Draco

Full-time Software Engineer, part-time trader. All in or nothing. Automating life, one line of code at a time. @kaisen_ai

[Draco @Draco_M6]

@bull_genius What app are you using?

[bread.mega @bread_]

Formal request to get tree-map view on DefiLlama.

@0xngmi plz

[Draco @Draco_M6]

@CryptoKaleo Lmao

[Draco @Draco_M6]

locking in profit near $65k resistance here, ~$3k profit. I will see how market consolidates around this region before re-entering long position. I'm trading live at https://t.co/J5Q31AFwZ6 #BTC #Trading #cryptotrading #Crypto

[kirk @OneTrueKirk]

Exciting times in the lending space, lots to learn from:

@MorphoLabs Blue/Metamorpho becoming the go-to for risk managers to operate their own pools
@LiquityProtocol v2 interest rate prioritizing redemptions
@aave v4 implementing a variety of modern features like per-collateral risk premiums, controller based rates
@eulerfinance v2 ultimate comeback story, probably the most modular design
@ajnafi peer to peer lending without oracles
@InverseFinance FiRM/DBR allowing price discovery for interest rates with tokenized borrow rights
@GearboxProtocol margin account for leveraged farming across a wide variety of venues
@CurveFinance Llamalend reversible soft liquidations

And of course our own @CreditGuild, the first oracle free lending pool

Credit v1 is designed with forward compatibility in mind so the market can continue to improve over time. Taking notes and getting inspired by the other projects mentioned above. If you have questions about how Credit or any other protocol works, or ideas to push the lending space forward, always keen to discuss here or on Discord

[@bytes032.xyz @bytes032]

im never gonna use etherscan again

[SMG @specialmech]

A builder-searcher paid 16.8024 ETH to build block 17195495 so they could arbitrage 36 different Uniswap v3 pools. All this happened in just 12 seconds. Still think LPs are not getting rekt?

[Xremlin @xGremlin]

People secured 5 figure airdrops in the past year alone:

• Optimism: $50,000
• Arbitrum: $10,000
• Blur: $8,000

The next $10k opportunities: zkSync, L0, and Starknet.

I've prepared a FREE INTERACTIVE DASHBOARD & GUIDES with everything you need to qualify for 3 airdrops🧵

[John Reed Stark @JohnReedStark]

Why US DOJ Will File, Or Has Already Filed Under Seal, a Binance-Related Criminal Indictment

Having worked in the US SEC Enforcement Division for almost 20 years and managed many US SEC-DOJ joint prosecutions, IMHO, there exist a litany of indicators that US DOJ will file, or has already filed under seal, a Binance-related criminal indictment.

Money laundering involves disguising financial assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them. To me, the CFTC and SEC complaints read more like criminal indictments, replete with allegations of fraud, deception, obstruction of justice and money laundering.

CFTC Action

The US CFTC filed a 76-page complaint against Binance charging Changpeng Zhao and three entities that operate the Binance platform with numerous violations of CFTC statutes and regulations. The complaint also charges Samuel Lim, Binance’s former chief compliance officer, with aiding and abetting Binance’s violations.

The CFTC provides evidence that Lim knew certain Binance customers "are here for crime." The CFTC alleged that Lim assured a regulator about compliance practices at Binance that he later admitted in an internal message to a colleague were a ruse. The CFTC also accused Lim of helping customers circumvent compliance controls, including advising that a user engage in potentially illicit activity to avoid being flagged.

The CFTC also alleged that the defendants helped US VIP customers evade Binance's compliance controls, including troubleshooting for U.S.-based customers identified through their IP addresses by letting them know their IP addresses were the sole reason they couldn't use Binance's larger, global platform.

For example, Lim said in a July 2019 conversation regarding customers that should have been "restricted" from accessing Binance's platform that, "they can use [a virtual private network] but we are not supposed to tell them that ... it cannot come from us ... but we can always inform our friends/third parties to post (not under the umbrella of Binance) hahah." https://t.co/FjgDJaRhnS

The CFTC further alleges that Binance, Zhao and Lim conducted certain activities outside the US designed to avoid CFTC regulation, such as instructing US customers as well as other customers as to how to evade Binance’s compliance controls. https://t.co/sKHmoWbuhR

SEC Emergency Asset Freeze Action

Like the CFTC action, the 136-page complaint filed by the SEC alleges that certain Binance entities and Zhao co-mingled billions of dollars in customer funds and secretly sent them to a separate company controlled by Zhao, enriching themselves by billions of US dollars while placing investors’ assets at significant risk. https://t.co/NLd70GgEJ5

Some of the allegations against Binance echoed the behavior that brought down FTX, leading to criminal charges against SBF for using customers’ deposits to as his own private piggy bank.

For example, the SEC alleges that the bank account of Merit Peak, a trading firm controlled by Zhao, has received more than $20B, that included customer funds both from the Binance platform and the platform of https://t.co/XTbtqFFjrw. Merit Peak then transferred the "vast majority of those funds" to an unidentified company, "in transfers that appear to relate to the purchase of Binance's bespoke dollar-linked crypto-token BUSD." https://t.co/l7qryQ4t9S

The SEC also lleges that Zhao used a firm he owns called Sigma Chain to artificially inflate Binance's value by conducting extensive market manipulation operations, sometimes against customers, and that the crypto platform was sending billions of dollars of investor assets to another company Zhao owned called Merit Peak Ltd.

In addition, the SEC alleges that Zhao has allowed many high-value U.S. customers continued access to its main platform at https://t.co/g9knq29bJ7 despite publicly claiming that those customers could not access the main platform.

Like the CFTC action, the SEC also alleges that Zhao designed, implemented and engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.

Among other things, the SEC alleges that, while Zhao and Binance publicly claimed that U.S. customers were restricted from transacting on https://t.co/g9knq29bJ7, in stark contrast, Zhao and Binance subverted their own controls to secretly allow high-value U.S. customers to continue trading on the https://t.co/g9knq29bJ7 platform.

As part of the SEC’s emergency motion, the SEC seeks a range of extreme remedies including an order freezing the assets of Zhao-controlled BAM companies and an order directing the defendants to repatriate billions of dollars worth of assets held for the benefit of Zhao-controlled BAM Trading's/BAM Management’s customers. Seeking such emergency relief typically means that the SEC believes they can convince a judge right now, that the defendants have committed fraud and that investor funds are at risk.

The SEC Accounting Declaration

The SEC’s Binance emergency action evidences a cryptoverse that is not the Wild West but more akin to a Walking Dead post-apocalyptic anarchy.

For example, Binance and Zhao allegedly used Silvergate and Signature banks to move fiat and crypto among a wide-range of Zhao controlled companies. https://t.co/shVan4GHgd

Evidence organized by its accounting expert (set forth in a declaration at https://t.co/rxcIuUR12V) describes some remarkably inculpatory asset transfers, including:

-$11M to Simpson Marine (S.E.A.) Pte Ltd. which appears to be a high-end Hong Kong yacht brokerage;

-$54.7M in withdrawals from Signature Bank to INSURED AIRCRAFT TITLE SERVICE LLC, an Oklahoma-based private airplane title and escrow company;

-$424M from Coinbase (also under SEC scrutiny); and

- $318M from Alameda Research and $1.5B to Alameda Research (already charged criminally).

Per AML expert Alison Jimenez, “The only thing missing is a #Lambo purchase.” https://t.co/P8iNreZW9f

In addition, the SEC identifies dozens of Binance accounts under the beneficial control of Zhao. Many of these accounts show transactions between various Zhao-controlled entities, apparently used almost interchangeably.

For example, the SEC alleges that $12 billion was sent to Zhao and $162 million to Singapore companies controlled by a back office Binance official identified as Guangying Chen with no obvious connection to Binance in their name. The SEC says that the majority of the funds sent to Zhao and Chen are now in accounts “offshore” i.e. beyond US borders.

Obstruction of Justice

Obstruction of justice broadly refers to actions by individuals that illegally prevent or influence the outcome of a government proceeding.

The CFTC alleged that following instructions from Zhao, Lim created a policy that instructed employees working with VIP customers to promptly notify them of law enforcement inquiries concerning their accounts. Per one email:

"VIP team is to contact the user through all available means (text, phone) to inform him/her that his account has been frozen or unfrozen. Do not directly tell the user to run, just tell them their account has been unfrozen and it was investigated by XXX. If the user is a big trader, or a smart one, he/she will get the hint," the instructions allegedly read." https://t.co/FjgDJaRhnS

Per the CFTC, Zhao devised a secret plot to instruct U.S.-based VIP customers to evade Binance’s compliance controls and instructing Binance employees to ensure all communications about their control subversion took place over applications that facilitated the automatic destruction of evidence. https://t.co/sKHmoWbuhR

Binance allegedly offered special services for any customer targeted by law enforcement. Per the CFTC, according to a policy titled “For management of LE requests for information and funds transfer,” created by Lim based on directions from Zhao, Binance instructed its VIP team:

“[A]t point of [account] freeze [based on a request from a law enforcement agency] and immediately after the unfreeze [which would occur 24 hours after the account freeze]. VIP team is to contact the user through all available means (text, phone) to inform him/her that his account has been frozen or unfrozen. Do not directly tell the user to run, just tell them their account has been unfrozen and it was investigated by XXX. If the user is a big trader, or a smart one, he/she will get the hint."

Binance even went so far as to use Signal’s auto-delete function to communicate, even after Binance received document requests from the CFTC and after Binance purportedly distributed document preservation notices to its personnel.

For instance, Zhao had the following exchange with an employee who would ultimately become Binance’s head of institutional sales:

“VIP team member: Hi CZ . . . I went through list of affected API clients, it includes a number of large strategic accounts including [a Chicago-headquartered trading firm] who is currently is a top 5 client and 12% of our volume.

Zhao: Give them a heads up to ensure they don’t connect from a us Ip. Don’t leave anything in writing. They have non us entities. Let’s also make sure we don’t hit the biggest market makers with that email first. Do you have signal?”

Looking Ahead

The SEC states in its Memorandum of Support that, “It has also been widely reported that Binance and Zhao are under investigation by criminal authorities in the United States." The SEC is obviously working with criminal prosecutors and FBI agents but reveals no other information.

Neither the CFTC or SEC case intensely focus on money laundering. IMHO, that is the prosecutorial space that has been carved out and reserved for a US DOJ criminal prosecution relating to Binance.

My take is that US DOJ is working with the SEC, CFTC and multiple informants/whistleblowers, and the next axe to fall is the filing, or unsealing of, Binance-related criminal charges. Fail not at your peril.

[Jas Singh @TheJasSingh]

People in their 20s are making $240,000+ a year.

Only using ChatGPT…

Here are 7 ChatGPT Plugins you can use to start your own business:

[Conks @conksresearch]

The entire U.S. Treasury market visualized

[LilMoonLambo @LilMoonLambo]

when you lose all your money on NFTs and have to get a job:

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

🚨 If you're using Cloudflare for your web3 product, stop what you're doing right now.

You NEED to:

1. Rotate the Global API Key for all your accounts

2. Remove all accounts added to your Cloudflare unless you rotated their Global API Key in step 1

https://t.co/z913LMCc85

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

If you're reading this in the future & think your (web3) frontend may be compromised via Cloudflare Workers, esp. if you were around in 2021, find ppl who grok the the threat:
@coinspect
@randlabs
@HalbornSecurity
@calif_io
@julianor
@mxmauro
@AndrewMohawk
@tayvano_ (me)

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Chemists give GPT-4 access to chemical databases & control of off-the-shelf lab robotics to create an "Intelligent Agent system capable of autonomously designing, planning & executing complex scientific experiments."

They find it exciting... and worrying. https://t.co/JhRcyxuW3g

[PeckShield Inc. @peckshield]

We need to clarify that the root cause is due to misconfigured yUSDT, not related to @AaveAave. https://t.co/XjI9UhbOZf

[OtterSec @osec_io]

.@iearnfinance was just hacked for over $10M. Here's what we know. 🧵

[samczsun @samczsun]

Block 16964664: A user managed to drain five MEV bots by exploiting a bug in mev-boost-relay.

Here's the block: https://t.co/ruSz8YzAJR
Here's the user: https://t.co/VY4gpmX0L8
Here's the patch: https://t.co/TPO80i3dz5
Here's the longer explanation:

[Lorenzo Green 〰️ @mrgreen]

Replace Siri with ChatGPT setup instructions:
Step 1: Install https://t.co/xCoyYksGc2
Step 2: Enter your OpenAI API key (https://t.co/drUwaw8f1P)
Step 3: Add HeyGPT to your home screen.

Built by: @mckaywrigley (thank you!)

[BlockSec @BlockSecTeam]

1/ @samczsun explained that the attacker exploited the vulnerability in mev-boost-relay to drain MEV bots. After digging into the attack, we have two more findings. First, the attacker used a honeypot tx to lure MEV bots. Second, the honeypot tx has a self-protected mechanism.