Criminal Pursuit
“Criminal Pursuit” – a cartoon that illustrates how commonplace the criminal conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried and other nefarious characters has become in the crypto industry.
It would be nice to think that after this sorry issue, the crypto industry has now washed out the fraudsters. Yet, the sad fact is that there are numerous other founders/CEOs in the industry that are currently on the run or have a high chance of being convicted (e.g. founders or executives at Terra, Bitzlato, Three Arrows Capital, SafeMoon).
Law enforcement and regulatory bodies seem to believe it is a nature of the industry, while potential consumers look on with a mixture of horror and glee at the dumpster fire.
For those that want to make changes to the industry, there are solutions that we could start to develop as best practices.
For example, a common fraud is misuse of consumer funds, which could be addressed by using the industry’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) technology to manage a public ledger that provides proof of funds.
DAOs are already used in the industry to manage the treasuries of many of the protocols and exchanges like Kraken, which offer Proof of Reserves audits to their consumers to prove the balances that Kraken holds are backed by real assets.
It is time the industry used its technology to help build trust, so bad actors have less room for maneuver.
