Binance runs their own bridge-esque setup which produces Binance-Peg tokens. These are tokens on a range of non-ETH blockchains backed by ERC20 tokens stored on ETH in a specific wallet. The process is described here. The wallet on ETH is here. BUSD on BSC/BNB Smart Chain — the geth-fork chain…

Besides being the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by market volume, Binance also operates several “blockchains” (the need for parenthesis will become apparent shortly) which on the surface appear to operate as normal. The BNB Beacon Chain provides governance for the ecosystem described here. It is a Cosmos-derived project with heavy…

tl;dr: DeFi cannot be permissionless, allow arbitrary innovation and comply with any meaningful regulations. You can only choose two of those properties. If you accept a limited form of innovation you can have two-and-a-half of them. Fundamental results in logic and computer science impose a trade-off on any permissionless system’s…

3AC sent about $100 million to BitMEX in early November 2021. This flow and surrounding wallets are pretty exceptional: $70 million disappears into BitMEX Transfer patterns match known 3AC wallets Large flows with known 3AC wallets Final transfer is 1AM SGT on Friday 17th June We know they traded on…

Circle issues USDC. Generally USDC is accepted to have proper backing, KYC their clients sensibly, and just all around work “fine.” What we are going to show here is that while those things are not problems some of the flows are “weird.” This explores a single example focused around address…

Canonically a stablecoin is only issued in return for fiat currency. Everyone knows that rule is not followed 100% of the time in crypto. Here we are going to look, in depth, at not-for-fiat transactions between Tether and Celsius. There are also direct transfers but those are boring. tl;dr: We…

Let’s go through how a stablecoin works. Not the whole “what backs this thing?” question. The “boring” mechanics of operating a stablecoin. Spoiler alert: it is not boring. Here we de-anonymize a large wallet and put a person’s name, with specific dates, next to public records corresponding to large USD…

Benford’s Law describes how the first (and 2nd, 3rd, etc) digits of naturally occuring numbers should be distributed. Below we will go a little bit deeper but the key point is that this “law” is used to detect frauds quite often and such evidence is even admissible in court sometimes. …

tl;dr FTX/Alameda minted nearly all the USDT-on-TRON and operate as something like a central bank or reserve manager for a shadow East Asian USD payment system. We provide convincing evidence from novel on-chain analysis that shows how a real, albeit mostly-not-kosher, crypto use case works. …