Amir Bruno Elmaani, the 31-year-old founder of Oyster Protocol, was sentenced to a maximum of four years in prison for tax evasion. Elmaani pleaded guilty in April to secretly minting and selling Pearl tokens while failing to pay income tax on profits from the project, admitting that this resulted in a tax loss of over $5.5 million.

Between September and October 2017, Elmaani introduced a cryptocurrency called Pearl (PRL), marketed as a method for investors to purchase data on a blockchain-based data storage platform called Oyster Protocol. However, in October 2018, Elmaani minted and launched new PRL tokens without the knowledge of the Oyster Protocol team and investors and sold these tokens for his personal interests.

Despite earning millions of dollars in income, Elmaani filed a tax return in 2017 claiming income from a patent design business for only $15,000, and reported zero income to the tax office in 2018. The court found that Elmaani spent more than $10 million on multiple mattresses in 2018, spent $1.6 million on a carbon fiber composite company and spent more than $700,000 on buying two homes.

In addition to the four-year prison sentence, Elmaani was sentenced to one year of supervised release and to pay $5.5 million in restitution.#OysterProtocol#AmirElmaani #cryptocurrency

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