By Amy Castor and David Gerard
Remarkable bird, the South African Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Twitter has now made it impossible to read tweets without being logged in. As of July 1, you can’t even load more than a few hundred tweets when you’re logged in — or you hit the rate limiter!
This has broken a pile of links and embeds on our previous posts. Some of it should be in the Internet Archive.
Elon Musk was trying to stiff Google on Twitter’s cloud bill — Twitter owed Google $42 million — and Google said they’d cut Twitter off as of July 1. Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, said she’d sorted it out — but then Twitter stopped working around 9 a.m. PST on July 1. This probably isn’t a coincidence. [Platformer; Bloomberg; New York Times]
We don’t know what crypto Twitter will do now. Mastodon and Bluesky are popping off, but neither has the sort of audience of suckers that crypto needs and Bluesky isn’t even officially open to the public yet. Bluesky users do a good line in naked hostility to crypto — even as the CEO used to be a ZCash developer and they tried to seed the userbase with NFT bros.
Using Twitter for actual work now is like using PACER for actual work. Except PACER is more pleasant.
In the meantime, all Twitter links in our posts will include archive links from now on. Archive. Everything.
Prime Trust takes out TrueUSD
TrueUSD runs TUSD, a supposedly asset-backed stablecoin. It’s pretty clearly unbacked. The entire enterprise has fallen over. You can’t get your money back.
But Binance is still printing its own fresh TUSD.
The market cap for TUSD has risen from $750 million to more than $3 billion in only six months. A pile of fresh TUSD fueled the recent pump in the price of bitcoin.
Binance replaced BUSD with TUSD earlier this year as its stablecoin of choice after US regulators started scrutinizing BUSD and Paxos.
Given all of Binance’s regulatory issues of late, it’s no wonder they’re still printing. They need the money, whether it’s real or not.
The ownership of TrueUSD is murky. It was launched in March 2018 by Rafael Cosman and Danny An, who cofounded TrustToken, which later became Archblock, a San Francisco firm with offices in Ireland and Poland. The company got funding from Thiel’s Founders Fund, Stanford’s StartX, A16z, and Jump Trading.
Archblock manages TrueUSD’s reserves, its banking partners, and its compliance. The token’s intellectual property is owned by a hitherto unknown BVI-registered investment company called Techteryx. Justin Sun totally doesn’t own TrueUSD, honest. [Bloomberg; Protos]
The problem, we’re guessing, is that TrueUSD minting and custody partner Prime Trust — also a former custodian for Binance.US, FTX, and Celsius — has gone broke.
Prime is an actual trust company that holds people’s crypto for a fee. How do you go broke in that business? Prime’s current story is that they … lost the keys to the cryptos in custody. Whoops.
Prime Trust is short $83 million — that they’ll admit to. The Nevada Department of Business and Industry has put Prime Trust (Prime Core Technologies and subsidiaries) into receivership. They’ve halted all withdrawals. [Nevada order, PDF; Petition for a receiver, PDF]
BitGo, another crypto custodian, put together a “preliminary non-binding agreement” to buy Prime Trust on June 8 — but walked away from the deal two weeks later after Nevada sent the cease and desist order. [BitGo; Twitter, archive]
TrueUSD assures its users that everything is fine and that they have other banking partners. “Rest assured, all your funds are safe with TUSD.” At the same time, they’ve been sending notices to customers telling them they can’t redeem TUSD: [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive]
… you will be unable to mint and redeem TUSD as well as any of our TrueCoin’s including TAUD, TCAD, and TGBP while Prime Trust operations are suspended.
How screwed is TUSD? “people try to redeem tusd and it just gets reminted to them a couple of days later lmao” [Protos; Twitter, archive]
But that’s okay! TUSD is still worth a genuine* dollar on Binance!
Banq, Prime Trust, Jon Jiles, and NFTs
Crypto payments company Banq — not, in fact, a bank — was founded as a subsidiary of Prime Trust. It was spun out and is now a partner company. Banq filed for voluntary bankruptcy on June 13. The reorganization plan lists $190,000 in assets and $5.4 million in liabilities. [Petition, PDF; Plan of Reorganization, PDF; case docket]
In its reorganization plan, Banq says that $17.5 million of its assets were blown on a May 2021 plan by former CEO Scott Purcell to pivot from payments to NFTs. Banq is suing to get the money back.
According to Banq’s filing, the company made a large…
Read More: TrueUSD in trouble, Prime Trust and Banq go down, Europe hates Binance, BlockFi,