He Raised $22 Million to Mine Crypto, Then Spent 13% of It on Mining
A crypto mining company has one job: mine crypto. So when the SEC pulls back the curtain and shows that a mining company spent only 13 cents of every dollar on actual mining, you do not have a mining company. You have a Ponzi scheme wearing a mining company's clothes. On July 20, 2026, the SEC announced partially settled fraud charges against Zan Shaikh, a Florida resident, and his company, legally registered as Bright Vision Distribution LLC and operating as Mining Automatic. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleges that between June 2023 and May 2025, Shaikh raised more than $22 million from over 380 investors by promising them guaranteed monthly returns of at least 3% from crypto mining operations. The pitch was the same one that has separated people from their money since long before crypto existed: give us your cash, we will put it to work in a business that generates steady income, and you will collect a reliable cut every month. Just, this time, the business was mining. The problem is arithmetic, and the SEC laid it out cleanly. Of the $22 million raised, only about 13% went toward anything resembling actual mining, the computing resources you would need to validate blockchain transactions and earn rewards. The mining that did happen generated roughly $1.1 million in revenue. Meanwhile, the company paid investors around $1.8 million in what it called returns. Sit with those two numbers for a second, because they are the entire case. A business that earned $1.1 million paid out $1.8 million. That is not a profitable operation. That is a hole. And there is only one place the extra $700,000 in payouts could have come from: the pockets of newer investors.
$TRUMP: When the President Launched a Meme Coin
On January 17, 2025, three days before his inauguration, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, an official meme coin on the Solana blockchain. It was the first time in history that a sitting (or incoming) U.S. president directly launched a cryptocurrency. No other world leader had ever done anything like it. The token peaked at $74.27 on January 19 - the day before he took office - hitting a market cap of $14.5 billion. The launch was unprecedented in every sense. A president-elect putting his name on a blockchain token signaled to the entire crypto industry that digital assets had reached the highest level of political legitimacy. This was not a senator talking about Bitcoin at a conference. This was the incoming president of the United States putting skin in the game on Solana. The tokenomics followed standard meme coin structures. Of the 1 billion total supply, 230 million tokens (23%) were initially circulating. The remaining supply was held by Trump-affiliated entities on vesting schedules. Reuters reported the project generated approximately $100 million in trading fees. The volume was staggering - billions of dollars in the first 48 hours alone. Melania Trump launched $MELANIA the following day. Both tokens saw significant volatility in the weeks that followed, which is standard for meme coin markets. $TRUMP settled around $3.89 by March 2026 after its initial price discovery phase. Meme coins are volatile by nature. DOGE dropped 90% from its peak too. So did SHIB. That is how this market works.