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Man pleads guilty to tax fraud for failing to report $13 million in CryptoPunks sales

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A 45-year-old Pennsylvania man is facing up to six years in prison after failing to disclose the sale of millions of dollars worth of Ethereum blockchain. Created in 2017, the collection is one of the oldest and most valuable brands in the NFT space. At its peak, a single Punk sold for $23.7 million, according to the collection’s website.

During the NFT frenzy, the DOJ statement says Wilcox sold 62 Punks for over $7.4 million in 2021 and another 35 Punks for nearly $5 million in 2022.

It’s unclear how the DOJ discovered the undeclared sales.

CryptoPunks have significantly declined in value since 2022 but are still worth thousands of dollars each. The cheapest Punk is currently on sale for 42.42 Ethereum or $70,000, according to the website. Earlier this month, an anonymous holder sold a Punk for $6 million, $10 million less than they bought it for last year. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Trump’s memecoin enjoys surprise 10% surge after sales lock up is lifted

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President Donald Trump’s personally endorsed memecoin surged over the weekend, despite expectations that its price would tumble as tens of thousands of fresh tokens were released to project insiders.

$Trump, a memecoin launched by Trump in the lead up to his second inauguration, has gained 10% since Friday, when 40 million additional tokens were to be released into circulation. The event, known as a token unlock, was expected to depress the memecoin’s price by increasing its supply but it seems to have had the opposite effect. 

Token unlocks are when a group of people—usually project team members, early investors or advisors—receive their allocated tokens for free or at a lower price after a predetermined amount of time and are allowed to sell them. Token unlocks are a way for project founders to guarantee to investors that they won’t do a rug pull—a common scam in which a memecoin project’s team members dump their holdings at once, tanking the token’s price and leaving investors holding the bag.

The tokens that were released last week were allocated to “creators and CIC digital,” according to the token’s website. While the identity of the token’s creators is unclear, CIC Digital is a company known to be affiliated with Trump. As the $330 million worth of tokens were unlocked, investors feared that these holders would immediately try to turn a profit by dumping the tokens into the market. 

Despite these concerns, the team has not made any significant sales yet, according to crypto analysis firm Chainalysis. “As of 1 p.m. ET on Monday, Chainalysis hasn’t detected any on-chain actions from the creators of $Trump coins,” the firm told Fortune

The token team’s perceived commitment to the project has led to increased confidence in the token’s longevity, leading investors to rush back over the weekend, Dylan Bane, an analyst at research firm Messari, told Fortune. “Because the price hasn’t gone down and a large-scale sale has not occurred, the markets might be pricing in the possibility that the Trump team just chooses to hold on to these tokens,” he said. 

However, this does not mean that the team behind the token won’t ever sell, Bane added. While there were 200 million tokens released for the launch in January, there are staggered unlocks scheduled every few months until 2028, when the total supply of tokens will reach 1 billion. 

“There’s a lot more to be unlocked,” Bane said. “So, if the price goes down, that’s not in the team’s interest since most of their tokens are not unlocked yet.”

Investors’ anxiety with Trump’s memecoin may be justified. The coin’s entry into the market was tumultuous, skyrocketing from $1.21 to $75.35 within its first two days, reaching a total market cap of $14 billion. But the coin’s price began to plummet soon after, and it has lost 90% of its value since Jan. 19. The token’s price now sits at $8.28. 

In the aftermath of the launch, investors lost more than $2 billion, according to an analysis by Chainalysis for The New York Times. Meanwhile, Trump-affiliated entities have produced $350 million in revenue from trading fees and selling the token itself, according to an analysis conducted by the Financial Times

According to the memecoin’s website, two Trump-affiliated entities—CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight—will own 80% of the 1 billion total $Trump tokens once they are all unlocked in 2028. That would mean, at its current price, Trump’s team stands to walk away from the project with a profit in the billions of dollars. 

It’s unclear how much of the token Trump and his family own directly, if at all. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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NEA partner Ann Bordetsky is on a mission to fund AI-first products and startups creating economic empowerment

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Zuckerberg-funded Silicon Valley school to shutter next year

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The Primary School, a tuition-free private school with 543 students co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan, will shutter its doors after roughly a decade in operation.

The school, which has two locations in the San Francisco area, said in a note on its website that it will close after the 2025-2026 academic year. To sustain its legacy, the billionaire couple’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, will make a $50 million investment in the communities the nonprofit serves — East Palo Alto, Belle Haven and the East Bay — over the next few years.

“This was a very difficult decision, and we are committed to ensuring a thoughtful and supportive transition for students and families over the next year,” according to the note, which was posted late Thursday.

Carson Cook, a Primary School spokesperson, had no comment beyond the statement.

Chan, 40, a pediatrician, co-founded the school in 2016 with an “integrated health and education model” to work with families and kids from birth through high school, according to the entity’s tax forms. The nonprofit’s first middle school cohort started in 2023. 

According to the latest tax form, more than 95% of the Primary School’s East Palo Alto students are under-represented minorities. The filing shows it had more than $30 million in assets at the end of June 2023. 

Musk, Ellison

The Primary School isn’t the only such initiative started by billionaires recently. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have all also opened schools over the last several years. 

Musk’s nonprofit, the Musk Foundation, has donated $237 million toward his education venture — a technology-focused primary and secondary school in Austin, with eventual plans for a university. That school, Ad Astra, is partnering with the same company that helped Ellison set up his Hala Kahiki Montessori school in Lanai, Hawaii, the island 98% owned by the Oracle Corp.co- founder. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder, created a network of Montessori-inspired preschools for children in poor communities.  

The Primary School’s closure comes as Zuckerberg, 40, founder of Meta Platforms Inc., makes sweeping changes to his business empire to better align with the Trump administration. He’s appointed longtime Trump allies to his board, including Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White and Dina Powell McCormick, who served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser during his first term.

Zuckerberg also tapped a Republican strategist to serve as chief of global affairs, eliminated Meta’s US fact-checking program, dismantled the company’s hate-speech policies and axed key diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Meta as well as at CZI.

The Primary School has prioritized diversity efforts, conducting an audit in June 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and establishing a DEI task force that fall. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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