Founder and Majority Owner of Cryptocurrency Exchange Charged with Processing Over $700 Million of Illicit Funds (2024)

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Founder and Majority Owner of Cryptocurrency Exchange Charged with Processing Over $700 Million of Illicit Funds? ›

“As alleged, Bitzlato sold itself to criminals as a no-questions-asked cryptocurrency exchange, and reaped hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of deposits as a result. The defendant is now paying the price for the malign role that his company played in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

For the third year running, Changpeng Zhao, founder and former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, is crypto's wealthiest person. Despite pleading guilty to U.S. money laundering charges in November, CZ, as he's known, is now worth an estimated $33 billion, up from $10.5 billion last year.

FTX and FTX.US crashed due to a lack of liquidity and mismanagement of funds, followed by a large volume of withdrawals from rattled investors. The value of FTT plummeted, taking other coins down with it including Ethereum and Bitcoin, which reached a two-year low on Nov. 9, 2022.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency created and is now the most valuable and well known. It was launched in January 2009 by a computer programmer – or group of programmers – using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto's actual identity has never been verified.

NEW YORK (AP) — Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.

NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors want Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, to serve three years in prison after he pleaded guilty to violating laws against money laundering.

Zhao, who is better known by the moniker “CZ”, also pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering failures and stepped down as CEO. Zhao, 47, is the world's 29th richest person and is worth about $43 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

FTX was a leading cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt in November 2022, amid allegations that its owners had embezzled and misused customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to repay $11 billion.

How was FTX hacked and what was stolen? ›

The thief first struck at 9:22pm on the evening of November 11th, moving 9,500 ETH (then worth $15.5 million) from a wallet belonging to FTX, to a new wallet. Over the next few hours, hundreds of other cryptoassets were taken from the exchange's wallets, in transactions eventually totalling $477 million.

NEW YORK, March 28 (Reuters) - Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a judge on Thursday for stealing $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded, the last step in the former billionaire wunderkind's dramatic downfall.

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* Your $1 worth of Bitcoin will be stored in your Cash App Bitcoin wallet. * You can view your Bitcoin balance and current price at any time in the Cash App. You can also buy, sell, or send your Bitcoin from within the app.

Identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss cofounded cryptocurrency exchange Gemini in 2014; today it processes about $30 million a day in trades. Cameron is Gemini's president; Tyler is CEO.

Bitstamp is a European cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011. It is the world's longest-running cryptocurrency exchange.

David Lee Chaum (born 1955) is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash.

Cryptocurrencies typically use decentralized control as opposed to a central bank digital currency (CBDC). When a cryptocurrency is minted, created prior to issuance, or issued by a single issuer, it is generally considered centralized.