"[t]he Delaware-based company that founded this experimental town in 2017 has raised $120 million in investments — including from venture-capital funds backed by the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen — to transform the territory, about twice the size of Monaco, into the most developed start-up city in the world. Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.

A California company offers a Montessori education for approximately 60 students. Security is provided by a private firm of armed guards. An arbitration center staffed by three retired Arizona judges handles dispute resolution. (In order to enter the jurisdiction, I was told I needed to sign an “agreement of coexistence” binding myself to 4,202 pages of rules, violations of which would be subject to the jurisdictional authority of the arbitration center.)"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.708.oULV.u9x6AD71MU2W&smid=tw-share

#Crypto #Crytpocurrencies #Bitcoin #TaxHavens #Honduras #Cyberlibertarianism #Prospera

"This past April, ICIJ’s data team started talking about what kind of numbers the investigation would require to measure the scale of illicit activity in the crypto industry. Talking with analysts and academics, and reading reports from blockchain analytics firms, it quickly became clear that we’d have to set strict parameters. What kind of activity would we want to look at? What time period would we be reviewing? What was the real-world context for these transactions? And which crypto wallet addresses — the equivalent of bank accounts — would we choose as starting points to trace along the blockchains? We soon found the perfect vehicle to explore these questions in Huione Group.

Huione Group, a financial services conglomerate, lies at the nexus of identity theft, human trafficking, scam, fraud and money laundering. As many as 300,000 people are estimated to be working in scam compounds operating from Southeast Asia. On May 1, the U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-money laundering agency, known as FinCEN, singled out Huione Group as a money laundering “concern.” (It has since been severed from the U.S. financial system.) And where was Huione sending its crypto transactions? Centralized crypto exchanges (CEX), the main gatekeepers of crypto trades.

The data team decided to focus our analysis on Huione at one end of the transactions and on centralized exchanges at the other. Two major CEX had pleaded guilty in U.S. federal courts to operating without basic safeguards to prevent money laundering and paid sizable penalties: Binance, the world’s largest exchange, in November 2023 for $4.3 billion; and OKX (formerly known as OKEx), another big exchange, in February of this year for $504 million.

The team pulled numerous datasets from Arkham Intelligence and Tronscan, two free blockchain data sources that provide application programming interfaces (APIs)..."

https://www.icij.org/investigations/coin-laundry/how-icij-traced-hundreds-of-millions-from-huione-group-to-major-crypto-exchanges/

#Crypto #Crytpocurrencies #Bitcoin #Blockchain #CEX