FTX Sues SBF's Mom and Dad

Dear Bankless Nation,

SBF is paying lawyers a lot of money to avoid decades in prison, but now even his parents are getting swept into lawsuits related to the FTX collapse.

For our weekly recap, we dig into:

1. FTX sues SBF's mom and dad
2. Crypto-critical Senator charged with corruption
3. ETH's next big upgrade may be delayed
4. Friend.tech copycat picks up steam
5. Optimism sells (and airdrops) more tokens

- Bankless team

📅 Weekly Recap

1. FTX sues SBF's mom and dad

FTX is getting serious as it looks to claw back creditor funds from SBF's web of corruption. Its next target? SBF's mom and dad.

This week, FTX sued Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, accusing them of using their “access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves,” according to a report in The New York Times.

The allegations suggest that mom and dad were getting more than the annual Christmas fruit basket; the suit says they were "gifted" $10 million and that the exchange purchased them a $16.4 million mansion in the Bahamas. Furthermore, dad was pulling a $200k per year salary for helping facilitate loans for FTX employees, though he wasn't so psyched about that salary after reportedly expecting to get paid $1 million per year for the role.

Lawyers for Bankman and Fried told The Times that FTX’s claims were “completely false.”

2. Crypto-critical Senator charged with corruption

Crypto holds plenty of critics in the U.S. Senate, and while plenty there love to detail how crypto is obviously just a den of thieves and scammers, they seem to have a tough time recognizing the criminals in their midst.

This week, Senator Bob Menendez, a long-time critic of Bitcoin, was charged with corruption and bribery. The Democrat from New Jersey allegedly was accepting gold bars, cash and mortgage payments in exchange for favoring a trio of wealthy businessmen in his state.

“From at least 2018 up to and including in or about 2022, Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menendez's power and influence,” the Friday indictment read.

Menendez faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

Menendez was a critic of Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project and was also the co-sponsor of the Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador (ACES) Act, which looked to investigate how El Salvador's adoption of bitcoin as legal tender could create risks for the country.

Thanks for keeping us all safe, Senator.

3. ETH's next big upgrade may be delayed

This month, we marked one year since The Merge, one of the Ethereum dev community's biggest technical achievements. Then, in April, the Shapella upgrade went live, allowing withdrawals from the Beacon chain for the first time.

Never one to rest on its laurels, Ethereum still has big plans ahead, but the timing of those plans may be shifting. This week, in a meeting of Ethereum's core devs, the Ethereum Foundation's Tim Beiko discussed the timing for the upcoming Dencun launch.

Dencun rolls out a number of features aimed at making it cheaper to transact on Ethereum's Layer 2 networks.

Per The Block's report

[Beiko] further pointed out that if the developer team doesn’t introduce Dencun on a public testnet before Devconnect, an Ethereum-centric developer conference slated for November 2023, the mainnet activation of Dencun might not occur this year — which would be a departure from earlier projections. “If we don’t launch a [public] testnet before DevConnect, it’s probably unlikely we can go live on the mainnet before the Christmas holidays,” Beiko said, suggesting that the Dencun upgrade might only be realized in 2024 if not introduced on public testnet by November.

4. Friend.tech copycat picks up steam

In what has always been a very common trend for tech in general, when one app or project achieves breakout success, the copycats pile in immediately. This week, activity poured into one such clone called Post.Tech, which sucked up more than $1.8 million in deposits in a surge of activity this past Thursday.

While Friend.Tech boasts some legitimacy thanks to its VC backers, others on Crypto Twitter were a bit more skeptical about Post.Tech.

5. Optimism sells (and airdrops) more tokens

This week, Optimism issued its 3rd community airdrop, sending qualifying users more than 19 million OP tokens worth $27 million. But just days after the airdrop, Optimism made another move that attracted some criticism.

The Optimism Foundation announced that they were selling 116 million tokens, some $159 million worth of $OP, to a number of private market buyers for an undisclosed sum. Critics poked at the project for unloading such a substantial sum of tokens without greater community input or consultation.

📺 Bankless Weekly Roll-Up

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• PayPal Brings PYUSD Stablecoin to Venmo
• 'Pirate Nation' Studio Raises $33 Million to Build Fully On-Chain Games
• After Failed Bid to Reclaim Namesake Company, Ben 'Bitboy' Armstrong Asks Fans for Cash
• Grayscale Investments Applies to Offer Ethereum Futures ETF
• Police Seize Bitcoin Mining Machines in Venezuelan Prison Bust