3 Comments
Apr 24Liked by David Z. Morris

Regarding GhostFace, I actually did a bit of research on GhostFace when reading Brady Dale's book on SBF. GhostFace is no stranger to crypto. On page 163 of "SBF," Brady Dale writes "CREAM … reference to … ‘Cash Rules Everything Around Me’". The reality is stranger.

It may be that CREAM (Finance) is a reference to (or IP theft of) Cream (Capitol) which is indeed a reference to C.R.E.A.M. (song). Or it could just be another Newton-Leibniz thing of independent discovery, just maybe not one as important as calculus.

Ghostface Killah is from Wu-Tang and was prominent on their C.R.E.A.M. track . During the ICO craze of 2017, Ghostface co-founded a crypto startup called Cream Capital (not CREAM Finance) with the intention of ICO. The other co-founder was Brett Westbrook (not Jeffrey Huang of CREAM Finance, mentioning in this section of "SBF"). Brett Westbrook explicitly said their “Cream” “stands for Crypto Rules Everything Around Me of which we have been granted a trademark by the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office)" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/wu-tang-clans-ghostface-killah-is-backing-a-cryptocurrency-venture.html .

After 2017, it seems the ICO was cancelled https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/7/22/17510130/cryptocurrencies-celebrities-scam-paris-hilton-steven-seagal-akon-mayweather. Their website creamcapital.io is currently down, and likely has been since December of 2022. A cached version of the site from that time states they were trying to build “the world’s largest cryptocurrency ATM network” https://web.archive.org/web/20221202192144/https://creamcapital.io/. Notably in 2017, Brett Westbrook was mentioned as part of the team as CEO https://web.archive.org/web/20171107011407/http://creamcapital.io/meet-the-team/. But by 2020, he was no longer mentioned on that same page, and in fact no CEO was being listed at all https://web.archive.org/web/20200804000508/https://creamcapital.io/meet-the-team/.

Then, around the same time in 2020, Jeffrey Huang, who is indeed connected to Taiwanese hip hop (per "SBF"), founded CREAM Finance https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cream-finance but at no point was there any mention of any connection to Cream Capital. Notably, at some point, CREAM Finance started putting on their website: “C.R.E.A.M. Crypto Rules Everything Around Me”—a slogan, again, supposedly trademarked by a different, seemingly unrelated entity. So, ultimately, CREAM Finance is a reference to C.R.E.A.M. the song, but possibly also a little known entity that actually had a member of Wu-Tang at least nominally on their team.

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So, not so weird that Ghostface is again after that crypto, crypto token y'all.

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