Aaaaaand it’s gone… 

Turns out the house always wins… especially if you don’t even own the house yet. Richard Kim, 39, ex–Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan exec, just got indicted for allegedly taking $4M in seed money meant for his blockchain-based online casino… and losing most of it gambling at a different online casino within a week. You can’t make this up…

(Source: Giphy) 

Prosecutors say Kim, fresh off a six-year stint at Galaxy Digital, pitched investors on Zero Edge (sounds legit)… a crypto gaming app that was supposed to marry gambling with blockchain, because God forbid those two ever remain separate. Galaxy even chipped in on the seed round. Then, almost immediately after closing $4.3M in June 2024, Kim allegedly pulled $3.8M into personal accounts, hit the leverage button on crypto trades, and then went all-in at Shuffle, a self-described VIP crypto casino. 

(Source: CNBC) 

By June 29,  Kim emailed investors admitting he was “solely responsible” for vaporizing $3.67M. But instead of saying, “I lost it on roulette at 3 a.m.,” he allegedly spun it as a “treasury management strategy” gone wrong… which is a very Wall Street way of saying “I pressed the double-or-nothing button until it stopped working” LOL. As a result, Zero Edge never launched. By December, the company was in liquidation, proving the only true “zero edge” here was Kim’s win rate. At his April arrest, he reportedly told the FBI, “I knew it was wrong from the beginning”... which in his defense, is better than the usual white-collar “I thought it was legal” go-to saying. 

Whereas now, Kim’s defense is leaning on a gambling addiction angle, and he even self-reported to the SEC, calling himself “grossly negligent” but denying fraudulent intent. Which might sound noble, until you remember he was once the COO of global FX and emerging markets trading for Goldman and JPMorgan… a.k.a., jobs where “grossly negligent with other people’s money” is generally frowned upon. 

(Source: Giphy) 

For now, Kim’s out on a $250K bond. Galaxy, for its part, is playing the “immaterial investment” card and says it helped alert authorities. The feds, meanwhile, are enjoying the irony: “He promised to build a casino… then gambled the money away.” And yet, somewhere in a dusty Vegas bar, an old FedEx story about Fred Smith saving the company with a blackjack win just got even more legendary. 

Moral of the story? Be careful who you give your money to friends… especially when they’re using that money to build a company called “Zero Edge”. Until next time…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.