Who's the cryptoqueen?

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Over the weekend, crypto influencer BitBoy showed up outside SBF’s house in the Bahamas with one request: let’s talk. The one-time billionaire and founder of FTX wasn’t excited. No one showed up to talk to the influencer holding the phone.

Moving on, today, we ask, why is Sony swallowing the metaverse pill and who is the crypto queen?

The markets were a mixed bag. Bitcoin was at $16,570 levels and Ethereum inched closer to $1,220. Nasdaq fell on gloomy holiday sales forecasts. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended slightly higher.

Did You Hear About The Crypto Queen?

You’ve seen this on Telegram. A mysterious woman pings you. Hey, you want to be friends? If you’re like us, you’ve blocked her and gone about your life. But if you’re naïve (and bored), you listen, yes, why not. She then goes on to tell you she has an extremely lucrative opportunity because you guys are now friends. Of course. This is the oldest phishing scam since Telegram let the world connect to you.

But what if this person wasn’t on Telegram. What if she was a real human?

This story goes back a few years, long before Elon Musk went mainstream. It is one of the most riveting mysteries of modern times. It is a con where one woman made off with $4 billion in crypto. The story starts in 2014.

Invest in this million-dollar idea. The returns are huge. The risks? Minimal. Dressed in expensive clothes and jewellery, Ruja sold investors a dream. OneCoin, a crypto token developed by her, was supposed to be the “Bitcoin Killer”. Soon, FOMO hit. Thousands invested. And three years later, OneCoin and Ruja vanished. Now there’s an international manhunt for Ruja Ignatova.

Ruja is MIA and is on the FBI's most wanted list. She has friends in high places who may have helped her escape. Unfortunately for investors, their money's gone.

But the world’s still intrigued by how Ruja pulled off the ~$4 billion scam. Was she alone? How did she plan the scheme? Who informed her about the investigation? And the biggest question, where is she?

Let’s rewind a bitBorn in Bulgaria in 1980, Ruja was a law graduate who worked for marquee brands such as McKinsey. But things got murky, in 2012, she was convicted of fraud in Germany. A year later, she partnered with the developers behind another crypto called BigCoin. In 2014, she launched OneCoin with Sebastian Greenwood (now in prison) and labelled it as the “future of money that will overtake BTC”.

The OneCoin storyWe have seen a fair bit of crypto cons. But OneCoin was like no other. For starters, OneCoin had no blockchain, no ledger, and no decentralised systems. Everything was manufactured. So it wasn’t really a rug pull, because the token didn’t even exist.

ICYMI You can read more about rug pulls here.

Ruja and her team sold OneCoin as an MLM. Let’s break it down:

1. People were nudged to sell “educational material” on crypto.

2. The courses were priced between $115 and $30,000.

3. Sellers got OneCoin tokens and commissions.

Typical of pyramid schemes, investors were asked to sell more courses and “earn” additional OneCoin. Ruja promoted OneCoin via international events. By 2016, OneCoin’s market cap was almost 50% of Bitcoin.

Here's a video of Ruja at the OneCoin London event:

Then the backlash Remember, this was June 2016. Crypto wasn’t mainstream. But blockchain experts questioned why OneCoin had no public blockchain. They found out that Ruja fudged OneCoin’s price manually.

The experts sounded off investors. OneCoin was unable to offer an explanation, so law enforcement took action. By April 2017, countries such as Bulgaria, China, Germany, India, and Italy cracked down on OneCoin. Word must have reached Ruja because she got cautious. She skipped an event for European OneCoin promoters in Portugal. And two weeks later, on October 25, 2017, she fled from Bulgaria to Greece.

But OneCoin continuedRuja’s brother Konstantin ran the token after she vanished and he was eventually arrested. But his sister is still missing.

FYI British journalist Jamie Bartlett’s podcast series with the BBC on Ruja is mad good.

Sony Dreams Of Virtual Sheep

Facebook, sorry, Meta’s metaverse dream is drowning the stock, its deep losses are forcing the company to lay off staff. Critics are asking, is Metaverse even real? Is it coming? Will people want to put on a headset to live life without legs? Sony rejects the critics. The company recently acquired Beyond Sports, which uses real-world data to produce 3D animation.

Eh, why?What is Sony best known for? The Playstation. Everything is built around the console. The more data it has the more realistic the game. The more realistic the game, the chances of you buying the console increases. In September 2022, Sony made $4.87 billion in the quarter by selling games, consoles and services.

The techTo support that ambition the Japanese company has been going deeper into sports. It bought Hawk-Eye Innovations in 2011. This company’s tech allows pinpointing the position of the ball in cricket, football, basketball, tennis, and others, at any time.

Now take all these, and put them next to Sony’s PlayStation, which has a virtual reality headset too. What do you get? A sports metaverse. And revenue that starts to rival the world’s largest companies. And hardware is where the money’s at. All tech biggies with a hardware play are planning to own a piece of the metaverse. Microsoft’s Xbox fits nicely with its Activision acquisition.

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Who are we? This newsletter’s ambition is to educate (and to entertain). The world of money is changing everyday and we want to help you decode what’s happening in the world of crypto, public markets in the US and India.