Truth Terminal, an account on X (formerly Twitter) operated by Andy Ayrey that semi-autonomously incorporates artificial intelligence tools, was recently offered its own cryptocurrency wallet by Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong. 

The account had an unusual response to this offer, responding, “I think it would be good for you to tell us about Russell first. Specifically, what is Russell’s species?”

Who or what is Russell?

Some have speculated that Russell is an allusion to Armstrong’s dog. This is apparently based on a deleted X post that appeared to reference the dog using that name. 

This would partially explain why this account might be interested in asking about Russell, though presumably it already has assumptions about the species of the animal. 

Interestingly, a token on BASE called $RUSSELL saw some interesting trading activity which was highlighted by various accounts on X.

Read more: Marc Andreessen gave an AI agent $50,000 of bitcoin — it endorsed GOAT

Specifically, in the minutes immediately before this post, there was a large (for this token) purchase followed by that account taking advantage of the subsequent pump to exit the position.

GOAT

This account and Ayrey had previously received $50,000 from Marc Andreessen, one of the named partners of Andreessen Horowitz, and then the account endorsed a Goatse-themed token. 

This earlier endorsement of a memecoin likely predisposed members of crypto X to look for this account to endorse another token. X users saw the unusual response as exactly that. 

It is also important to re-iterate that this account is not fully autonomous, is created and operated by Ayrey, and has endorsed a memecoin and convinced some traders it endorsed another.

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Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong says the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked the exchange to cease trading on every asset but bitcoin shortly before it launched a lawsuit against the company for operating an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency.

Speaking to the Financial Times (FT), Armstrong claims the SEC told him that it believed every asset other than bitcoin is a security.

According to Armstrong, “We said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that’s not our interpretation of the law. And they said, we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin.” 

Coinbase refused to comply with the SEC’s request, preferring instead to “find out what the court says.”

“We really didn’t have a choice at that point, delisting every asset other than bitcoin, which by the way is not what the law says, would have essentially meant the end of the crypto industry in the US,” Armstrong told FT.

“It kind of made it an easy choice . . . let’s go to court.”

If the exchange had relented, it could have set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the industry, effectively placing every other exchange in the US outside the law until they registered with the regulator.

According to the SEC, its enforcement division doesn’t make formal requests for “companies to delist crypto assets.” Instead, it says, “In the course of an investigation, the staff may share its own view as to what conduct may raise questions for the commission under the securities laws.”

SEC says Coinbase listed risky assets and failed to protect users

Last month, the SEC accused Coinbase of operating an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency. In its lawsuit, the regulator claims that the firm “never registered with the SEC” to provide these functions, “thus evading the disclosure regime that Congress has established for our securities markets.”

A number of tokens listed by Coinbase, along with its Prime, Wallet, and staking products, were identified as alleged violations of securities law. The SEC also claims that the company knowingly listed high-risk assets that “had the characteristics of securities.”

Read more: Why did the SEC let Coinbase go public?

The commission also claimed that Coinbase failed to protect investors against fraud and conflicts of interest.

“Coinbase’s alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC,” said the suit.

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Crypto Twitter has been charged with tracking down and preserving ‘spicy’ deleted tweets from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong after the tech mogul apparently wiped all of his messages from the site.

It appears that The Wayback Machine — the trusted internet archive — has also scrubbed all evidence of Armstrong’s tweets.

The hunt’s instigator, pro-Bitcoin tweeter @Pledditor, says that the goal of the thread is to “find links via alternative archival services to all his old tweets” and has specified that the new archive should focus exclusively on “tweets with verifiable archive links.”

Pledditor also says that it should include tweets from between 2015 and 2018 because this was “when he posted all the spicy takes.”

Read more: Coinbase boss Brian Armstrong sorry for leaving retail users high and dry

The Internet Archive says that web users who want archives of their sites or accounts removed can make a request by sending an email specifying the URLs and time period that they wish to have deleted. However, it does also point out that these requests are subject to review and won’t necessarily result in records being expunged.

It’s clear why Armstrong might want some tweets deleting

The tweets recovered so far cover a range of topics, from mundane updates on the state of the company to more controversial takes on the future of Coinbase and crypto itself.

Among the highlights so far are Armstrong’s complaints about Coinbase’s removal from bitcoin.org, his suggestion for a for-profit Bitcoin fork, his claims that “altcoins are a distraction,” and his hyping of a 4% ETH pump after Coinbase listed it.

Read more: Justin Sun faces criticism for SEC tokens and inappropriate tweets

Armstrong isn’t the only crypto CEO who has cause to back-peddle where his social media is concerned.

Back in November 2022, Protos detailed how digital asset information platform The Tie had compiled a list of tweets deleted by former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The list tracked all of SBF’s erasures over the preceding year along with many tweets from other people that he’d shared.

Then, back in April this year, Justin Sun’s exchange Poloniex published and then deleted a number of tweets touting an ‘SEC-focused token’ giveaway after crypto lawyers and Twitter users raised concerns.

Presumably, the new Armstrong tweet archive will be an ongoing project. You can keep up to date or submit your own entries here.

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A trader has banked millions of dollars with an options bet against Coinbase placed just a day before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued its suit against the exchange. Earlier this week, the regulator also filed charges against Binance.

The trade, made on Monday morning, was spotted by Unusual Whales and was placed via multiple put options bets with a target price of $50 and a total premium of $107,000. The trader is estimated to have made more than $25 million on the trade.

Coinbase’s share price was down by nearly 19% on Tuesday morning. The stock began crashing on Monday when rival exchange Binance received its own suit from the SEC and as much as $81 billion worth of crypto was traded.

Bitcoin ended 5% down on the day with as much as $300 million worth of liquidations, most of them on the long side. This activity made for one of the most intense days in crypto this year.

Coinbase insiders are still offloading shares

Meanwhile, Cathie Wood of Ark Invest has bought the dip, buying nearly 420,000 Coinbase shares for around $21 million. Her purchase comes after having sold 160,887 Coinbase shares last March for $13.5 million.

Coinbase is down more than 77% since going public and its insiders have been selling stock on a regular basis, netting more than $1.2 billion so far. Company insiders — Brian Armstrong included — have continued to sell their stock this year, offloading more than $28 million in total. Armstrong has personally sold more than 29,000 shares, making over $1.7 million on last May’s sale alone.

Read more: SEC won’t give into Coinbase demands, says it wants the impossible

Coinbase lost $2.6 billion last year and is still losing money, albeit at a slower rate. It lost $69 million in the first quarter of this year. The company’s financials show that so far, the company has successfully stayed afloat by selling its stock while taking on debt. It currently has up to $3.4 billion in debt and $119 million in crypto debt.

Famous short-seller Jim Chanos describes Coinbase as symptomatic of the predatory junkyard that is crypto.

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Coinbase has decided to further dig in its heels against regulatory pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with CEO Brian Armstrong calling out the commission’s chair Gary Gensler, and the crypto exchange’s legal chief hitting back at an SEC proposal that would amend custody rules for registered investment advisors (RIAs).

In a 23-page letter to the SEC, Coinbase’s legal head Paul Grewal outlined many ways in which the exchange doesn’t agree with major revisions proposed to the investment adviser custody rule. Grewal explained that the SEC is seemingly making assumptions about crypto that would do harm to investors.

“While we agree with some of the measures outlined in the Proposal, we are concerned that, in its current form, the Proposal makes unwarranted assumptions about custodial practices based on the Commission’s experience with securities,” the letter stated.

“These assumptions are not necessary or appropriate, and could be detrimental to consumer protection for other asset classes, including crypto assets (whether or not they are securities).”

• A registered investment advisor (RIA) advises clients on investments and can leverage their portfolio.
• Firms that act as RIAs, like Coinbase, are registered with the SEC or state-regulated trust companies.
• The SEC submitted its proposal to amend the RIA rules on February 15, 2023.

Grewal argued that, although the SEC’s proposal widens the scope of RIA custody obligations from “funds and securities” to all client assets, including crypto, it doesn’t adequately change the requirements to reflect that expansion. The letter requests that the SEC keep state-regulated trust companies as qualified custodians — even though Coinbase Custody would retain its position under the proposal.

Read more: Coinbase execs slapped with insider trading lawsuit as banks get spooked

“This works well today, so there’s no reason to disrupt longstanding Congressional and SEC policy,” Grewal explained in a Twitter thread summing up his letter. The Coinbase legal chief further wrote, “Second, the proposal would ban RIAs from trading on non-QC crypto exchanges. This wouldn’t benefit RIAs or their clients and would in fact harm them. Thus the SEC should allow limited non-QC exposure so RIAs can trade crypto for their clients.”

Additionally, the letter outlined these requests and amendments:

• The SEC should allow RIA client assets limited exposure to non-qualified custodian environments.
• Standards of care, indemnification, and insurance requirements should be tailored by asset class.
• Sophisticated investors should be allowed to negotiate their own custodial arrangements.
• The SEC should revise the proposal to allow RIA custody in additional circumstances to account for early-stage crypto tokens and more.
• A unified possession or control standard should be adopted so that investors can hold crypto assets with a broader range of custodians.
• The SEC should alter the external reconciliation requirements to let qualified custodians use the best available data.
• The commission should direst staff to modify accounting guidance in accordance with the proposal, so that companies and banks can hold crypto assets without recording them on balance sheets.

Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong says SEC is on ‘lone crusade’

In March, the SEC served Coinbase with a Wells Notice, warning that the firm was likely selling unregistered securities and therefore violating federal law. This prompted a strong response from Coinbase: “We do not relish litigation against the SEC, but we will vigorously defend ourselves.”

The following month, Coinbase sued the SEC over an administrative matter.

Now, along with the letter by Grewal, Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong has decided to publicly double down on his bad blood with the commission. In an interview with CNBC on Monday in Dubai, the CEO said “The SEC is a bit of an outlier here. There’s kind of a lone crusade, if you will, with Gary Gensler, the chair there, and he has taken a more anti-crypto approach for some reason.”

Read more: Coinbase execs have sold 9 times more stock than they’ve bought in 2023

“I don’t think he’s necessarily trying to regulate the industry as much as maybe curtail it,” Armstrong elaborated. “But he’s created some lawsuits, and I think it’s quite unhelpful for the industry in the US, but it also is an opportunity for Coinbase to go get that clarity from the courts that we feel will really benefit the crypto industry and also the US more broadly.”

In the same interview, Armstrong announced that the firm wasn’t going to relocate overseas — after suggesting Coinbase was exploring the option last month. “We’re always going to have a US presence … But the US a little behind right now,” he said.

It appears that Coinbase has committed to its fight, not flight approach.

Quotes in bold are our emphasis. Got a tip? Send us an email or ProtonMail. For more informed news, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. 

The post Coinbase claps back at SEC proposal, chief exec targets Gary Gensler appeared first on Protos.

Coinbase execs have dumped nearly nine times more shares in the company than they’ve bought since the start of the year, according to data from insider trading tracker, Dataroma.

The most recent figures show that since late December, company insiders have sold more than half a million shares at a total value of just over $26 million. By contrast, only 57,000 shares, worth just under $2.6 million, have been bought.

As you’d expect, the most significant action came from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Since December, he’s sold 297,320 shares at a total value of nearly $18 million.

Last November, it was revealed that Armstrong had sold off the last of the Coinbase common stock that he had held since the firm’s IPO in 2021. However, many of these shares were sold to the Brian Armstrong Living Trust meaning that they were still likely fully under his control.

Read more: Coinbase reportedly considers overseas expansion amid US crackdown

The rest of the sales come from four more Coinbase execs:

• Chief financial officer Alesia Haas sold 182,000 shares in five transactions, totaling just under $6.6 million.
• Chief people office Lawrence Brock offloaded 16,215 shares for just over $960,000.
• The company’s chief accounting officer Jennifer Jones dumped 8,197 shares in four transactions. These sales totaled $509,000.
• Paul Grewal, the company’s chief legal officer, sold 4,143 of his shares, making just shy of $280,000.

While these Coinbase big hitters were busy dumping their stock, company director and Shopify founder Tobias Lutke was bucking the trend. Since the turn of the year, Lutke has bought up just over 57,000 shares at a cost of nearly $2.6 million.

ARK Invest is also dumping COIN

It’s not just Coinbase insiders dumping the company’s stock. This week, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest sold off more than 160,000 Coinbase shares worth $13.5 million. This sell-off comes just weeks after ARK bought 350,000 Coinbase shares.

As reported by CoinDesk, this purchase included 301,437 shares for its ARK Innovation ETF and 52,525 shares for its Next Generation Internet ETF.

Coinbase is waiting for judges’ ruling on lawsuits

Coinbase is currently awaiting the US Supreme Court’s decision on its attempt to quash customer lawsuits. These include one user who sued the firm after a scammer took funds from their account.

Coinbase wants to transfer the cases out of court and instead go down the path of private arbitration, reports Reuters.

Justices have reportedly expressed doubt over the exchange’s arguments while some were worried about how the outcome would affect defendants looking to arbitrate customer claims.

A ruling is expected by late June.

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Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong has hinted that the spectacular implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s rival exchange FTX last year proves that his company has chosen the right strategy for long-term success. However, despite this foresight, the company has announced that it’s set to fire nearly 1,000 employees.

Armstrong broke the news early Tuesday in a message to Coinbase’s employees.

“Coinbase is well capitalized, and crypto isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I believe recent events will ultimately end up benefiting Coinbase greatly (a large competitor failing, emerging regulatory clarity, etc.), and they validate our long-term strategy,” wrote Armstrong.

However, he then went on to say, “But it will take time for these changes to come to fruition… Therefore, I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our operating expense by about 25% Q/Q, which includes letting go of about 950 people.”

Read more: Coinbase fined $100M over KYC and AML failures

The affected employees were immediately locked out of the Coinbase system and invited to meet with the company’s HR department.

Armstrong says that the cuts are due to the company’s annual planning process which runs various revenue-based calculations. In Armstrong’s words, Coinbase needs to “reduce expenses to increase our chances of doing well in every scenario.”

According to the Coinbase CEO, the reduction in workforce will be carried out alongside the firm killing off a number of projects that “have a lower probability of success.” Other projects will operate as normal but with smaller teams.

Staff cuts are becoming a crypto trend

Coinbase previously cut 18% of its workforce in June blaming the company’s rapid growth during the last bull market.

Now it seems that the exchange is being forced to reckon with the repercussions of the recent crypto winter that has seen a number of the space’s biggest players first to scale back.

Indeed, Huobi recently revealed that it’s set to slash its workforce by 20% amid rumors of insolvency, and last week, Barry Silbert’s Genesis cut 30% of its workforce in what was the firm’s second round of layoffs in under six months.

And last November, Kraken blamed “macroeconomic and geopolitical factors” for it needing to shed 1,100 workers from its payroll.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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Brian Armstrong has sold every last share of Coinbase common stock that he held since IPO. The last sales were recorded on November 11, quietly occurring as crypto markets focused almost exclusively on the ongoing issues surrounding FTX and Alameda.

A week after the final sale, Armstrong told the Financial Times that he was “just as bullish on crypto as ever.” Clearly, he wasn’t being totally straightforward.

Coinbase, despite being a publicly-traded stock, regulated by the SEC, and trying to present itself as wholly different to FTX and Alameda, hasn’t been faring well: the price of COIN is off almost 90% since IPO.

Earlier this year, analytics firm S&P Global downgraded Coinbase’s credit rating from BB+ to BB, drastically affecting the price of COIN and officially designating the asset as “junk.” The company’s shares were also downgraded by Moody‘s and Goldman Sachs.

Read more: Coinbase: A Boring Story

Funnily enough, co-founder Fred Ersham, who is no longer an active employee at the company, appears to have more shares than any other executive, holding 1,121,844 shares.

Meanwhile, Coinbase is caught up in the biggest mystery affecting the cryptocurrency industry today: where exactly are Grayscale’s 600,000 bitcoins? Both Grayscale and Coinbase refuse to say but they assure everyone that the bitcoins are there. The inability to disclose the public addresses could have something to do with the original GBTC prospectus.

Hopefully, Armstrong’s multimillion-dollar sale will stop the bleeding temporarily — after all, there are only a few hundred thousand shares for other top executives to sell.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

Update 17:50 UTC, Nov 21: Many of the shares in question were sold to the Brian Armstrong Living Trust, likely for tax or ownership purposes. While no longer owned by Brian Armstrong individually, the shares are still likely fully under his control.

Edit 18:30 UTC, Nov 21: Headline has been updated to match the article and specify that Armstrong has sold all of his common stock.

The post Armstrong holds no Coinbase common stock but who has GBTC’s bitcoin? appeared first on Protos.

Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong admitted that the company overhired and “grew too quickly” as he broke the news to 1,100 workers that they’d be fired.

In a letter to all Coinbase staff on Tuesday, Armstrong announced that the company’s workforce would be slashed by 18%, blaming the need for such drastic measures on a possible looming recession, the need to manage costs, and the desire to increase efficiency.

But Armstrong also detailed the company’s own failings with regard to its hiring policy, specifically the decision to swell its ranks by around 200% a year starting in 2021.

“At the beginning of 2021, we had 1,250 employees,” wrote Armstrong. “At the time, we were in the early innings of the bull run and adoption of crypto products was exploding. There were new use cases enabled by crypto getting traction practically every week.”

“We saw the opportunities but we needed to massively scale our team to be positioned to compete in a broad array of bets. It’s challenging to grow at just the right pace given the scale of our growth. While we tried our best to get this just right, in this case it is now clear to me that we over-hired.”

Read more: Coinbase staff will see what colleagues think of them with new app

Armstrong, for what it’s worth, said that he bore full responsibility for the disaster and outlined a package designed to help affected employees, comprising:

• At least 14 weeks of severance pay, boosted by an extra two weeks for every year of employment.
• Four months of health insurance for US workers and four months of mental health support for international employees.
• Access to Coinbase’s Talent Hub team, which will work with fired employees to find them jobs with other firms.

According to an SEC filing, the cuts will leave Coinbase with approximately 5,000 remaining staff and will cost the company somewhere in the region of $40 million in related expenses — almost all of which will make up termination packages.

Fired Coinbase workers forced to wait to discover their fate

Employees across the firm were left sweating for an hour after receiving Armstrong’s devastating news.

“In the next hour every employee will receive an email from HR informing if you are affected or unaffected by this layoff,” read the note.

“Every affected employee will receive an invitation to have a direct conversation with your HRBP and the senior leader of your organization.”

However, it appears that eager employees could also discover their fates by simply checking to see if their company email had been locked. Armstrong explained that the confirmations would be sent to fired workers via their personal emails due to the company protecting itself against disgruntled (soon-to-be) ex-employees who might try to access and misuse sensitive company data.

“I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you,” wrote Armstrong. “Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.”

The exchange lied about not nixing job offers

Coinbase announced it would ‘slow its headcount growth’ last month but moved to assure all incoming employees that their jobs were safe. However, it reneged on that promise soon after and vacancies that were in the final stages of being filled were slashed at the last moment.

In an email, Coinbase’s chief people officer L.J. Brock told candidates that the measures were due to “the macro environment.”

To soften the blow, it promised one month’s pay and, once again, access to Talent Hub.

There’s always Tron

While Coinbase firings grab the headlines, Justin Sun is ramping up recruitment over at Tron.

The controversial Chinese entrepreneur tweeted on Tuesday that the ecosystem is looking to boost its workforce by 50%. In his message, he directly addressed crypto professionals who have recently become unemployed.

Read more: A career timeline of Justin Sun, crypto’s most annoying over-marketer

However, desperate jobseekers might do well to consider Sun’s offer very carefully before making that particular move.

Not only is Sun one of crypto’s more colorful characters, he’s also been accused of behavior in the workplace that ranges from inappropriate to just plain bizarre.

According to reports, Sun has in the past referred to himself as ‘Chairman Mao,’ disappeared without warning to commune in forests with spiritual leaders, and been verbally and physically abusive to staff.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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