- Joined
- Jul 27, 2020
The Curious Case of the Staff Buy-In
Ethan Ralph: "We got support from the staff here, we got a little buy-in from the staff, you know what I mean? 'Buy-in', it's just a figure of speech."
Narrator: "It wasn't."
In this third LBRY post, I will be covering the interactions between LBRY Inc and Ethan Ralph on the LBRY ecosystem over the past two months. I'll also be following up on the controversy surrounding Ethan's infamous gaffe - partially reproduced above, then fully later - where he stated that LBRY Inc has given him a "buy-in", as well as refuting his attempt to walk that statement back by going over two interestingly timed transactions.
Post 1 / Post 2
In my last post about Ethan's entanglements with LBRY staff, I described how he'd used a secret wallet (bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z) to hide a payment of 2004 LBC made to him by LBRY staff. I discovered the existence of this wallet because Ethan, in his carelessness, used the same unique exchange deposit address for both the secret wallet and the primary wallet associated with his Odysee account, demonstrating that both wallets belonged to the same person. This exchange deposit address subsequently became defunct when that exchange, Bittrex, stopped allowing American users to trade LBC.
On June 28th, Ethan cashed out 10,000 LBC, allowing me to discover his new exchange deposit address. This was the first time he'd cashed out using his main wallet since the end of Bittrex's LBC support, so this transaction was highly informative, allowing me to discover the new deposit address ID: bb2AJWzT5dQ5AtmJKtiZskpcyWxYWEBDVp.
Here are the transactions associated with that deposit address:
These transactions can be broadly classified into three categories: Ethan cashing out with his main wallet (6,000 LBC / $138; 10,000 LBC / $170), Ethan cashing out using a secret wallet (57,800 LBC, 500 LBC / $1516), and a direct deposit from LBRY staff (9,460 LBC / $1854).
The Primary Wallet
The first of these categories - cash-outs from the wallet associated with Ethan's Odysee account - needs little explanation, and I have not observed him receiving many noteworthy large transfers from LBRY staff on his main wallet, so I'm going to mostly gloss over these transactions for now other that noting their utility in identifying this new deposit address as Ethan's. The single exception is one 1000 LBC transaction from Tom Zarebczan's staff account (worth around $2
:
There is really only one point that merits actual discussion regarding these transactions: on a recent livestream, Ethan discussed how he has been farming referrals for 8 LBC each. Normally, there is a referral cap of 20 users per person, but Ethan appears to have had this restriction removed from his account, as he described performing a batch of over 160 referrals in one day. This caused me to realize that a bunch of transactions I mentioned being unable to attribute in a previous post are all multiples of 8, and thus likely to be the result of these uncapped referral rewards.
Here is "well-known Nazi" Ethan Ralph redeeming 186 referrals at once for a total of 1488 LBC, showing the cap is removed:
Now then, here are the two transactions where he cashed out with his primary wallet, with Ethan's known wallet bYwaDEmBruqupqxoWYi7KkUV7iUReoFNr2 as the outbound source:
The Secret Wallet
The next category, comprising the 57,800 and 500 LBC transactions, is a lot more interesting. Both of these transactions were cashed out from bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z, the very same secret wallet that Ethan previously used to receive 2004 LBC from LBRY staff, as outlined at length in Post 2.
Viewing this wallet, it is immediately apparent that the 57,800 and 500 LBC deposits were both transferred in as the 58,300 LBC transaction seen immediately above the 2004 LBC transaction:
The 500 LBC transfer to Ethan's exchange deposit address, made about 10 minutes before the 57,800 LBC deposit, was likely a test Ethan performed to be sure that he had the right address copied to his clipboard so that a typo wouldn't cost him the entire 58,300.
Unsurprisingly, this 58,300 LBC came directly from bG1fEEqDVepDy3AbvM8outQ3FQUu76aDot, the labeled LBRY staff account that has previously contributed LBC to Ethan:
Yes, that's right: LBRY Inc has seen fit to slip almost 60,000 LBC in institutional funding to Ethan Ralph using a secondary wallet. One might even go so far as to say they "bought in", to quote Ethan himself:
Transcribed:
"We got support from the staff here, we got a little buy-in from the staff, you know what I mean? 'Buy-in', it's just a figure of speech. Uhh...(nervous laughing), before people say anything else...but yeah, it is a collaborative effort, uhh, so..."
But why exactly did LBRY Inc send these LBC to Ethan? They "bought in", but what exactly were they buying? Even with the value of LBC in the dumpster, this transaction is still disproportionately valuable compared to their past contributions to him, so it must have been something beyond the usual. The answer to that question lies in the date of this transaction: June 24th.
23:30 UTC is 7:30 PM ET. Six hours prior to the transaction being sent, at 1:30 PM ET, Ethan made this tweet:
Tweet / https://archive.is/2nKTV
Odysee staff sending 58,300 LBC to Ethan's secret wallet mere hours after he publicly floated the idea of keeping the Killstream on Odysee permanently is unlikely to be a coincidence. Indeed, the timing and magnitude of this transaction combine to suggest it was a payment made in exchange for live broadcast exclusivity, and it was only a few days later we got the "buy-in" gaffe.
Ethan now mentions that the Killstream is exclusively on Odysee at least once per stream, and has also mentioned it on Twitter as contributing to his early access to fiat hyperchats:
Tweet / https://archive.is/spZ3o
He didn't do a very good job of keeping the wallet secret, either. In addition to the repeated failure of operational security whereby he again used the same unique exchange deposit address for his known wallet and his secret wallet (the same mistake he made with Bittrex), he also accidentally used the secret wallet to fund the stream claim for July 16th's Tequila Sunrise episode:
This transaction alone constitutes indisputable proof of two things: 1) bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z, which received the 58,300 institutional LBC from LBRY staff, belongs to Ethan Ralph, and 2) Ethan Ralph does not understand LBRY as well as he claims he does. It also further underscores that bb2AJWzT5dQ5AtmJKtiZskpcyWxYWEBDVp is Ethan's new deposit address because we now have two independently confirmed Ethan wallets depositing LBC into it.
Ethan has been forced to resort to simultaneously asserting that my findings are all made up and stating that everything I describe is obvious and clearly visible to everyone at a glance so writing it up is no accomplishment at all. Expect this type of "Schrodinger's Cope" to intensify in response to this post's revelations.
The Exchange
At this point, I found myself wondering exactly which exchange Ethan was using to cash out now that Bittrex (USA) was no longer an option. He'd mentioned CoinEx in the past, but we've already shown that his words are unreliable, and since I wanted to know for sure I set out to determine which exchanges fit with the pattern of trading I was observing.
Generally, the way exchanges work is that once you deposit crypto, a bunch of deposit addresses pool deposits together and pass the coins down to a central hot wallet belonging to the exchange. It was my hope, then, that I could look one hop down from Ethan's deposits and get a list of other wallets transferring LBC to the same wallet...these would include other users' deposit addresses on the same exchange.
I hoped to use other users' exchange deposit metadata to find some older transaction dates that would give me a sense of how long Ethan's exchange has been trading in LBC to aid in identifying the exchange. LBRY adds and removes exchanges pretty frequently, so finding a very old transaction would mean the exchange must have been available throughout, greatly culling the list of possibilities.
Fortunately, this approach allowed me to quickly find another user's deposit address. I'm not going to type out the address of a random person with no connection to Ethan aside from random proximity, but will show the deposit history in a screenshot:
Specifically, here we see the earliest and the most recent deposits this user has made to the exchange (as of the drafting of this message). Thus, the exchange must be one that has had an active LBC market on both July 31st, 2020, and July 24th, 2021. The source code for LBRY's website is maintained on a public Github repository, so we can view the commit history for their "Supported Exchanges" page to see which exchanges could meet these two criteria.
Here is the list of active exchanges from July 31st, 2020:
github.com
Bittrex
CoinEx BTC / USDT
Upbit
VCC
Coinspot
Coindeal
Here is the list of active exchanges from July 24th, 2021:
github.com
Bittrex - International Only, US Trading Disabled (USD, ETH, USDT)
MXC
Lbank / USDT
Hotbit / USDT
CoinEx / USDT
BigONE / USDT
The intersection of these lists contains two entries: Bittrex (international only) and CoinEx. Thus, we can conclude that Ethan is indeed using CoinEx as his new exchange, and has used it to cash out 58,300 LBC ($1516) from his secret wallet and 16,000 LBC ($30 from his primary wallet, for a total of $1824 USD cashed out between these two wallets.
The Direct Deposit
Now then, all that's left to discuss is the final transaction; though it's chronologically the earliest, I've saved it for last because this transaction is far and away the most salacious discovery that I've made during the entire investigation process across all three posts. Here is what the transaction looks like:
What you're looking at is a transaction directly from LBRY Inc's primary hot wallet to Ethan Ralph's exchange deposit address. This is a manual transfer from a member of LBRY staff: there is simply no way to redeem reward codes or referral bonus rewards directly to an exchange deposit address without using an Odysee-synced wallet to first receive the LBC in question. That this step did not take place is proof that a LBRY staffer performed the transfer, and therefore that the staffer knew that the 9,460 LBC was not being sent to Ethan's own wallet but rather to an exchange. In other words, they knew that these institutional funds would not be invested back into Ethan's channel, but would instead be immediately converted to USD(T) without ever doing anything to grow the ecosystem.
That's an especially interesting finding in light of the fact that in the SEC case court documents, LBRY Inc admits to hiring a market maker, Altonomy, to maintain liquidity on the exchanges by actively filling both buy and sell orders. It turns out they've discussed their partnership with Altonomy publicly as well:
Source / https://archive.is/C6g5L
Source / https://archive.is/U8flU
This means that not only did a LBRY staffer knowingly send LBC directly to Ethan's exchange deposit address, they did so fully aware that the resulting sell order would likely be filled by Altonomy using cash raised by filling buy orders (selling the LBC LBRY Inc has repeatedly loaned them, as discussed in the above overview) - in other words, using LBRY Inc institutional cash. Though there's no way to be positive the buyer on the other end of Ethan's sale was Altonomy, it's probable, and so for all intents and purposes, LBRY Inc likely just paid him in cash with extra steps.
And what was the purpose of this transaction, sent on May 2nd? One can only speculate, but it bears acknowledgement that May 3rd was the original launch date for Tequila Sunrise before Ethan decided to no-show without warning the morning of the launch:
Tweet / https://archive.is/8tyUP
In any case, we can safely discard Odysee's false claim from two weeks later on May 14th that their sponsorship of Ethan is "just floating the hyperchats":
Tweet / https://archive.is/XbGEM
The Conclusion
In spite of his many gaffes where he admits to things that are inconvenient for LBRY, for whatever reason, LBRY staff still holds Ethan Ralph in high regard...but is that outlook reciprocated? No, no it is not.
On 8/3's Killstream, Ethan Ralph became enraged with Blaire White's use of his footage of Chris-chan being arrested. He continued to seethe for several minutes, and then resolved to flag Blaire live on air. It wasn't long before he noticed that Chrissie Mayr was live on Youtube recording a podcast with Blaire, so Ethan began to snipe their stream to confront Blaire live.
When he pulled up the Youtube video, he revealed that he was logged in as Chillstream More, the account that runs the "Youtube Restream" of the Killstream. He used this account to type in Chrissie's chat, an action that was captured on the broadcast. Here is a screenshot of Ethan controlling Chillstream More and using it to interact with Mayr's chat:
This incident is proof that Chillstream More is not an independent user rebroadcasting Ethan's content, as he constantly claims, but just him ban evading and dual-streaming to Youtube, violating his touted exclusivity agreement with Odysee on a nightly basis. Even with all of the clandestine payments LBRY staff have gone out of their way to make, including the 58,300 LBC they paid for Killstream live broadcast exclusivity, Ethan's greed compels him to reach for more, spurning his benefactors at Odysee and continuing to engage with their worst enemy, Youtube.
That's interesting, given that complete divestment from Youtube is a requirement for Ethan receiving any financial support from Odysee, as stated by their official Twitter account:
Tweet / https://archive.is/SSyOn
But Ethan Ralph doesn't care what Odysee says - he's going to do whatever he wants, irrespective of its impact on them or its congruity with their Community Guidelines. Ban evading to stream with Odysee's primary competitor, submitting perjurous DMCAs about other Odysee users, threatening to murder People's Populist Press on an Odysee stream, stating his intention to dox private citizens live on Odysee...it's all on the table for this man. He's even willing to reveal damaging company secrets like the fact that Odysee is profit sharing with its sponsored streamers, something undoubtedly meant to be confidential, solely to puff himself up and make himself look important in front of his detractors.
I wonder when they're going to realize they've made a huge mistake.
Ethan Ralph: "We got support from the staff here, we got a little buy-in from the staff, you know what I mean? 'Buy-in', it's just a figure of speech."
Narrator: "It wasn't."
In this third LBRY post, I will be covering the interactions between LBRY Inc and Ethan Ralph on the LBRY ecosystem over the past two months. I'll also be following up on the controversy surrounding Ethan's infamous gaffe - partially reproduced above, then fully later - where he stated that LBRY Inc has given him a "buy-in", as well as refuting his attempt to walk that statement back by going over two interestingly timed transactions.
Post 1 / Post 2
-Most large transfers from LBRY staff are now coming from their labeled hot wallet (not Tom's unlabeled staff account)
-Previous old transactions that I had mentioned being unable to classify based on existing information were mostly referral code rewards
-Referrals are normally capped at 20 but Ethan has had his limit manually removed
-Ethan cashed out 16,000 LBC from his main wallet to a new exchange deposit address, allowing me to discover that address
-16,000 LBC = $308
-Ethan reused his old secret wallet to receive a 58,300 LBC transfer from LBRY staff
-58,300 LBC = $1516
-This transfer happened mere hours after Ethan tweeted that he was considering keeping the Killstream on Odysee and is likely payment for live broadcast exclusivity
-These 58,300 LBC were almost immediately cashed out to the new exchange deposit address as well
-On July 16th, Ethan accidentally funded a Tequila Sunrise stream claim using his secret wallet instead of his main wallet, conclusively proving that he is the owner of that wallet
-Based on transaction patterns, Ethan's new exchange is CoinEx
-Ethan's unique CoinEx deposit address has one more transaction in addition to those outlined above: a direct deposit of 9,460 from LBRY Inc's primary hot wallet
-This transaction occurred on May 2nd, one day before Tequila Sunrise was originally scheduled to premiere
-This 9,460 LBC transaction is a direct transfer of LBRY's institutional LBC, and is not the result of Ethan using a reward code or redeeming referral bonuses - LBRY staff knowingly manually sent funds to this address
-9460 LBC = $1854
-Odysee has a market maker, Altonomy, buying and selling LBC on all served exchanges using LBRY Inc resources; thus, Ethan likely transacted with Altonomy when he sold these 9,460 LBC, receiving LBRY Inc's institutional USD
-Ethan is demonstrably managing the Youtube stream as well, violating his exclusivity agreement
Total USD values:
Cashing out from his main wallet: $308
Received from LBRY staff: $3370
-Previous old transactions that I had mentioned being unable to classify based on existing information were mostly referral code rewards
-Referrals are normally capped at 20 but Ethan has had his limit manually removed
-Ethan cashed out 16,000 LBC from his main wallet to a new exchange deposit address, allowing me to discover that address
-16,000 LBC = $308
-Ethan reused his old secret wallet to receive a 58,300 LBC transfer from LBRY staff
-58,300 LBC = $1516
-This transfer happened mere hours after Ethan tweeted that he was considering keeping the Killstream on Odysee and is likely payment for live broadcast exclusivity
-These 58,300 LBC were almost immediately cashed out to the new exchange deposit address as well
-On July 16th, Ethan accidentally funded a Tequila Sunrise stream claim using his secret wallet instead of his main wallet, conclusively proving that he is the owner of that wallet
-Based on transaction patterns, Ethan's new exchange is CoinEx
-Ethan's unique CoinEx deposit address has one more transaction in addition to those outlined above: a direct deposit of 9,460 from LBRY Inc's primary hot wallet
-This transaction occurred on May 2nd, one day before Tequila Sunrise was originally scheduled to premiere
-This 9,460 LBC transaction is a direct transfer of LBRY's institutional LBC, and is not the result of Ethan using a reward code or redeeming referral bonuses - LBRY staff knowingly manually sent funds to this address
-9460 LBC = $1854
-Odysee has a market maker, Altonomy, buying and selling LBC on all served exchanges using LBRY Inc resources; thus, Ethan likely transacted with Altonomy when he sold these 9,460 LBC, receiving LBRY Inc's institutional USD
-Ethan is demonstrably managing the Youtube stream as well, violating his exclusivity agreement
Total USD values:
Cashing out from his main wallet: $308
Received from LBRY staff: $3370
In my last post about Ethan's entanglements with LBRY staff, I described how he'd used a secret wallet (bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z) to hide a payment of 2004 LBC made to him by LBRY staff. I discovered the existence of this wallet because Ethan, in his carelessness, used the same unique exchange deposit address for both the secret wallet and the primary wallet associated with his Odysee account, demonstrating that both wallets belonged to the same person. This exchange deposit address subsequently became defunct when that exchange, Bittrex, stopped allowing American users to trade LBC.
On June 28th, Ethan cashed out 10,000 LBC, allowing me to discover his new exchange deposit address. This was the first time he'd cashed out using his main wallet since the end of Bittrex's LBC support, so this transaction was highly informative, allowing me to discover the new deposit address ID: bb2AJWzT5dQ5AtmJKtiZskpcyWxYWEBDVp.
Here are the transactions associated with that deposit address:
These transactions can be broadly classified into three categories: Ethan cashing out with his main wallet (6,000 LBC / $138; 10,000 LBC / $170), Ethan cashing out using a secret wallet (57,800 LBC, 500 LBC / $1516), and a direct deposit from LBRY staff (9,460 LBC / $1854).
The Primary Wallet
The first of these categories - cash-outs from the wallet associated with Ethan's Odysee account - needs little explanation, and I have not observed him receiving many noteworthy large transfers from LBRY staff on his main wallet, so I'm going to mostly gloss over these transactions for now other that noting their utility in identifying this new deposit address as Ethan's. The single exception is one 1000 LBC transaction from Tom Zarebczan's staff account (worth around $2
:
There is really only one point that merits actual discussion regarding these transactions: on a recent livestream, Ethan discussed how he has been farming referrals for 8 LBC each. Normally, there is a referral cap of 20 users per person, but Ethan appears to have had this restriction removed from his account, as he described performing a batch of over 160 referrals in one day. This caused me to realize that a bunch of transactions I mentioned being unable to attribute in a previous post are all multiples of 8, and thus likely to be the result of these uncapped referral rewards.
Here is "well-known Nazi" Ethan Ralph redeeming 186 referrals at once for a total of 1488 LBC, showing the cap is removed:
Now then, here are the two transactions where he cashed out with his primary wallet, with Ethan's known wallet bYwaDEmBruqupqxoWYi7KkUV7iUReoFNr2 as the outbound source:
The Secret Wallet
The next category, comprising the 57,800 and 500 LBC transactions, is a lot more interesting. Both of these transactions were cashed out from bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z, the very same secret wallet that Ethan previously used to receive 2004 LBC from LBRY staff, as outlined at length in Post 2.
Viewing this wallet, it is immediately apparent that the 57,800 and 500 LBC deposits were both transferred in as the 58,300 LBC transaction seen immediately above the 2004 LBC transaction:
The 500 LBC transfer to Ethan's exchange deposit address, made about 10 minutes before the 57,800 LBC deposit, was likely a test Ethan performed to be sure that he had the right address copied to his clipboard so that a typo wouldn't cost him the entire 58,300.
Unsurprisingly, this 58,300 LBC came directly from bG1fEEqDVepDy3AbvM8outQ3FQUu76aDot, the labeled LBRY staff account that has previously contributed LBC to Ethan:
Yes, that's right: LBRY Inc has seen fit to slip almost 60,000 LBC in institutional funding to Ethan Ralph using a secondary wallet. One might even go so far as to say they "bought in", to quote Ethan himself:
Transcribed:
"We got support from the staff here, we got a little buy-in from the staff, you know what I mean? 'Buy-in', it's just a figure of speech. Uhh...(nervous laughing), before people say anything else...but yeah, it is a collaborative effort, uhh, so..."
But why exactly did LBRY Inc send these LBC to Ethan? They "bought in", but what exactly were they buying? Even with the value of LBC in the dumpster, this transaction is still disproportionately valuable compared to their past contributions to him, so it must have been something beyond the usual. The answer to that question lies in the date of this transaction: June 24th.
23:30 UTC is 7:30 PM ET. Six hours prior to the transaction being sent, at 1:30 PM ET, Ethan made this tweet:
Tweet / https://archive.is/2nKTV
Odysee staff sending 58,300 LBC to Ethan's secret wallet mere hours after he publicly floated the idea of keeping the Killstream on Odysee permanently is unlikely to be a coincidence. Indeed, the timing and magnitude of this transaction combine to suggest it was a payment made in exchange for live broadcast exclusivity, and it was only a few days later we got the "buy-in" gaffe.
Ethan now mentions that the Killstream is exclusively on Odysee at least once per stream, and has also mentioned it on Twitter as contributing to his early access to fiat hyperchats:
Tweet / https://archive.is/spZ3o
He didn't do a very good job of keeping the wallet secret, either. In addition to the repeated failure of operational security whereby he again used the same unique exchange deposit address for his known wallet and his secret wallet (the same mistake he made with Bittrex), he also accidentally used the secret wallet to fund the stream claim for July 16th's Tequila Sunrise episode:
This transaction alone constitutes indisputable proof of two things: 1) bMxPULWNpW8JxML3mDjdgto7pskWmf9V1Z, which received the 58,300 institutional LBC from LBRY staff, belongs to Ethan Ralph, and 2) Ethan Ralph does not understand LBRY as well as he claims he does. It also further underscores that bb2AJWzT5dQ5AtmJKtiZskpcyWxYWEBDVp is Ethan's new deposit address because we now have two independently confirmed Ethan wallets depositing LBC into it.
Ethan has been forced to resort to simultaneously asserting that my findings are all made up and stating that everything I describe is obvious and clearly visible to everyone at a glance so writing it up is no accomplishment at all. Expect this type of "Schrodinger's Cope" to intensify in response to this post's revelations.
The Exchange
At this point, I found myself wondering exactly which exchange Ethan was using to cash out now that Bittrex (USA) was no longer an option. He'd mentioned CoinEx in the past, but we've already shown that his words are unreliable, and since I wanted to know for sure I set out to determine which exchanges fit with the pattern of trading I was observing.
Generally, the way exchanges work is that once you deposit crypto, a bunch of deposit addresses pool deposits together and pass the coins down to a central hot wallet belonging to the exchange. It was my hope, then, that I could look one hop down from Ethan's deposits and get a list of other wallets transferring LBC to the same wallet...these would include other users' deposit addresses on the same exchange.
I hoped to use other users' exchange deposit metadata to find some older transaction dates that would give me a sense of how long Ethan's exchange has been trading in LBC to aid in identifying the exchange. LBRY adds and removes exchanges pretty frequently, so finding a very old transaction would mean the exchange must have been available throughout, greatly culling the list of possibilities.
Fortunately, this approach allowed me to quickly find another user's deposit address. I'm not going to type out the address of a random person with no connection to Ethan aside from random proximity, but will show the deposit history in a screenshot:
Specifically, here we see the earliest and the most recent deposits this user has made to the exchange (as of the drafting of this message). Thus, the exchange must be one that has had an active LBC market on both July 31st, 2020, and July 24th, 2021. The source code for LBRY's website is maintained on a public Github repository, so we can view the commit history for their "Supported Exchanges" page to see which exchanges could meet these two criteria.
Here is the list of active exchanges from July 31st, 2020:
lbry.com/exchanges.md at 23f3cf257d41b0992ba9ba169dc010471c08b65c · lbryio/lbry.com
lbry.com, the website for the LBRY protocol. Contribute to lbryio/lbry.com development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Bittrex
CoinEx BTC / USDT
Upbit
VCC
Coinspot
Coindeal
Here is the list of active exchanges from July 24th, 2021:
lbry.com/exchanges.md at ca3fa0b3669be3d9e2c1c9bd5cab6532f5c714ef · lbryio/lbry.com
lbry.com, the website for the LBRY protocol. Contribute to lbryio/lbry.com development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Bittrex - International Only, US Trading Disabled (USD, ETH, USDT)
MXC
Lbank / USDT
Hotbit / USDT
CoinEx / USDT
BigONE / USDT
The intersection of these lists contains two entries: Bittrex (international only) and CoinEx. Thus, we can conclude that Ethan is indeed using CoinEx as his new exchange, and has used it to cash out 58,300 LBC ($1516) from his secret wallet and 16,000 LBC ($30
from his primary wallet, for a total of $1824 USD cashed out between these two wallets.The Direct Deposit
Now then, all that's left to discuss is the final transaction; though it's chronologically the earliest, I've saved it for last because this transaction is far and away the most salacious discovery that I've made during the entire investigation process across all three posts. Here is what the transaction looks like:
What you're looking at is a transaction directly from LBRY Inc's primary hot wallet to Ethan Ralph's exchange deposit address. This is a manual transfer from a member of LBRY staff: there is simply no way to redeem reward codes or referral bonus rewards directly to an exchange deposit address without using an Odysee-synced wallet to first receive the LBC in question. That this step did not take place is proof that a LBRY staffer performed the transfer, and therefore that the staffer knew that the 9,460 LBC was not being sent to Ethan's own wallet but rather to an exchange. In other words, they knew that these institutional funds would not be invested back into Ethan's channel, but would instead be immediately converted to USD(T) without ever doing anything to grow the ecosystem.
That's an especially interesting finding in light of the fact that in the SEC case court documents, LBRY Inc admits to hiring a market maker, Altonomy, to maintain liquidity on the exchanges by actively filling both buy and sell orders. It turns out they've discussed their partnership with Altonomy publicly as well:
Source / https://archive.is/C6g5L
Source / https://archive.is/U8flU
This means that not only did a LBRY staffer knowingly send LBC directly to Ethan's exchange deposit address, they did so fully aware that the resulting sell order would likely be filled by Altonomy using cash raised by filling buy orders (selling the LBC LBRY Inc has repeatedly loaned them, as discussed in the above overview) - in other words, using LBRY Inc institutional cash. Though there's no way to be positive the buyer on the other end of Ethan's sale was Altonomy, it's probable, and so for all intents and purposes, LBRY Inc likely just paid him in cash with extra steps.
And what was the purpose of this transaction, sent on May 2nd? One can only speculate, but it bears acknowledgement that May 3rd was the original launch date for Tequila Sunrise before Ethan decided to no-show without warning the morning of the launch:
Tweet / https://archive.is/8tyUP
In any case, we can safely discard Odysee's false claim from two weeks later on May 14th that their sponsorship of Ethan is "just floating the hyperchats":
Tweet / https://archive.is/XbGEM
The Conclusion
In spite of his many gaffes where he admits to things that are inconvenient for LBRY, for whatever reason, LBRY staff still holds Ethan Ralph in high regard...but is that outlook reciprocated? No, no it is not.
On 8/3's Killstream, Ethan Ralph became enraged with Blaire White's use of his footage of Chris-chan being arrested. He continued to seethe for several minutes, and then resolved to flag Blaire live on air. It wasn't long before he noticed that Chrissie Mayr was live on Youtube recording a podcast with Blaire, so Ethan began to snipe their stream to confront Blaire live.
When he pulled up the Youtube video, he revealed that he was logged in as Chillstream More, the account that runs the "Youtube Restream" of the Killstream. He used this account to type in Chrissie's chat, an action that was captured on the broadcast. Here is a screenshot of Ethan controlling Chillstream More and using it to interact with Mayr's chat:
This incident is proof that Chillstream More is not an independent user rebroadcasting Ethan's content, as he constantly claims, but just him ban evading and dual-streaming to Youtube, violating his touted exclusivity agreement with Odysee on a nightly basis. Even with all of the clandestine payments LBRY staff have gone out of their way to make, including the 58,300 LBC they paid for Killstream live broadcast exclusivity, Ethan's greed compels him to reach for more, spurning his benefactors at Odysee and continuing to engage with their worst enemy, Youtube.
That's interesting, given that complete divestment from Youtube is a requirement for Ethan receiving any financial support from Odysee, as stated by their official Twitter account:
Tweet / https://archive.is/SSyOn
But Ethan Ralph doesn't care what Odysee says - he's going to do whatever he wants, irrespective of its impact on them or its congruity with their Community Guidelines. Ban evading to stream with Odysee's primary competitor, submitting perjurous DMCAs about other Odysee users, threatening to murder People's Populist Press on an Odysee stream, stating his intention to dox private citizens live on Odysee...it's all on the table for this man. He's even willing to reveal damaging company secrets like the fact that Odysee is profit sharing with its sponsored streamers, something undoubtedly meant to be confidential, solely to puff himself up and make himself look important in front of his detractors.
I wonder when they're going to realize they've made a huge mistake.
