This page compiles several updates posted on the EA Forum.
October 2, 2020 You may have read recent reports that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Department of Justice have filed charges (announcements here and here) against the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX and several people involved with the company. This includes Ben Delo, a major EA donor and a cofounder of BitMEX.
CEA, Effective Giving UK, and 80,000 Hours became aware of the charges yesterday, when the news was first reported. No findings have been made about these charges at this point. We will continue to watch how things unfold and learn more, and will continue to update the EA community.
Update February 17, 2021 Here’s an update from CEA's operations team, which has been working on updating our practices for handling donations. This also applies to other organizations that are legally within CEA (80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Forethought Foundation, and EA Funds).
- “We are working with our lawyers to devise and implement an overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors and donations going forward.
- We've engaged a third party who now conducts KYC (know your client) due diligence research on all major donors (>$20K a year).
- We have established a working relationship with TRM who conduct compliance and back-tracing for all crypto donations.”