EXCLUSIVE: Ex-SafeMoon CTO admits rug pull, details insider exemptions
“As soon as I start asking you to trust me, you shouldn’t.” That was Thomas “Papa” Smith’s pithy summation today of the fundamentally fraudulent nature of SafeMoon, a DeFi protocol whose centralized contract Features allowed a core team to extract tens of millions of dollars from liquidity pools (LP) it had represented as sacrosanct. Smith testified for the third consecutive day in the trial of John Karony, former SafeMoon CEO. Smith, Karony, and SafeMoon creator Kyle Nagy are charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering in connection with SafeMoon, which thrived for just a scant few months in 2021 before evidence of embezzlement emerged. Smith has pleaded guilty to the charges and is cooperating with government prosecutors . This morning, he detailed an array of deceptions and backdoors allegedly used to defraud investors. Prosecutors shared a series of 2021 “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) videos recorded by Karony, Smith, and Ben Phillips, an ...