of the most important companies in the crypto world. Investigating Tether is what got me started on this multi-year quest to figure out what is up with this whole crypto industry. And Tether is the one cryptocurrency whose price is not intended to go up. It's called a stable coin, and its price is supposed to stay at $1 because it's backed by real money held in a bank somewhere.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And Tether got my attention because back in 2021, it had grown bigger than $50 billion, but there was a lot of doubt about whether they had the real money to back all those tokens.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yes. And as I set out to look into this company, everyone in crypto agreed that this was kind of the linchpin of the whole crypto economy. But even people who were big crypto supporters each had their suspicions about Tether. And When I went to look into it, the company that created it was not based anywhere. It was run by a former plastic surgeon from Milan who had never given an interview.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
One of its other executives was so reclusive that people online speculated that he didn't exist at all. And so I went to go and try and find out definitely. did they really have this money? And it's a journey that took me around the world, but took me to meet Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran the crypto exchange FTX and was one of the biggest users of Tether. And I learned that Tether was used by
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All sorts of criminals around the world from the North Korean regime to Mexican drug traffickers to Russia has been using it to circumvent sanctions. How is Howard Letnick connected to Tether? So Tether... Because of its kind of sketchy origins, it had trouble finding banking partners who would hold the money to back it.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah, so pretty much as soon as Bitcoin was created, people started poking fun at it. And one of the early joke cryptocurrencies was called Dogecoin. It was kind of the first meme coin. And what this was was instead of promising this is the future of finance, this is some new way of making payments, they said, hey— This is a cryptocurrency represented by a picture of a dog.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And a couple of years ago, they were introduced to Howard Lutnick and his bank, Cantor Fitzgerald. And since then, Lutnick's bank has held what's grown to be most of Tether's $130 billion or so in assets. And those assets are largely invested in Tether. U.S.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Treasury bonds, and that's turned this tether company, which still only employs a few dozen people, into one of the most profitable companies on a per-employee basis in the world. They say they made $10 billion last year, and the former plastic surgeon who's its boss is now one of the richest men in Italy. And none of this would be possible without Lutnick's Bank investing
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
holding their reserves and Lutnik coming out and vouching for Tether.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Tether would say that this is like digital cash. And just like the U.S. Treasury can't control where every $100 bill goes, Tether can't control who uses its digital currency. reported at Bloomberg that his bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, owns a minority stake in Tether the company. Now, he said that were he to become commerce secretary, he would divest all his business interests.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
We'll see exactly what that means. But he's also said he would have nothing to do with any company that was engaged in illicit activity and that Tether cooperates with law enforcement when the they find bad guys using their payments network.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So, if you have ever received one of those wrong number text messages that says, hey, Bill, like, how's it going? Did you pick up the cat food on your way home? That's an example of one of these scam messages. And the people who send them will try to win your trust, gain your friendship. Often they'll...
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
pretend to be an attractive person of the opposite sex, eventually they will invite you to invest in some sort of cryptocurrency trading opportunity. And in general, they will ask you to acquire some tether and to send it to their anonymous address identified by a 31-character string of letters and numbers. And once you send those tethers, that money is gone and you can't get it back.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And there's not much for law enforcement to go on because there's no name or address associated with where you sent your cryptocurrency. And so I went over to... Cambodia to look into this. It's truly a horrible problem.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
There are these complexes where thousands of people are sending these scam messages, and many of them are themselves victims of human trafficking who've been lured to these compounds with the offer of a high-paying job in customer service. Once they get there, their passports are taken, and they're forced under the threat of
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
torture, or even worse, to try to perpetrate these scams on people around the world. And there's no reason to believe that the people who run Tether the company know any of these bad guys personally or do business with them personally, but they've created this means of exchange that allows somebody in Illinois to just zap $100,000 to someone who's actually a Chinese gangster in Cambodia.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And without leaving... much of a trail of evidence for law enforcement to look into. And while I was in Cambodia, I visited one of the many places where they have money exchange stores where you can just walk in, take the tether or whatever cryptocurrency you have on your phone, send it to the clerk's anonymous wallet digitally, and they will hand you cash, no questions asked.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And we're not saying it does anything at all. But if you think it's funny, maybe you should buy it. And if other people think it's funny, they'll buy it too. And the value will go up. So this idea of a meme coin has been around for about a decade. And in the last year or two, it's been really... embraced by the crypto industry.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And Tether has gotten so popular that there are these cash for Tether storefronts in places all around the world. And it's possible to move big amounts of money this way.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. So – Anybody who asked me about this in the last few years and listened to me when I said that crypto was dumb has missed out on potentially a big score. But I have to say that I... Believe that in the long run for an asset to have value, it has to have some kind of use. It has to generate some kind of profit.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And a lot of people like to say, hey, you know, isn't the stock market all rigged anyway? Aren't there a lot of abuses in the market?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
on wall street and sure like there are a lot of abuses on wall street but if you buy a share of apple you have a claim on some tiny piece of the profit every time they sell an iphone if you buy a dogecoin you have a claim to an entry in a database that i guess is some sort of joke about a dog
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And there's been just this explosion of different meme coins to gamble on. Some of them are by C-list celebrities. Some of them try to attract attention by being as stupid as possible. For example, one popular one was like the Dogecoin dog with a hat.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And the goal is just to get people on the internet to think it's funny, or at least to think that other people might think it's funny, and to get some attention so that people buy your coin. And in most cases, there's some sort of group of insiders who started this whole thing, who have a lot of coins, and they're hoping to sell them to the
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like a new kind of gambling game, except that it's basically rigged in favor of whoever started the meme coin. And in the case of Trump coin, Trump created one billion of these coins and he is keeping 800 million of them for himself and his associates. He also made money by selling this like initial block to the public.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
It used to be this took a lot of technical expertise to create a new cryptocurrency, but it's now super easy. There's websites where it's as easy as coming up with your own little joke and uploading an image and clicking a button on this website called pump.fun where, you know, Hundreds or thousands of new coins are created every day. And what Trump is saying is that, hey, the game is on.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I've released a meme coin. I am very famous. This will get a lot of attention. Don't you want to buy now? Get in early before other people get in. And as soon as he released it, the price soared. It got as high as $72. The best estimates by... Cryptocurrency analysts are that he has already made 50 or 100 million dollars just from releasing this coin and sending a tweet.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
A few days after Trump's coin, Melania Trump announced that she was releasing her own meme coin. This led to kind of a negative reaction from crypto traders driving the price of Trump coin down. Why?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So what they say is that they believe the crypto industry is great and valuable and working all sorts of good, important tech things, and that Trump is discrediting their industry by promoting a coin that's based on nothing at all and that will inevitably crash at some point and leave people with a bad taste in their mouth.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Now, what I would say is that these crypto guys, their attitude is that we donated a lot of money to Trump so that he would promote our coins that we already own and help us make money, not so that Trump would launch his own coin and make the money himself.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
From what I've seen, they're very upset. I mean, it's unprecedented for the president to be running a business while he is supposed to be busy setting national policies. And it presents all kinds of conflicts of interest. Right now, Trump's appointees at the Securities and Exchange Commission are determining what kind of rules will apply to the cryptocurrency markets in the future.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And I think it's very unlikely that they would pick rules that made Donald Trump's meme coin illegal. But they should be able to set those rules based on what they think is right for ensuring efficient markets and protecting investors, not based on what kind of cryptocurrency projects the president has already launched.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
World Liberty Financial is not a meme coin because it actually promises to do something. And real simplified version is that this was going to be some kind of crypto trading platform, which Trump and his sons endorsed last summer and promoted on Twitter and on live streams. Now, they also were selling a World Liberty coin, which... It wasn't a very appealing investment.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
The terms were that you couldn't sell it. It did not guarantee some sort of share in the profits of this World Liberty Financial. And it didn't serve much of a purpose at all. But they opened up this offering. They were selling World Liberty coins. And 75% of the proceeds of selling these coins were to go to the Trumps.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Initially, the offering didn't go very well because this World Liberty offering was more or less rejected by the crypto industry because of the weird terms until this one particular crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun came in. And he's one of the top guys in crypto. He's very rich. He's also facing... a big lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission that's accusing him of fraud.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And he stepped in and bought... In total, $75 million of these World Liberty coins, which generates a payout of $56 million to the Trumps. And, I mean, you can see the crazy opportunity for attempting to buy influence that this presents. It's really in his interest to get in good with Trump because he's facing this serious lawsuit from the U.S.,
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And he this Justin Sun was named an advisor to this World Liberty Project. And pretty soon after his investment, he met Eric Trump at a crypto conference in the Middle East where he would have had an opportunity to present the case for why his SEC lawsuit should be dropped.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. So... Trump didn't appear to pick the top people in the crypto industry to partner with on this. Chase Hero is kind of an online hustler who at one point had $149 a month get-rich-quick class. He used to sell colon cleanses online. And he's called himself the dirtbag of the internet and said that regulators should kick people like him out of the industry. But...
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
He was able to connect to the Trumps through the son of Steve Witkoff, who is the Trump's Middle East envoy, a Florida real estate developer. And he became friendly with Eric and Don Jr. And... became the co-founder of this World Liberty Coin, which he got the Trumps to endorse.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Wow. Yeah. And... I agree with him. He's not wrong. You know, I've spent years looking into crypto, trying to see if there's something there, something more than just gambling on the price of made up coins. And what I've found is a lot of scams, a lot of grift, a lot of even worse things, but not a lot of actual uses for regular people. But I guess Chase found that and said,
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Why don't I start a World Liberty coin with the president rather than saying, hey, this area seems a bit fishy. Maybe it should be more regulated.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
There has been a big coordinated effort by some of the biggest players in the crypto industry to donate money to politicians, to spend money on lobbying, and to win influential people over to their cause. And it's been really effective. Trump... Signaled some openness to crypto in late 2022 when he started selling a series of Trump NFTs.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
These are basically Trump digital trading cards with like cartoons of a jacked up Trump looking like a superhero for $99 each.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yes, I was trying to keep the jargon to a minimum. But yes, those were Trump NFTs. You get your digital card for $99 each. And some crypto guys realized, hey, maybe we could get Trump on our side. And one of the most... influential people was weirdly the chief executive officer of a publication called Bitcoin Magazine.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
His name is David Bailey, and he started mustering support among crypto guys to raise money for Trump. And In July, after Bitcoin advocates raised $25 million for the campaign, Trump actually came to Nashville to David Bailey's annual Bitcoin conference and gave a big speech where, for the first time, he endorsed cryptocurrency.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
He promised to loosen up regulations on the industry and to make, in his words, the United States the crypto capital of the planet.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah, I mean, pump and dump implies crime. And in the crypto world, we've entered this like new era where, you know, we can do sort of like crime light. It's not a pump and dump. It's just like a rug pull. It's all in the game is sort of their attitude. Because on these like... new cryptocurrencies, the rug pull, it's not even a question of like, will there be a rug pull?
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
It's almost like a game where you're just gambling on this cryptocurrency and hoping that you'll sell at a profit before the inevitable crash.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah, so the original idea with Bitcoin, which is now like 15 years old, was that it would be some sort of alternative to the US dollar. Like it would be this decentralized digital money, and we would use it for everyday transactions. And that totally has not come true. Nobody is using cryptocurrency for regular stuff.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
But what has happened is there's been this proliferation of new cryptocurrencies. And some of them are almost like stocks and startups. Some of them are still trying to be alternatives to real currencies. And then at the absolute dumbest end of the spectrum, we have meme coins. These are... The original meme coin was Dogecoin.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
And this was... It was created as a kind of parody of the Bitcoin and what the creator saw as its get-rich-quick mentality. So they said, hey... We've got this new cryptocurrency. It's represented by this picture of a dog. We're calling it Dogecoin. It does absolutely nothing. We are not saying it will ever do anything in the future.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
There's literally no way this could ever actually be worth money. Now, how would you like to buy some? And as it turned out, a lot of people did buy some and people made tons of money on Dogecoin because this became kind of an online craze. And it was similar to the GameStop and AMC phenomenons during the pandemic when basically traders kind of
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
went crazy and pumped up the value of these stocks, like way beyond anything that could be justified by their real business. And in crypto, when you've got like a good story, like, oh, Dogecoin, people got rich on Dogecoin. Very quickly, there's copycats. And in the last couple of years,
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
there have just been tons and tons of meme coins and what distinguishes a meme coin from other cryptocurrencies is that there is no promise that it will ever do anything there's at best this is like a zero-sum game where the early people might make money and the later people lose money but in reality
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
it's a game that is generally rigged by the insiders and that money comes off the top and a lot of the gamblers think they're the smart ones who are going to get in early and win the game but are in fact the bag holders, the ones who are getting dumped on by the insiders. And that's like this happens again and again. And people just don't seem to learn their lesson.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
They just seem to sort of like this meme coin game.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So Hayden Davis, he's 28 years old. Until recently, he was not like a big name figure in crypto. It's actually kind of funny because this Malay meme coin got rugged so quickly and maybe the right people did not make money on it that the crypto community is really up in arms and they're pointing fingers at Hayden Davis. And what they're saying is like, you know,
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
all the stuff that we were doing, that's not so bad. Look at this guy. That coin dropped after five minutes. We at least had the decency to let our coin run for a couple of days before we rug pulled it.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So it appears, and the details of this are all just coming out now, but it appears that he has been behind not just political meme coins, but some other ones that don't involve celebrities, maybe some that involve other minor celebrities. Basically, it seems like Let's say you wanted to launch a meme coin. You might not know exactly how to do it.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
And you, in asking around, would eventually be told, hey, this guy Hayden has done many successful meme coins. He's the guy to talk to. He'll set you up with everything. Now, Hayden has said that he denies paying Mule or his sister and that he was doing this only to benefit Argentina's people and economy.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
But there's been all sorts of chatter about influencers getting special deals to promote these meme coins to their followers. There's also...
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
On most of these meme coin launches, people who follow crypto closely can see on the blockchain that there are certain anonymous wallets that are getting in really early, even maybe before the famous person sends a tweet promoting the meme coin, and then dumping quickly for big profits. And so a lot of people are looking for meme coin insider trading.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Like, how are these people getting tipped off? Are the people involved with creating the meme coin conspiring with other traders to make like extra profit off the launch beyond just selling worthless made up coins to the public for real money?
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah, like this isn't going to go on the New York Stock Exchange, but you still need to connect with like the crypto exchanges and figure out how to set up your liquidity pool. Now, that said, if you wanted to launch a meme coin, there is a website called pump.fun where you can do it in like 10 seconds.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
and so if your goal is only to launch a meme coin for fun just you do not need any help but if you want to control every aspect of it and maximize your profits you might want to talk to some weird crypto guy who's done it before and you know you heard made x million dollars for you know some c-list rapper
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah. With cryptocurrency, everyone has their own wallet address. And these wallet addresses, they don't have your name on it. You are represented by a 30-something string of random letters and numbers. And if you don't tell anybody your wallet address, nobody's going to know it. And it would be very effective for you to hide your money or to send it around the world without anybody knowing.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Where the detectives come in is that... once they do know that a wallet address is of interest, they can see every single transaction it's ever made with every other anonymous wallet address. And so there are these crypto research firms, the best known one is Chainalysis, that have built up these really big databases that connect wallet addresses with people's identities.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
And again, your average person is not going to end up in this database and probably still could use this for anonymous crime. But just the other day, a big crypto exchange called Bybit was hacked for $1.5 billion worth of Ether. And so immediately, all of those wallet addresses that receive the hacked money, it's like the dye pack went off in the bag of stolen cash from the bank.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Like those are now dirty wallet addresses. And if you try and send it to another wallet anonymous to clean it up, people can still see that it won't really work. So there are techniques that the criminals use to try to launder their dirty crypto. But once like your money is kind of identified as dirty crypto, it becomes hard for you to spend it. Like you might remember,
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
razzle con the terrible rapping hacker um yeah tell us about them real quick so these guys they previously held the record for like biggest bitcoin exchange heist it turned out it was this couple who lived in a financial district the woman went by razzle con and she had actually recorded like epically terrible raps in which she talked about like her social engineering skills and
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So they got caught. They're, I think, awaiting prison right now. But they stole Bitcoin that, at the time they were caught, was worth like $3 or $5 billion. But they were only ever able to spend a tiny fraction of it because that metaphorical die pack had gone off. So in the case of a Trump coin... Right now, I'll give you an example.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
There is a wallet that acquired a million dollars of Trump coin possibly before he ever tweeted about it. And so That person sold the Trump coin and made about $180 million in profit. Wow. And me and my colleagues did some digging on this. Even though you could see this on the blockchain, we weren't able to identify who this person was.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
A researcher on Twitter who goes by Bubble Maps was able to track down through the person had... transacted with some sort of known wallet at some point they identified this trader as an anonymous person who goes by nasim and nasim claims he did not have inside information um but we still don't know who nasim is so like this crypto tracing only kind of goes so far
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah. So the exchange said that they had been holding this crypto in what's called a multi-sig cold wallet. And what this means is that it's a little like in the movie when you need like three people's key to activate the nuclear missile. These multisig wallets will not, you can't send crypto out of them unless two or more of the people who control the wallet successfully authenticate themselves.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
You would think it would be very hard for hackers to get that money out of there. I don't think it's been revealed how they did it actually. In the past, some of these hacks that appeared pretty sophisticated technically, it's turned out that the hackers used social engineering. As Razzlecon rapped in one song, spearfish your password, all your funds transferred. So...
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
The multisig makes it harder, but if I get two people to open my junk email and install malware on their computer, I might be able to steal both of their passwords and transfer this crypto out. I mean, the amount of money that's there to be stolen is so big that it justifies a huge amount of effort by these hackers.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
And so far with these crypto exchanges, it's just with each of them, so many of them have gotten hacked over the years. I mean, going back to...
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So Justin Sun has been around in crypto since 2017, which is a long time in an industry which seemingly turns over every two years as a new set of players becomes billionaires and then is sent to prison. He founded what's called Tron, which is one of the most popular blockchains used for tons of transactions.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So Justin Sun is being sued by the SEC over the launch of this Tron blockchain and its Tron token. Now, the SEC, until recently at least, was suing pretty much everybody in crypto, and A lot of these cases are just based on the idea that these cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities, like these sales should have followed the SEC rules, but they didn't.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
And the Trump administration has said, we're going to drop that type of case. But the Tron case is a little bit different because the SEC also alleged fraud in the offering, like manipulative trading to dupe the public into investing in this Tron token sale. So Justin Sun has said that's not true. He's fighting the case.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
But recently, he did a little something that might have been intended to help his cause. So President Trump now has two or three crypto ventures, depending on how you count. But his first one was called World Liberty Financial. He announced this in September and the pitch was truly unappealing. It was some sort of vague crypto platform
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
But so with a meme coin, you don't say it's connected to anything. You're just like, this is going to be fun. Buy my meme coin.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Yeah, fine. But with World Liberty, they were like, this is going to be a crypto platform. There's something real here. We're not really going to say what it is yet. Also, if you buy the coins, you're not allowed to sell them and you don't get any profit ever. So...
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
what a deal yes um and if you buy a dollar's worth of coins 75 cents of that is paid to the trumps as a licensing fee um it was looking like the sale would kind of fail and maybe this thing wouldn't launch and justin's son stepped in he bought 30 million dollars of world liberty coins and He later increased that and bought another 40 or 45 million, I think.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
So he's kind of rescued the project and was made an advisor to the project. And a few weeks after his purchase, he was at a crypto conference in Abu Dhabi. And there he was meeting with Eric Trump meeting with Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy, who's also one of the founders of this World Liberty crypto project. So it's really like an amazing conflict of interest.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
Like here's a guy who's got a serious fraud case before the SEC. He's got a huge interest in how Trump decides crypto should be regulated. And he's able to just give Trump more than $50 million And immediately secure a meeting with people who are close to Trump. I should say he denies that his investment in world liberty has anything to do with getting out of trouble.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
But he also says the SEC case is very unfair. Very unfair.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
That's about right. Yeah. Like Trump is still sitting on, on paper, like tens of billions of dollars worth of Trump meme coin. He could not really monetize that because if he started to sell, it would drive the price down. But as long as this sort of keeps going and people are trading it, he can collect fees on it.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
World Liberty has actually, since Justin Sun's investment in the success of the Trump meme coin, it's kind of turned around. And By my calculation, I think that Trump has made, the Trumps have made like at least 200 million off that one.
Pod Save the World
The US and Europe’s Conscious Uncoupling
You're welcome. And it's not too late to pick up some Trump coin or world liberty.