Crypto Twitter has been consumed by a messy affair involving Barron Trump, the Trump family, a Peter Thiel-associated blog, Martin Shkreli, Arkham Intelligence, and numerous others over the past few days. Here’s a summary.

Airdrop

Pirate Wires, a ‘new new media’ outlet tied to Peter Thiel put out a tweet saying “per conversations,” Barron Trump would spearhead an official Donald Trump token. The news was met with equal parts skepticism and speculation, mostly because the only proof given was a lazily added contract address thrown in by Pirate Wires head, Michael Solana.

Considering the low liquidity of the coin at that time, the dropping of the contract address only increased the doubt about who was behind it.

But Martin Shkreli quickly inserted himself into the drama by tweeting out that a specific X (formerly Twitter) account “looks like the official account.” This was also presented without proof.

Next, Shkreli created a Space called ‘$DJT is real,’ again claiming that the token was an official Trump coin being launched by Barron Trump. No evidence was provided.

Mask begins to slip

A little while later, numerous large influencer accounts began to spread the news that the DJT token was indeed real.

Shortly thereafter, Shkreli and Bo Loudon — one of Barron Trump’s best friends — joined yet another Space where Loudon stated, “Barron [Trump] is confirmed partially behind this.” He quickly backtracked and corrected himself, stating, “It’s a rumor that Barron is partially involved… I heard that through another friend.”

Louden then deleted a tweet that he put out claiming, “$DJT IS THE ONLY REAL TRUMP TOKEN.”

As public sentiment began to slip for the coin, Shkreli started to take on a more front-and-center role, tweeting that a Polymarket prediction market offering a bet about Trump’s involvement with DJT “as defined, [has a] literally 100% chance” of resolving ‘Yes.’

Soon, DJT was almost exclusively what Shkreli was tweeting and talking about.

Read more: Wu-Tang Clan ‘nothing to F with’ but does PleasrDAO have Shkreli case?

Bet me, bro

Not long after taking such public stances about the involvement of Donald J. Trump and Barron Trump in the DJT token, Shkreli put out an offer to bet anyone with size about the meme coin. Alex Wice, a cryptocurrency investor, was willing to bet $1 million. Shkreli said “You’re on, how high can you go?”

But before that bet could be publicly confirmed, a much larger player jumped into the fold: a pseudonymous crypto account going by ‘GiganticRebirth’ offered to bet $100 million with Shkreli that Donald Trump had nothing to do with the coin. Shkreli agreed to the bet, replying with “done your way.”

However, despite bringing in well-known cryptocurrency figures like Jordan Fish (@cobie on X), GiganticRebirth and Shkreli couldn’t agree to terms. No money was ever escrowed, no bets were officially made, and no one ended up losing or winning anything.

Talk, talk, talk, it’s only talk

This didn’t stop Shkreli from taking victory laps, claiming that he’d won the bet and that GiganticRebirth had backed out. But as he celebrated his faux-win, Arkham Intelligence — a cryptocurrency company that specializes in tracking and identifying wallets and addresses on blockchains — offered a $150,000 bounty to anyone who could determine who had created the DJT token.

In under two hours, on-chain sleuth and investigator ZachXBT put forward a claim on the bounty. This appeared to spook Shkreli.

In DMs released by ZachXBT and a timeline confirming as much, Shkreli panicked and directly messaged ZachXBT to tell him he was involved with DJT, then started a Space and admitted to his involvement and his creation of the token for the first time publicly.

Read more: Joe Biden is suddenly pro-crypto after Trump embraces it

The beginning of the end

After not collecting $100 million, being exposed as the creator of the token in the most embarrassing way possible, and never getting a confirmation of Barron or Donald Trump’s involvement, Shkreli once again took to X, spending nearly half a day in numerous Spaces, desperately trying to convince anyone who would listen that he had worked directly with Barron Trump to create the token.

If Shkreli is to be believed, his story goes like this:

Shkreli was working with a 17-year-old minor named Cameron who was in contact with Bo Louden and Barron Trump. Supposedly, Cameron had reached out to Barron and heard that he was interested in launching a meme coin before his brother, Donald Trump, Jr. They asked for Shkreli’s help.

Using Chat-GPT and talking about how to create good financial incentives and mechanics with numerous influencers in the crypto space, Shkreli coded the coin and Barron Trump launched it.

The coin laid silent for a while as the three individuals associated with it attempted to get numerous funds and investors to put money into the project. Shkreli states that it was very difficult to get anyone to commit, but also stated that Barron Trump told him that Donald Trump supported the concept.

Shkreli insists that he had little financial reason to be involved, hardly purchased any of the coin, didn’t take advantage of the 17 or 18-year-olds, and absolutely had hoped that his involvement would not be exposed.

While much of this could very well be true, it’s difficult to believe that Shkreli never wanted anyone to uncover his involvement, seeing how adamant he was that the token was real from the jump and how he repeatedly hinted that he’d spoken to those who would know.

Shkreli claims that Barron Trump is the one who leaked the information to Pirate Wires, though he also states that the information was leaked sooner than they’d hoped and that the project wasn’t ready for launch yet.

By the end of the day yesterday, Shkreli seemed less sure of a public assurance by Barron Trump that he was involved and very hesitant to claim Donald Trump will ever speak about the coin at all.

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

The post The entire DJT token drama in one article appeared first on Protos.

Convicted felon-turned-crypto influencer Martin Shkreli launched a meme coin called DJT. During a live social audio room on X (formerly Twitter), he said he didn’t own any of its supply and simply launched it to “help a friend.”

It turns out that this friend is Barron Trump, the 18-year-old son of Donald J. Trump.

As of publication time, the Solana meme coin is down 73% from yesterday’s $0.047 high.

Investigative researcher ZachXBT posted evidence that the holder of large quantities of another Shkreli meme coin, Shoggath, sold $832,000 worth of DJT within the past 24 hours. However, ZachXBT does not believe that particular wallet belongs to Shkreli.

Read more: Martin Shkreli tells reporter to ‘lick my balls,’ New York cancels his crypto event

Earlier, Shkreli sent a direct message (DM) to ZachXBT claiming that Andrew Tate had confirmed Barron Trump’s involvement.

Interestingly, it’s also apparently part of Shkreli’s parole terms that he submit full financial statements, and steer clear of “any self-employment involving access to client money or investments.”

This could potentially mean he has violated his parole by managing an investment opportunity on behalf of Barron Trump.

Why Martin Shkreli launched an immediate failure

GCR, a crypto whale trader, apparently made a large bet about a Trump family member not endorsing the meme coin. Shkreli is on the opposite side of that bet and wants to collect a payout of $100 million from GCR. 

Shkreli claimed on his live X Spaces room that he has a private message from GCR clarifying that Barron Trump’s endorsement would suffice to win the modified terms of the original bet.

A caller on his X Spaces yesterday asked Shkreli why he helped Barron create the meme coin if he didn’t personally own an allocation of tokens to sell.

Shkreli responded, “We mentioned it earlier, the same reason why you might create an NFT collection — it could be popular, and one could make money. Trump said it himself, he wants to be the crypto president.”

The caller asked a follow-up question, “So, the team held tokens that they could sell?”

He responded frankly, “That would probably be the correct assumption.”

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

The post Did Martin Shkreli violate his parole by launching DJT coin with Barron Trump? appeared first on Protos.

In a very public tiff, PleasrDAO — an a16z and Paris Hilton-funded ‘DAO’ with 74 members, according to a 2021 New York Times article — has decided to sue Martin ‘Pharma Bro’ Shkreli regarding his distribution of a Wu-Tang album that he originally purchased in 2015.

The album was seized by the US government and sold to PleasrDAO after Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud.

According to the original sale of the album, called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, it cannot be commercially exploited until the year 2103. Shkreli has streamed portions of the album on YouTube and has admitted to making copies of it and distributing it to friends. It remains unclear if this violates the agreement of the original sale.

A temporary restraining order has been put in place which ensures that — at least for the time being — Shkreli is unable to play the album publicly.

He attempted to sell the album on eBay, where bids hit one million dollars before it was removed from the auction site, back in 2017.

Read more: Martin Shkreli tells reporter to ‘lick my balls,’ New York cancels his crypto event

While it’s impossible to know who will win the case, Shkreli has made it clear that he plans to attack the idea that PleasrDAO is a DAO at all (although, as Hayden Adams of Uniswap pointed out, PleasrDAO has never really been a traditional decentralized autonomous organization) and that with proper due diligence, it would have known that Shkreli had widely distributed it before the DAO purchased the album.

It’s unclear what PleasrDAO hopes to get from Shkreli outside of a few million dollars, at best, as the former pharmaceutical CEO has lost most of his money. Sadly, the former founder and face of PleasrDAO, Jamey Johnson, was placed in a medical coma last year after suffering a serious injury in an ATV accident and hasn’t been heard from since.

Protos reached out to PleasrDAO on X, but it did not comment.

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

The post Wu-Tang Clan ‘nothing to F with’ but does PleasrDAO have Shkreli case? appeared first on Protos.

Following criticisms over data credibility from Martin Shkreli and others, io.net’s founder and CEO Ahmad Shadid has published a ‘post-mortem’ statement, explaining, “We move fast, and sometimes we break things.”

Shadid’s post on X (formerly Twitter) describes a ‘game of cat and mouse’ to block spoofed network activity by those looking to game the anticipated IO token airdrop. The approach, known as a ‘sybil attack,’ aims to magnify an individual’s eligibility for rewards such as airdrops.

Various techniques were reportedly used to falsify the network’s GPU activity, including virtualized GPUs for sale by ‘bad actors’ and a user ID leak which was exploited to display fake nodes on the project’s explorer.

The number of nodes on the network was recently reported to be over half a million. Shadid explains that after running tests, io.net identified 120,000 verified nodes. However, this number also turned out to have been gamed. The post-mortem settles on a final number of around 12,000 ‘clusterable, verifiably active and real GPUs.’

Read more: Martin Shkreli tells reporter to ‘lick my balls,’ New York cancels his crypto event

Disgraced pharma-bro-turned-crypto-antihero Martin Shkreli has been vocal in calling out io.net on its metrics over the past few days. Others have also found it difficult to independently verify the numbers stated.

The Block editor Tim Copeland also pointed out the apparent manipulation of news related to the project on X.

However, others have suggested that Shkreli’s tirade may have an ulterior motive.

The project, which raised $30 million at a billion-dollar valuation last month, describes itself as ‘AI compute-as-a-currency’ and falls into a category known as decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). 

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

The post Solana project CEO says ‘sybil attackers’ gamed metric hoping for airdrop appeared first on Protos.

Convicted pharma fraudster Martin Shkreli told a Daily Beast reporter to “lick my balls” on social media yesterday after the New York Department of Education (DoE) canceled his scheduled crypto talk at a Brooklyn high school.

Students at Brooklyn Tech had invited the former pharmaceutical chief to give a talk on the industry, along with crypto and AI, slated for Tuesday. Shkreli, who served nearly seven years in prison for securities fraud, brought social media attention to the event after telling a reporter that he wasn’t welcome.

“Daily Beast, you’re not invited to the main event,” Shkreli wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “However, I will offer you an exclusive opportunity to lick my balls immediately afterward.”

Hours later, Shkreli’s talk was “indefinitely postponed.” Brooklyn Tech’s crypto club said on Instagram that the DoE saw it as a “bad PR risk.” Shkreli claimed the Department of Justice was tipped off by Noah Kirsch, the Daily Beast journalist. The outlet denies this.

“motherfuckers, i will host a parade in brooklyn on a harambe float in front of the DoE building, you dont know me,” the 40-year-old threatened.

Read more: Criminals seem to have nine lives when it comes to crypto

When it appeared the event was cancelled, Shkreli provided Kirsch with a quote: “’I am not mad. Less work for me is better. I like having fans but I don’t want to do work for them because I am lazy. So it would be good if it was cancelled, but I think we will do it somewhere else, which is bad for me because I am lazy and I said earlier in this quote.’

Shkreli added, “You’re honestly doing me a favour, I put this appearance off for like 6 months, but I do feel bad for those kids.”

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

The post Martin Shkreli tells reporter to ‘lick my balls,’ New York cancels his crypto event appeared first on Protos.

Judge Lewis Kaplan has revoked Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) bail and sent him to jail at Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City. That’s the same jail as Martin Shkreli, the ‘pharma bro’ who illegally raised the price of the life-saving medication Deraprim by 5,000% to price-gouge AIDS patients.

Like Shkreli, criminal prosecutors charged SBF with defrauding investors. Shkreli served more than three years inside the Brooklyn-based federal jail.

Prior to this past weekend, SBF was sitting out his house arrest at his parents’ multi-million dollar house in Palo Alto, California. The court granted him limited liberties like watching Netflix and making phone calls.

He availed himself of those liberties extensively, making over 1,000 phone calls and sending 100 emails, not to mention using VPNs to pseudonymously access the Internet.

Judge Kaplan reasoned that SBF’s various misdeeds — especially using his communication privileges to attempt to influence potential witnesses — warranted jail detention while he awaits trial. Specifically, SBF leaked documents to New York Times reporters in violation of a court order to avoid contact with the press.

SBF indicted for more crimes in jail while awaiting trial

The documents leaked by SBF related to Caroline Ellison, who is set to be a witness at his upcoming trial. It’s a crime to tamper with witnesses in a criminal trial and, unsurprisingly, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against SBF that added additional charges to his October trial.

SBF has pled not guilty to the various charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Department of Justice (DoJ). The charges include multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and violations of US campaign finance laws.

Judge Kaplan acknowledged that Metropolitan Detention Center “is not on anybody’s list of five-star facilities.” However, he rejected the alternative of sending SBF to the more distant Putnam County Correctional Facility.

SBF’s attorneys protested that a staff shortage would reduce his ability to view evidence collected by prosecutors. One of the attorneys, Mark Cohen, says he plans to appeal the decision. Cohen argues that limiting SBF’s ability to communicate with journalists violates his First Amendment rights.

Any jail would likely seem a serious letdown after SBF’s previously lavish lifestyle. The lifestyle included beachfront properties allegedly purchased by FTX for its senior staff.

Read more: SBF leaked diaries to harass Caroline Ellison and derail trial, lawsuit claims

Former inmates describe Sam Bankman-Fried’s jail

His fellow inmates have complained of poor conditions at the jail. These inmates include convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez. Other notable inmates include exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who faces fraud charges for his role in Himalaya Coin.

Hernandez’s lawyer compared conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center to conditions that “prisoners of war” might be forced to endure. Guo’s attorneys called the jail “an extraordinarily dangerous environment.” Public defenders seemed to echo these sentiments by calling the jail “inhumane.”

Issues include staffing shortages and a poor diet that included moldy food. Prisoners and their lawyers have complained of sleep deprivation. An electrical fire cut heat and electricity off at the jail in 2019, causing possible exposure to the frigid temperatures that winter. Maxwell’s lawyers complained of raw sewage leaking into her cell.

The center has also gone into lockdowns to search for contraband weapons. One guard was fired for taking bribes to smuggle drugs inside.

Despite the frequent complaints, Metropolitan Detention Center houses more than 1,600 inmates, while a nearby facility, Manhattan Correctional Center, is closed for renovation.

Some observers predicted that SBF will change his plea to guilty, saying that the jail would be enough to “break anyone.”

Judge Kaplan has scheduled Bankman-Fried’s trial for October 2, 2023. Until then, he will wait inside the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center at Sunset Park.

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 Jailed SBF swaps California mansion for moldy food and raw sewage appeared first on Protos.