The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has arrested an Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith after breaking sanctions against North Korea, He was formally sentenced earlier today.
Griffith spoke at the controversial event in North Korea, which was attended by journalist Ethan Lou, author of Once a Bitcoin Miner. For Griffith’s sentencing, he was asked to provide a statement, but that statement was never filed with the court. He recounts the inside narrative of what transpired in this video.
After barely a few hours on North Korean soil, Virgil Griffith quietly informed his fellow visitors and local guides that his trip was unofficial. The United States is the only country in the world that prohibits its citizens from visiting North Korea unless they have received explicit authorization.
At the round dinner table at Pyongyang’s riverside Pothonggang Hotel, Griffith, an American working for the Ethereum Foundation in Singapore, told how he had tried unsuccessfully to obtain such clearance. Griffith had made the strongest case he could for attending the Pyongyang cryptocurrency conference in 2019, but he was turned down. As a result, he told the others at the table that he had decided to go nonetheless.
The Ethereum developer informed an audience of North Koreans how they could use blockchain in discussions with the US four days later, in a building fashioned like an atom. The question of whether measures should be unraveled first, the US economic sanctions or North Korea’s nuclear program, had stymied bilateral discussions at the moment.
Griffith was a firm believer in being honest, even if it made him uncomfortable. Griffith went to the local US consulate almost immediately after arriving in Singapore to speak with a special agent about the trip. Perhaps he thought he was helping his government in some manner by informing them about the cloistered kingdom.
Griffith had not expected the meeting to have such an impact on the US government, but Special Agent Brandon Cavanaugh of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counterintelligence unit in New York was quickly brought in, and the circle grew to three Justice Department lawyers plus Treasury Department lawyers. Griffith was detained in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day, 2019.
The Ethereum developer was arrested by the FBI and has accepted a plea deal for 63 months in prison in April 2022 after being accused of helping North Korea circumvent sanctions by teaching it about blockchain.
It was the end of a two-year journey that had been as perplexing as it had been alarming — the narrative of how an adventurous idealist and his trip to North Korea had come to annoy the ruthless powers of geopolitics and national security.
Griffith did not reply to an interview request through his lawyers, but court filings give a vivid picture of the days after the trip and the decisions and movements made then — a pivotal, revealing period during which FBI agents went after Griffith as much as he fell into their lap.
