Conor Grogan, head of product business operations at Coinbase, has made a sensational discovery, linking the anonymous inventor of Shiba Inu, Ryoshi, to former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). In a Twitter thread, Grogan today presented the evidence he found in his on-chain analysis.
The Coinbase exec writes that he discovered a Bitkub deposit address used by Ryoshi that was linked to an OpenSea account called “ALAMEDA.” According to Grogan, the anonymous Shiba Inu inventor made two deposits to this address in 2020 and 2021.
“Perhaps unbeknownst to them, Bitkub does not generate new deposit addresses, which is how I linked them to https://opensea.io,” Grogan said, further explaining that he has no idea why the SHIB founder might have chosen Alameda as his Opensea handle in 2020.
In addition, Grogan revealed that the OpenSea account minted an SBF-inspired NFT collection called “SBF Legendary” in September 2020. The publisher, Meme Ltd, has issued 10 NFTs in total, while there are eight owners.
“Here’s a cool NFT they minted,” Grogan said, showing an NFT marked “SBF Legendary.” Other users discovered more pieces of the collection.
So this answers your question here IMO https://t.co/yLpIJQy3Gq pic.twitter.com/altPm1TTQk
— ChampOfSun
(@ChampionSun1) March 7, 2023
Another user speculated that the buyers may have purchased a Rare SBF and then a LEGENDARY SBF and tried to sell it for a lot of ETH. For this it makes sense to change the OpenSea handle to Alameda.
More Evidence That SBF Might Be The Shiba Inu Inventor
Remarkably, this isn’t the first time Conor Grogan has made a connection between Shiba Inu and Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm, Alameda. As Grogan points out, Alameda and SHIB share a history.
In a thread in February, the Coinbase executive noted that he found solid evidence that Alameda sold the top of the Shiba Inu price on October 27. Alameda, the supposed largest Shiba Inu farmer at the time, dumped $107 worth of SHIB that day and sent it to FTX, Huobi, Binance and OKX.
“This marked the absolute top; SHIB immediately began to plummet, never to recover. Coincidentally, one exchange [FTX] had just expanded SHIB perps. Here is the address of the mystery wallet. I’m sure some savvy sleuths out there might be able to guess who it belongs to,” Grogan said at the time.
Unsurprisingly, Grogan’s reasoning has been met with a lot of interest and has led to much speculation. Chief developer Shytoshi Kusama was asked about the rumor by the SHIB community, but has not yet given a response.
At the time of writing, SHIB was trading at $0.00001095, struggling to hold support at $0.00001083.
