Ben McKenzie came out swinging against cryptocurrency and Donald Trump’s meme coin while speaking to Bill Maher. “I mean, the insiders always win, and the general public always loses on average,” he told Maher.

McKenzie, the former “O.C.” star who wrote, directed, and produced the documentary “Everyone is Lying to You for Money,” was joined by historian Dan Jones and New York Times columnist David French on Friday Night’s episode of “Real Time” on HBO.

Maher and McKenzie were discussing the $TRUMP meme coin when the host brought up McKenzie’s assertion that very few people may actually be getting much from the deal.

“I mean, and you said it could be as little as 20 individuals who are really profiting from this. And everybody else, I means millions of people have lost their shirt. When … it’s an insider-trading scam,” he said.

“Absolutely. I mean, the insiders always win, and the general public always loses on average,” McKenzie answered.

“This is just that on steroids,” Maher replied, to which McKenzie agreed. “Yeah, exactly. And to give you an example, Trump coin, right, his meme coin, down 96%. Right? They had all the coins, his followers buy them, they dump on the followers. Now, some of them got something out of it. He hosted a dinner for the top investors. So the top investors got to have dinner with the President of the United States.”

“In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” McKenzie said in 2022 while testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. “In fact, by the time the dust settles, crypto may well represent a fraud at least 10 times bigger than Madoff.”

McKenzie, who has been outspoken about his concerns about cryptocurrency for years, also co-authored the book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.”

“I started warning people in October of last year [and] the market peaked in November, so just a month after Jacob Silverman, my colleague and I wrote our first piece warning celebrities about the dangers of endorsing these cryptocurrencies and NFTs and whatnot,” McKenzie told CNN. “Since then the market has lost approximately 70-75% of it’s value — and that’s just the value that’s on paper.”

Coinbase’s Fred Ersham Shows Interest in Venezuela’s Economic Recovery Potential

While Venezuela has been battling an economic crisis for years, including devaluation and hyperinflation, recent events have brought the possibility of a recovery, with potential gains for international investors taking part.

Fred Ersham, co-founder of U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Paradigm, a venture capital firm, has traveled to Venezuela several times and has been meeting with government officials, including interim president Delcy Rodriguez and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, according to Bloomberg. The reason behind these visits would be to explore investments as the country aims to reinsert itself in the international economic system.

Ersham, with a net worth of $2.6 billion, would be interested in investing in several sectors of the Venezuelan economy, including fintech and payments, but also in energy and gas.

He appeared this week in a tech event organized by one of the main state-owned banks, Banco de Venezuela, to promote the country’s potential to become “the best country in Latam.”

In private meetings with business leaders, Ersham highlighted that assets in Venezuela were “deeply undervalued” and that now was the moment to invest in the country. Nonetheless, no deal has been disclosed at the time of writing.

While Venezuelans have managed to build their own financial infrastructure using cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance as a gateway for stablecoins, the country is ripe for international financial services companies like Coinbase, which could also expand its influence as part of the nation’s alternative financial system.

Other companies are seeking to position themselves to provide institutional financial services during a transitional period. Erebor Bank would be willing to bridge the Venezuelan financial system to the world, offering correspondent lines with Venezuelan banks and setting up sub-accounts for clients. Jacob Hirshman, co-founder of Erebor, would have suggested the idea to the new Venezuela’s central bank chief, Luis Perez.

A quiet move by the Trump administration is allowing major crypto firms to skirt U.S. state regulators that have, for years, played a key role in policing dirty money in the industry.

Following a recent reinterpretation of banking rules, federal authorities have granted some crypto companies special, slimmed-down national banking licenses that come with minimal federal oversight and immunity against a wide range of actions by state regulators.

The sudden loss of state authority over some major crypto firms shocked Linda Conti, superintendent of Maine’s Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection, which oversees licensing of money-transmitting firms.

“We will not be able to address consumer complaints,” Conti told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in an email. “We will not be able to ask any questions of these entities.”

After a surge in cryptocurrency scams, Maine began requiring crypto firms to verify the ownership of certain digital wallets their customers were sending money to. The rule was intended to prevent would-be victims from paying scammers, but Coinbase, one of the world’s largest crypto players, cried foul.

In a letter asking federal authorities to intervene last September, the crypto exchange suggested Maine’s new rule was unconstitutional and “threatens the very purpose” of core features of cryptocurrency that offer users deep privacy. Coinbase has since converted to a national trust charter bank, meaning it will no longer need to comply with this rule in Maine, according to Conti.

Coinbase is not alone in obtaining the new licenses that can curtail state action.

Through a records request, ICIJ obtained a letter to Conti’s office from the crypto firm Fidelity Digital Assets, which recently converted to a national trust charter bank, telling local regulators that the company no longer needed its state money transmission license. In the letter, lawyers representing the crypto firm requested that Maine update Fidelity Digital Assets’ license in Maine to “Terminated – Surrendered / Canceled.”

Fidelity Digital Assets, the cryptocurrency arm of the investment management giant Fidelity, did not provide comment for this story.

National trust charter banks are not new. Previously, these charters had been granted to entities such as investment managers and private equity funds that don’t engage in regular banking activity. But a recent reinterpretation of federal rules by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a U.S. federal banking regulator, has allowed these charters to become available to crypto firms, affording them greater access to the formal financial system and exemption from many state rules.

Traditional banks are overseen by a consortium of regulators that can include the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and state regulators as well. In contrast, national trust charter banks are generally overseen by the OCC as their sole regulator.

The federal government’s opening of national trust charters to crypto firms has frustrated the traditional banking industry. In March, The Guardian reported that the Bank Policy Institute, which represents dozens of major banks, was considering suing the OCC over the decision. The group said that giving charters to crypto firms would create an “unlevel playing field” and “could significantly increase risks to the U.S. financial system.”

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors, a national organization of state financial regulators, has also slammed the move. The crypto firms “would fall outside the scope of core federal banking laws,” the organization said in a February letter to the OCC. The move, the letter said, creates “a potential risk of tremendous harm to consumers by enabling such institutions to assert that they are entitled to immunity, through federal preemption, from critical consumer protections afforded under state law.”

One of the first crypto firms to receive conditional approval for a trust charter from the OCC last year was Paxos Trust. Months before this approval, Paxos settled with the New York Department of Financial Services, which found systemic failures in the firm’s anti-money laundering program. As part of the settlement, Paxos committed more than $40 million to pay penalties and to improve its compliance program.

Just a few months later, Paxos shed its New York State license. Experts told ICIJ that the move will likely reduce New York authorities’ ability to enforce Paxos’ promised changes to its compliance program. Pamela Clegg, an anti-money laundering expert who has worked in compliance roles at traditional banks and crypto firms, says that Paxos’ surrendering of its state license “absolutely takes some of the teeth out of the settlement’s long-term impact.”

Paxos and the New York Department of Financial Services did not provide comment for this story. The OCC’s conditional approval of Paxos’ federal charter requires the firm to set aside millions for compliance required by its settlement with state authorities. Both Paxos and Fidelity Digital Assets no longer appear on New York State’s list of firms licensed as cryptocurrency services.

In an April press release, Coinbase said it would keep its license with New York’s Department of Financial Services, a regulator the firm said it has worked with in the past.

Even before the advent of cryptocurrency, U.S. financial institutions used evolving interpretations of federal rules to ditch their state regulators. According to past critics of the practice, this proved catastrophic in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis as mortgage lenders, newly free of state oversight, began taking on riskier loans. “The last time the national banks were granted broad exemption from state enforcement authority, we ended up with a global economic crisis on our hands,” Lisa Madigan, Illinois’ then-attorney general, told lawmakers in 2010. “We must not let that happen again.”

Clegg, the crypto compliance specialist, said she knows from experience why crypto firms are jumping at the OCC charters. “State regulators play an important role, but today crypto exchanges are effectively managing 50 different compliance regimes at once,” Clegg told ICIJ in an email. “That creates a costly, duplicative, and near-constant cycle of licensing, exams, and audits across jurisdictions.”

According to Conti, the Maine financial regulator, Coinbase and other firms operating with national trust charters will no longer need to comply with the state’s anti-scam rule identifying owners of certain crypto wallets. Conti said that an initial rule was repealed and replaced with a narrower rule that requires crypto firms only to verify the wallet ownership of people trying to send digital currency to themselves. This is to fight common scams where crypto users think they are funding their own investment account but, in reality, are sending money to scammers.

Coinbase did not provide comment for this story.

Conti said she is concerned by the removal of oversight from state offices that are intimately familiar with the challenges their residents face.

“And the sad part is, consumers do not even know this is coming,” she said. “People do not know that their local place to complain about a crypto issue is now Washington, D.C.”