Tornado Cash Founders Charged With Money Laundering | Friend.tech Craze

Founders helped North Korea launder money, prosecutors say.

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Nina Bambysheva Senior Reporter, Forbes Money & Markets
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Steven Ehrlich Director, Forbes Digital Assets
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ETHEREUM PRIVACY TOOL FOUNDERS CHARGED WITH MONEY LAUNDERING

U.S. prosecutors charged Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, two founders of Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer that enables users to facilitate anonymous transactions, with allegedly laundering more than $1 billion, including hundreds of millions for the Lazarus Group, the sanctioned North Korean cybercrime organization.

Charges in the indictment, filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York and unsealed Wednesday, include conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

The third cofounder of the platform, Alexey Pertsev, was arrested last August in the Netherlands over alleged money laundering charges.

THE FRIEND.TECH MONEY MACHINE

Meet crypto’s new viral app—friend.tech. Touted as “the marketplace for your friends,” it lets users buy and sell “shares” (now called “keys”) of their favorite X (formerly known as Twitter) personalities in exchange for access to private chatrooms with them.

The app, launched on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, attracted more than 100,000 users in less than two weeks after its launch surpassed popular decentralized protocols including Uniswap and MakerDAO by revenue and fees, according to data aggregator DeFi Llama.

Multiple reports suggested that personal information of more than 100,000 of its users was leaked but the team behind the app refuted them, saying the information came from scraping its public API. “It’s like saying someone hacked you by looking at your public Twitter feed,” friend.tech said in an X post.

CURRENT PRICE OF TOP 5 COINS (7-Day % Change)

Coin

Price

Percent Change

Bitcoin (BTC)

$25,961

0.7%

Ether (ETH)

$1,647

1.2%

Tether (USDT)

$1

0%

Binance Coin (BNB)

$218

0.3%

XRP (XRP)

$0.5

3.4%

Source: Forbes Digital Assets. Prices as of 2:33 p.m. on August 25, 2023.

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COINBASE ACQUIRES STAKE IN CIRCLE

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has bought an undisclosed stake in Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin. Under the new arrangement, USDC revenue will continue to be shared based on the amount of tokens held on each platform, and additionally the two will now “equally share in interest income generated from the broader distribution and usage of USDC,” the companies said in a statement Monday.

The two companies also said they will close down the Centre Consortium, a governance organization for USDC, as they now see “regulatory clarity” on stablecoins.

Exclusive Interview: Congressman French Hill Sees Urgency In Congress To Pass Crypto Legislation

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