The Week in Crypto – Silk Road, LBRY and FTX

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No. 3 – LBRY Loses SEC Lawsuit

Decentralized media platform LBRY this week lost its lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which had accused the project of selling unlicensed securities through its LBC token.

The judge agreed that LBC tokens should be considered securities, a verdict that LBRY said sets a “an extraordinarily dangerous precedent” and paved the way for every single cryptocurrency bar bitcoin to be classed as a security.

As a result, LBRY can expect a rather large fine in the coming months.

No. 2 – 50,000 BTC Seized From Silk Road Hacker

This week saw the revelation that over 50,000 was seized last year from a Georgia resident who stole it from Silk Road in 2012. James Zhong was tracked down after he sent some of the stolen funds to an exchange, leading to police raiding his house and seizing 50,676 in hardware wallets and in Casascius coins, as well as over $700,000 in cash and metals.

Zhong gamed Silk Road by finding a way to withdraw huge amounts of bitcoin after creating new accounts and depositing a small amount, walking away with the haul and doing almost nothing with it. This was probably out of fear of getting caught, but he was caught anyway after he sent a small bit to an unnamed exchange.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to steal masses of bitcoin, spend it before they catch you.

No.1 – FTX Implodes

Of course, the biggest story of the week (and the year) was FTX imploding in spectacular fashion, locking billions of dollars of customer funds as it went down. The story is too huge to compact into a couple of paragraphs, so here’s how we navigated it this week:

There is undoubdedly more to come from this scandal, but that’s not bad for five days…

Honorable Mentions

This week we also learnt that:

We’ll be back next week for another review of the week’s top crypto news, although whether it can top this week is doubtful.

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