A 24-year-old New York resident has pleaded guilty to acquiring more than $7 million in COVID-19 relief through fraudulent loan applications and misleading investors in a fraudulent initial coin offering during 2018. According to a Tuesday announcement from the United States Department of Justice, Taiwanese national, Justin Cheng — also known as “Justin Jung” — submitted a series of online loan applications accompanied by forged tax and payroll records between May and August of last year. Cheng’s applications featured fraudulent Internal Revenue Service tax and payroll records purporting to document the names of 200 employees earning $1.5 million in monthly …

Boson Protocol, a project that aims to connect physical commerce and smart contracts, has concluded a $25.8 million public token sale ahead of listings on several exchanges, including Bitfinex, Kucoin and Gate.io. With the token sale, Boson has successfully raised $36 million in support of its decentralized commerce platform. The company raised $10 million in March ahead of its public sale, with participation from Outlier Ventures, FBG, TRG Capital, Walsh Wealth Group and several others. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Boson is aiming to create a decentralized commerce platform with minimal arbitration, or a “DEX for physical assets,” according to Justin …

Amid a weekend pump carrying multiple cryptocurrencies higher, Ripple’s XRP looks to be leading the way with a push as high as 30% on the daily — carried on the back of a string of legal victories and rumors of relisting at some exchanges. Where Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) are up merely 2.7% and 3.4%, respectively, on the day, XRP climbed to $1.36 before retreating to $1.32, where it sits at the time of publication. The digital currency is now up 111% on a seven-day basis and a staggering 544% on the year. The recent push has also buoyed …

“A Polkadot project with a difference” says it is restoring trust and simplicity to complex token ecosystems and eliminating the centralized distribution models that can render the power of blockchain technology useless. Polkalokr offers a multi-chain token escrow platform that can be integrated into existing DeFi protocols, ensuring that network participants have full control over how tokens are distributed and treasuries are managed. The project’s goal is to remove human reliance and bring trust to token economies through governance-as-a-service — all while delivering security, scalability and a user-friendly experience. Explaining why Polkalokr is needed, the developers behind this initiative said: …

What started as a joke to celebrate April Fool’s Day has become yet another sign of a frothy, overeager market. A bonding contract designed to sell baseball cap vouchers sold 468 hats in just a few hours, raising over $100,000 and bumping the price to $3,700 per voucher. Solana-based decentralized finance, or DeFi, platform Mango Markets announced the sale on Twitter this morning with the caption “ICO ALERT!” — a twist on the initial coin offerings of yore. According to a blog post, Mango’s “initial cap offering” is all about high fashion. 1/ ICO ALERT! Initial Cap Offering: Presenting the …

With a possible billion-dollar nonfungible token drop and a high-powered, multiproject collaboration in the works, the Ethereum ecosystem may finally be ready to compete with NFT-centric blockchain Flow. In a press release today, Ethereum software developer ConsenSys announced Palm, an environmentally friendly NFT scaling solution. Palm will be a sidechain designed to be “fully connected” to Ethereum, sporting faster settlement times, lower fees and an especially light carbon footprint — a noted bugaboo for artists as of late. Ethereum’s community — one of the chain's advantages over the faster, more efficient rival NFT chain Flow — is also on full …

By the end of 2018, many crypto skeptics had their “I told you so” moment, as many initial coin offerings, or ICOs, failed to deliver on their promises. Between 2017 and 2018, 3,250 projects were launched via ICO and $21.4 billion was collected from investors. But by early 2018, a study revealed that nearly half of 2017’s ICOs had failed — with another 13% considered “semi-failed” — dealing financial blows to coin purchasers anticipating gains. Many projects achieved very high returns initially, only to see coin values fall precipitously thereafter. Related: Did you fall for it? 13 ICO scams that …

Editor’s note Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the final installment of Law Decoded, at least with yours truly at the helm. Though someone may pick this newsletter back up at some point, there are no plans to do so now. Taking advantage of the rose-tinted glasses or maybe the graduation goggles that are in effect for this final newsletter, I will be shaking up the format. As last week’s Law Decoded focused on a few long-standing stories in crypto, this week, I wanted to get thematic. As I will no longer be guiding you through the weekly changes in crypto …

Crypto advocate and internet security pioneer John McAfee faces a number of different criminal charges, based on a new statement from the United States Department of Justice, or DoJ. The department accused McAfee of “conspiracy to commit commodities and securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities and touting fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and substantive wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy offenses stemming from two schemes relating to the fraudulent promotion to investors of cryptocurrencies qualifying under federal law as commodities or securities,” the DoJ’s statement from the Southern District of New York said on Friday. Jimmy Watson Jr. is also listed …

Sohrab Sharma, the co-founder of the notorious celebrity-spruiked initial coin offering of 2017, Centra Tech, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for his leading role in the fraudulent scheme that duped investors out of more than $25 million. Shama had previously pled guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, and mail fraud for material misrepresentations made by him and his co-conspirators to solicit investors to participate in the scheme. United States attorney, Ilan Graff, described Sharma as having “led a scheme to deceive investors by falsely claiming that the start-up he co-founded had developed fully functioning, …

The last bull run of 2017 was defined by the initial coin offering craze, which took a turn for the worse with foreseeable consequences for overvalued projects that had little more than a team and a poorly written white paper. While many useful projects were able to blossom from the ICO era, including Ethereum and others, most have come and gone with the wind, leaving thousands of unwary investors holding on to worthless bags of tokens. A full market cycle later, and there’s now yet another rally that seems to be expanding over multiple sectors of the crypto industry, especially …

Today, the Senate Banking Committee held its first hearing on the nomination of Gary Gensler to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. The role will have major influence on the future of crypto regulation, as the SEC has been a chokepoint for major areas like the status of initial coin offerings, approval of new exchange-traded funds, and crypto firms going public. In his appearance before the committee, however, Gensler was evasive about any specific changes he would make to the SEC's crypto policy. He supported prior decisions, like Bitcoin’s (BTC) exclusion from the SEC’s purview, but dodged any real commitment …