Wall Street Journal

Aside #1: the founder of Binance - Changpeng Zhao - pled guilty in November of 2023 to willfully failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering (AML) program at Binance, in violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. He was sentenced to jail and fined $50 million. In addition, Binance itself also pleaded guilty to multiple federal violations and agreed to pay approximately $4.3 billion in penalties.

What happened next? Well, crypto’s biggest convert - Donald J. Trump - pardoned Zhao in October of 2025.

Around 11:20 p.m. in Abu Dhabi, home to Binance offices (4:20 p.m. in New York), the company’s cybersecurity team detected a breach—more than $1 billion had been siphoned from the exchange, seemingly out of the blue. The group alerted the exchange’s top executives, who convened a crisis team of some 100 employees. Within minutes, the staff were on a conference call. Every single senior executive had signed on.

The team could only watch in horror as money streamed out of Binance’s accounts, in real time.

…

The company’s cyber investigators began to work with their own partners that specialize in tracing cryptocurrency—TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic—to compile a list of digital addresses containing the pilfered funds. 

Binance’s next move was to reach out to the issuers of the stablecoins that function as digital dollars that move between crypto wallets. Because these firms, including Tether and Circle, can freeze their coins in place and blacklist suspicious wallets, their rapid cooperation can be the key to stemming the flow of stolen money before it can be laundered. 

…

Witkoff noticed that Binance’s hackers had received funds from Tornado Cash—a “mixer” program often used by bad actors to obfuscate the source of their funds. “This was so obviously a hack that someone who is a novice in blockchain analytics would know.”

…

But as they continued to scour the blockchains for missing funds, the hackers had been busy, too. 

At 5 p.m. ET, the hackers placed $60 million worth of stablecoins into a crypto-lending platform called Aave. The coins served as collateral the hackers used to borrow almost 20,000 ether, worth about $44.6 million at the time.

Ether and other assets like bitcoin can’t be frozen, so the transaction essentially moved the money beyond the outer limits of any centralized platform’s control. Meaning, the hackers were home free. 

Decentralized platforms like Aave eventually shut down loans to those suspicious accounts, but the hackers ultimately escaped with some $2.4 billion in un-freezable crypto assets, according to TRM.

Wall Street Journal

I don’t know about you, but the mention of “crypto” immediately makes my bullshit antennae go up. Anytime someone starts explaining to me why cryptocurrency is a thing I should be investing in, or why “the blockchain” is better than actual banks, I feel like I’m getting a lobotomy and am going to wake up with a basement full of Amway products or a timeshare in the Caribbean that I never use. I used to feel bad about having this reaction—like I wasn’t smart enough to “get it” or just missing something obvious.

So it was a huge relief to learn that Michael Lewis, the author who has written bestsellers explaining how numbers work from baseball to Wall Street, doesn’t totally get crypto either. In Going Infinite, his chronicle of the improbable rise and rapid fall of cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried, Lewis spends one short paragraph explaining Bitcoin, observing that “Bitcoin often gets explained but somehow never stays explained. You nod along and think you are getting it but then wake up the next morning needing to hear the explanation all over again.” Yes, exactly. Which is why President Trump’s latest Executive Order unleashing crypto in the U.S. economy and potentially even creating a “national digital asset stockpile” seems totally suss. Look: If I don’t get crypto, and Michael Lewis doesn’t get crypto, I think we can be pretty sure that Trump’s team doesn’t really get it either and this whole EO is yet another cluster**** waiting to happen.

Aside #2: would it surprise you that, initially, Donald J. Trump viewed crypto as a total scam? In July of 2019, during his first term, Trump Tweeted: "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."

So it’s important to say that whatever the final language on the bill says, it will still be enabling corruption. Why? Because the entire crypto enterprise is corrupt. Money-laundering and scams that exploit naïve investors aren’t unfortunate behavior that taints a potentially useful enterprise. For crypto, they are the whole game, more or less the only reason cryptocurrencies exist.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but you should bear in mind that Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was created in 2008. That makes cryptocurrency ancient by tech standards — not much younger than the iPhone, much older than Apple Pay. Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will find widespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now. But it keeps not happening.

At this point, 17 years after crypto arrived on the scene, there are still no — I repeat, no — significant legal use cases. This is despite many efforts to make crypto a real medium of exchange. Most notably, El Salvador’s government made a big push to turn Bitcoin into the country’s effective currency, making taxes payable in Bitcoin, subsidizing people’s digital wallets and pushing businesses to accept Bitcoin for purchases. The attempt was a complete bust, and El Salvador, which dreamed of becoming a hive of crypto-investment and crypto-tourism, has gone into the rent-a-Gulag business instead.