Steve Bannon Promoting Anti-Biden ‘FJB’ Cryptocurrency But Experts Who Reviewed Its Code Have Questions

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Two former Trump advisers are promoting an anti-Biden cryptocurrency but experts are warning that it’s structured in a way that could substantially disadvantage those foolish enough to invest in it.

Steve Bannon was the beneficiary of an eleventh-hour pardon from former President Donald Trump and has spent the first year of President Joe Biden’s tenure promoting Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and various conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spent a week listening to the absolutely bonkers content on Bannon’s podcast, WAR ROOM PANDEMIC. Among Miller’s observations was that Bannon had “teamed up” with Boris Epshteyn to promote a new cryptocurrency called “$FJB” — short for “F*ck Joe Biden — that they were promoting to Trump supporters as a way to stick it to Biden somehow:

Boris and Bannon have teamed up on a new FJB (get it?) crypto that aspires to be the “currency for the MAGA movement.” According to an appearance on last Wednesday’s program, Boris believes that FJBcoin “represents a primal political scream and a growing absolutely powerful movement” and he encourages listeners to “let your feelings, your primal disapproval, your primal disgust with Biden be heard” by shoveling more money across the table to the same guy who allegedly took their money to build a pretend wall a couple years ago.

The reference Miller made about building a pretend wall is Bannon’s arrest in August 2020 for wire fraud and money laundering related to a crowdfunding scheme that was supposed to collect money from supporters and use the funds to build sections of wall along the Texas-Mexico border. Instead, Bannon and his accused co-conspirators diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars that was used to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” the Department of Justice said in a statement announcing the indictments.

Trump pardoned Bannon on the morning of his last day in the White House, and his former campaign adviser is now relentlessly shilling all manner of products to the Trump faithful, including the $FJB crypto coin.

But as Mother Jones’ Ali Breland and David Corn reported, potential $FJB investors have very good reasons to be wary, because of the way that Bannon and Epshteyn have structured the “strategic ownership position” they took in $FJB:

Not only does every purchase bolster the value of Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s holdings, crypto experts say the currency is designed in a way that affords its operators an usual amount of discretion in blocking owners of coins from selling their tokens—a power that could cause problems for investors…

The code for $FJB allows the currency’s operators to manually lock an owner’s token balance, an unusual practice in a space that aims to avoid centralized authority. This would prevent an owner from selling coins, according to Simon de la Rouvier, who reviewed the code for Mother Jones. De la Rouvier is a digital artist and co-author of ERC-20, a coding standard used to program contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which supports Ether, a cryptocurrency second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization.

De la Rouvier points out that this restriction doesn’t apply to the operators of $FJB. “They can transfer as much as they want, whenever,” he says. De la Rouvier outlines a possible scenario: If $FJB’s price started to drop, the coin’s operators could freeze some token holders from selling to prevent a further spiral, while the operators remain free to sell off their own coins. By the time locked investors regained access, their tokens could be worth much less.

Breland and Corn also noted that some $FJB holders had reported their holdings had already been placed under “arbitrary locks and unlocks,” and that all users have to pay an 8 percent fee to the $FJB operators with every purchase or sale of tokens.

$FJB was launched last October by a man named Grant Tragni, and Mother Jones notes the “surprisingly easy” programming needed to set up a new cryptocurrency these days. Originally called the Let’s Go Brandon coin, each $FJB coin was valued at $0.0019 at launch, according to Coinbase. It hit a low of $0.000971 on Dec. 20, 2021, a high of $0.0046 after Bannon and Epshteyn started touting it, and then dropped back down to just above launch price at $0.0021 as of Jan. 18.

UPDATE 4:15 pm ET: A source with knowledge of $FJB’s operations pushed back on the accusations in Mother Jones’ report that the coin was structured in a way that posed an unfair risk to investors, telling Mediaite, “The fee structure and lock only works with on chain transactions and do not apply to any trades made on centralized exchanges, which are the majority of the trading volume.”

This claim is refuted by one of the experts cited by Mother Jones, an engineer who reviewed the code used for $FJB, who said that a lock could “arbitrarily be placed on almost any address,” and also by de la Rouvier, who noted that the code empowered the coin’s operators to manually select individual users’ wallets and lock them:

An engineer with experience at major crypto companies—who asked not to be identified citing professional concerns—reviewed the currency’s code and agreed with de la Rouvier, confirming that “there is a lock that can arbitrarily be placed on almost any address,” with the only exception being the $FJB operators’ address.

Locks are sometimes written into cryptocurrency codes as an “anti-whale” feature—a supposed safeguard tempering the influence of big investors. But unlike other cryptocurrencies with triggers that automatically apply locks to holders trying to carry out large transactions, $FJB’s operators can manually pick and choose whose wallets to lock. “It would’ve been better if it was an automated process,” de la Rouvier says. “It’s just bad code.”