Does Theranos Founder Trial Have Implications For The Cryptosphere?
Last Updated on 6 January 2022 by CryptoTips.eu
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of pharmaceutical tech firm (and former Silicon Valley darling) Theranos, was convicted on four counts of fraud this week and will probably have to spend several years (or even decades) behind bars to satisfy the broken pride of the numerous famous investors she swindled.
Theranos pretended to have developed a technology that would be able to check a person’s health status simply from a drop of blood. A home testing kit would tell you your body’s biological status, whether you would need to run to the doctor or continue your current health regimen. In health crazy California, it proved a big hit and Elizabeth raised a whopping $9 billion in venture capital.
Until it seemed that the technology she pretended to have developed, simply didn’t exist.
The conviction of Elizabeth Holmes signals "the end of an era," David Streitfeld writes. "In Silicon Valley, where the line between talk and achievement is often vague, there is finally a limit to faking it."https://t.co/mYJmxilMTA
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 4, 2022
Her style of promising new technologies was dubbed ‘fake it till you make it’. Another well-known Silicon Valley term for the young up and coming entrepreneurs was coined by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (now Meta) who claimed that in tech you should ‘move fast and break things’.
Rug pulls
However, this week’s verdict seems to bring a close to that generation of entrepreneurs and also comes with a warning. If you promise the development of a new technology and you don’t deliver, you could end up in jail.
For those crypto coin developers who invented terms like yield farming, DeFi, Memecoins and all other shiny bright words that have been thrown around in the cryptosphere in 2021, this could have serious implications if the sector ever gets regulated.
This site has repeatedly asked for Bitcoin maxis to root out the rug pulls (remember the Squid Game coin scandal in 2021), the ‘founder scams’ (remember the Chef Nomi scandal in 2020) and so many other events that have taken place in the past few years.
If those with the ability to make a change in the cryptosphere don’t call out the scammers, they will be taken down with them when governments step in and regulate. Now or never might be exaggerated, but let’s be clear that this is a signal from the US courts towards tech entrepreneurs which should not be ignored.