This week in the crypto world we saw FTX given permission to sell billions in holdings, the CEO of defunct Turkish exchange Thodex given an 11,000+ year sentence and a former Bitcoin owner going to court to try and get access to a landfill containing a hard drive with 7,500 bitcoin on it.
Might want to take a peg, mate.
FTX Gets Green Light for Token Sales
A Delaware district judge this week gave the green light for bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX to proceed with the sale of $3.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies as part of its bankruptcy process. The exchange will sell up to $100 million worth of tokens per week, with the option to increase this limit to $200 million on a case-by-case basis.
Despite some concerns in the crypto community about traceability of deposited cryptocurrencies, FTX assured that individual crypto holdings cannot be traced back to individual customers as they all belong to a single pool. This assurance follows a recent data breach that exposed customer information anyway.
Thodex Founder Given 11,196 Years in Prison
The founder of Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, Faruk Fetih Özer, was this week sentenced to over 11,000 years in prison for his role in the platform’s collapse. Özer, who fled Turkey with access to billions of dollars in exchange funds and was arrested in Albania, received this extraordinary sentence along with two others; all were found guilty of aggravated fraud, leading a criminal organization, and money laundering.
Thodex went offline in April 2021 during unplanned maintenance and never returned, with Özer fleeing to Albania with up to $2 billion of users’ funds. Özer’s arrest and extradition in April led to charges for multiple crimes, being hit with a seven-month jail sentence for tax offenses and then this huge sentence despite his claims of being framed.
Bitcoin Loser Not Giving Up
An IT developer who lost 7,500 bitcoin when he threw out a hard drive in 2013 is hoping to use mechanical arms powered by artificial intelligence to try and recover it from landfill. James Howells has been battling with his local council ever since to try and recover the hard drive, but the council has always refused on safety grounds, leading to him taking desperate measures; Howells has hired a legal team to petition the council claiming that he will use a robotic arm powered by AI to sift through the trash in search for the precious hard drive.
The hard drive, buried under a decade’s waste, would be worth $193 million if it was found in working order.
