Amalgam Capital Is a Blockchain Company Without a Blockchain
A self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” raised half a million dollars for a payment platform that didn’t work, a company that had no money, and assets that didn’t exist. Then he threw a New Year’s Eve party and bought a luxury car.
The Pitch: A Borderless Payment Empire Built on Nothing
In January 2021, Jeremy Jordan-Jones co-founded Amalgam Capital Ventures LLC, a Delaware company operating out of 99 Wall Street, New York, New York. The address alone was doing a lot of work. Wall Street. The name implies gravity, legitimacy, proximity to money and power. Amalgam’s marketing materials backed up that impression with a full portfolio of claims: blockchain-based software solutions, data security, payment processing, crypto assets, supply chain management, even a web browser. The company’s flagship product was a payment platform called Zeo, described on the company’s website as “a borderless payment gateway and payment engine” that “leverages blockchain technology” to let users move funds between bank accounts in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Africa, settling in any denomination instantly.
That is a compelling product description. It is the kind of language that gets meetings with venture capital firms. It is the kind of language that gets term sheets signed. It reads like the future of fintech, like something that could genuinely reshape how working people access and move money across borders. The SEC’s complaint confirms that Amalgam’s website, pitch decks, and corporate documents all promoted this vision aggressively during what the complaint calls the “Relevant Period”: November 2021 through February 2022.
The problem, documented in the complaint with forensic precision, is that Zeo was not operational during the Relevant Period. The blockchain-based platform that Jordan-Jones was pitching to investors did not function. It had not been built. Amalgam did not possess the technical capabilities or the infrastructure necessary to launch it. There were no contracts with financial institutions. No payment service providers had been onboarded. No merchants had any agreements or commitments to use Zeo. The borderless payment empire was a story. A well-decorated, confidently-delivered story with a Wall Street address, a luxury hotel meeting room, and a product deck that Jordan-Jones drafted himself.
— SEC Complaint, Paragraph 19. The simplest sentence in the document. The most expensive one.
Jordan-Jones approached multiple venture capital firms in 2021, according to the complaint. He was pitching Amalgam for funds nominally earmarked to acquire licensing and infrastructure to support Zeo, plus general business expenses. In October 2021, he was introduced to a venture capital firm identified in the complaint only as Investor A. In November 2021, Jordan-Jones handed Investor A a Product Deck and a Due Diligence Report, complete with a balance sheet, a capitalization table, a statement of earnings, and a summary of how the money would be spent. Jordan-Jones drafted the Product Deck personally. He signed the cover letter on the Due Diligence Report personally.
Investor A agreed to invest $500,000 in exchange for a convertible promissory note on December 28, 2021. The note would convert to LLC membership interests or, if Amalgam later became a corporation, to stock. It carried a 7% annual interest rate and a maturity date of December 27, 2023. The first installment of $250,000 arrived on December 29, 2021. The second $250,000 followed on January 3, 2022. Both were deposited into an Amalgam bank account for which Jordan-Jones was the sole account holder and the sole signatory.
The Financials: Every Number Was Fabricated
The Due Diligence Report that Jordan-Jones handed Investor A was a constructed fiction presented as financial reality. The SEC complaint catalogs its false claims with methodical, damning detail. Each line item is a specific lie, not a vague optimism or a forward-looking projection. These were representations of present fact, and each one was the opposite of true.
The Balance Sheet told Investor A that Amalgam’s third-quarter 2021 cash and cash equivalents totaled $101,899.15. The actual bank records tell a different story. Amalgam’s account balance was negative $101,830.50 at the beginning of Q3 2021. By the end of that same quarter, the negative balance had deepened to negative $103,440.34. The document Jordan-Jones handed Investor A showed a positive six-figure cash balance. The bank records from that exact period showed the company was more than $100,000 in the hole. That is a fabricated swing of over $203,000 on a single line of a balance sheet.
The Balance Sheet also claimed Amalgam owned $3,062,351.58 in “IP/Equipment.” It further claimed Amalgam had two “current patent hold[s] pending” for “trade secrets.” A public patent search, cited in the SEC complaint, reveals that Amalgam had no patents, no pending patent applications, and no intellectual property during the Relevant Period. The $3 million asset line was invented. There was nothing behind it.
The Statement of Earnings falsely claimed that Amalgam had paid licensing fees of $1,164,222 in Q4 2021. The complaint notes that no licensing fees were ever paid from Amalgam’s bank account, and the account did not have sufficient funds to pay such fees from at least July 1 through December 27, 2021. The statement also projected that Amalgam would begin generating revenue from cannabis companies in Q4 2021, and from a professional basketball team competing in the NBA (identified only as “Basketball Team A”) in Q1 2022. The complaint is unambiguous: Amalgam had no contracts with companies in the cannabis industry, no contracts with professional basketball teams, and no contracts with any other revenue-generating entity.
The Product Deck, drafted by Jordan-Jones, claimed Amalgam had the necessary technical capabilities and infrastructure to launch Zeo. It further claimed Amalgam had contracts in place to generate minimum annual revenue of $39 million, scaling up to $495 million. Both claims were false. There were no such contracts. There was no such infrastructure. The complaint states that Jordan-Jones “knew or recklessly disregarded” that all of these representations were false, because he personally knew that Zeo was not operational, that Amalgam was in financial distress, and that the company had no revenue-generating contracts, no patents, and no IP.
Source: SEC v. Jordan-Jones, Case 1:25-cv-04297, ¶¶31–39. All figures drawn directly from complaint allegations.
The Receipts: Where $500,000 Actually Went
The money arrived in two tranches. The first $250,000 hit the Amalgam account on December 29, 2021. That same day, Jordan-Jones transferred $55,000 to another Amalgam member identified in the complaint only as “Amalgam Member 1.” The following day, December 30, 2021, he paid $4,265 to an event planner for champagne and servers for a New Year’s Eve party in Manhattan. Before the calendar turned to 2022, Jordan-Jones had also withdrawn an additional $27,000 in cash from the account. That’s roughly $86,000 out the door in three days, before the second installment even arrived.
On January 3, 2022, Investor A wired the second $250,000. That same day, Jordan-Jones spent over $500 at a sports apparel store in SoHo and withdrew an additional $5,500 in cash. Between January 3 and February 3, Jordan-Jones pulled nearly $50,000 in cash from the account. Between January 4 and January 6, he made additional transfers totaling $30,000 into Amalgam Member 1’s bank account.
The breakdown of personal expenses is laid out in paragraph 74 of the complaint with specific dollar figures. Jordan-Jones spent at least $111,000 of Investor A’s money on personal expenses, including approximately $38,000 at a luxury vehicle dealer in Virginia; $47,000 on hotels, including $26,000 at a luxury hotel in New York City; $12,000 shopping, including at luxury retailers; $4,000 on entertainment; $8,000 on travel and transportation; and $2,000 on restaurants. Art purchases are mentioned in the complaint’s summary paragraph as well.
Between December 29, 2021, and January 31, 2022, Jordan-Jones did transfer more than $40,000 from the account to Amalgam employees as backpay. The complaint separately notes that Amalgam owed its employees approximately $475,000 in backpay going into this period. The $40,000 paid out represents less than a tenth of what was owed. The employees were getting scraps while Jordan-Jones was booking luxury hotel suites and walking into car dealerships.
The complement to that spending is what was never purchased. The Due Diligence Report Jordan-Jones submitted to Investor A specified that approximately $350,000 would be used for infrastructure: six physical servers, five virtual servers, user interfaces, coding and architecture, integration with “major card network(s),” and licensing and gateway fees. The complaint confirms that neither Jordan-Jones nor Amalgam spent any of Investor A’s funds on computer hardware or software, or licensing or integration fees associated with credit card networks. Zero. Not a single server. Not a single line of code funded by Investor A’s money.
By February 24, 2022, the Amalgam account balance was zero. The entire $500,000 was gone in less than two months. When Jordan-Jones later came back to Investor A in June 2022 requesting additional funding, he submitted a new slide deck claiming that Amalgam had spent 32.98% of the investment on “IT/Hardware” and 19.68% on “Licensing.” The complaint states that Jordan-Jones “knew or recklessly disregarded” that those representations were also false. Investor A declined to invest a second time.
The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Money Actually Cost
There is a version of this story that gets told purely in securities law terms: violation of Section 17(a), Rule 10b-5, material misrepresentation, disgorgement. That framing is accurate. It is also incomplete. The SEC complaint treats Investor A as an institution, a “venture capital firm,” a faceless entity that wrote a check and got burned. But behind every institutional investment decision are human beings, people who did due diligence, who read the documents Jordan-Jones signed and submitted, who sat in meetings, who made a case to their partners that this was a bet worth taking, who staked some portion of their professional credibility on the integrity of a man who was, at that moment, planning a champagne party on their dime.
The deeper indignity here is the performance of legitimacy. Jordan-Jones did not operate from a garage or a college dorm. The complaint specifically notes that Amalgam meetings were conducted at the Dominick, a luxury hotel in Manhattan. The company’s address was 99 Wall Street. The documents Jordan-Jones handed over were professionally formatted, complete with balance sheets, capitalization tables, statements of earnings, and a cover letter bearing his signature. This was a full-scale simulation of a real company, complete with the trappings that signal trustworthiness to people trained to evaluate trust: real addresses, real paperwork, real-seeming numbers, and the confident posture of a man who described himself as a “serial entrepreneur.”
Consider the employees. The complaint makes a passing but devastating reference: at the time Jordan-Jones was pitching Investor A on Amalgam’s financial health, the company owed its own workers approximately $475,000 in backpay. These are people who showed up. Who built pitch decks, probably. Who sent emails and took calls and did whatever their job description said, and who were not being paid for it. The complaint notes that Amalgam was “unable to meet payroll” in Q3 2021 and had “service contracts cancelled by multiple providers for failing to remit any payment.” While Jordan-Jones was negotiating a $500,000 investment and describing a company with $3 million in assets, his own staff was working on empty. After the investment landed, he paid them $40,000 in backpay, which is less than 9% of what they were owed, and then kept spending on hotels and cars and New Year’s Eve parties.
There is a specific detail in the timeline that deserves to sit with the reader for a moment. Investor A wired the first $250,000 to Amalgam on December 29, 2021. That same day, Jordan-Jones transferred $55,000 to Amalgam Member 1. The very next day, December 30, 2021, he paid an event planner $4,265 for a New Year’s Eve party. The champagne was purchased with money that had been in the account for less than 48 hours. The ink on the promissory note was still warm. The commitment Jordan-Jones made in writing, that investor funds would go toward servers, software, licensing, and infrastructure, lasted less than two days before it dissolved into a party budget. This is not a story about a startup that failed to execute. It is a story about a man who never intended to execute.
The structural betrayal embedded in this case goes beyond the individual transaction. The blockchain and fintech space has, for years, attracted people who genuinely needed what was being promised: accessible cross-border payments, alternatives to predatory remittance services, financial tools that actually serve the unbanked and underbanked communities in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Africa that Amalgam’s Zeo platform specifically named in its marketing copy. Amalgam’s website described Zeo as enabling users in those exact regions to “pull funds from any bank account” and “settle in any denomination instantly.” That is language designed to appeal to a real and legitimate need. Millions of people pay enormous fees to send money to family members across borders. A product that genuinely solved that problem would matter to real people. Jordan-Jones wrapped his personal enrichment scheme in the language of financial inclusion, and that co-optation of genuine need for personal gain represents a particular kind of betrayal that does not appear on any balance sheet.
The SEC complaint notes that Jordan-Jones’ current address is unknown. The agency lists his last known addresses as Boston, Massachusetts; New York, New York; and Arlington, Virginia. The man who was CEO of a company headquartered on Wall Street, who held meetings at a luxury Manhattan hotel, who spent $38,000 at a Virginia car dealership and $26,000 at a New York luxury hotel, is now, as of the filing of a federal securities fraud complaint, simply: location unknown. This is the final insult in the ledger. The people he defrauded know exactly where they are. They are the ones left holding the promissory note.
Legal Receipts: The Complaint in Its Own Words
Every quote below is taken verbatim from SEC v. Jeremy Jordan-Jones, Case 1:25-cv-04297, Document 1, filed May 21, 2025 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Nothing is paraphrased. Read the complaint yourself.
“Jordan-Jones, a self-proclaimed ‘serial entrepreneur,’ made multiple material misrepresentations to a venture capital firm (‘Investor A’) that invested $500,000 in Amalgam Capital Ventures LLC (‘Amalgam’)—a start-up technology company that Jordan-Jones co-founded and for which he was the chief executive officer—for the purported purpose of launching a blockchain-based point-of-sale and payment processing platform called Zeo.” ¶1 — Summary
“Rather than spending Investor A’s funds to launch Zeo, Jordan-Jones misappropriated portions of the funds to pay personal expenses unrelated to Amalgam’s business—including payments to a luxury car dealership, department stores, luxury clothing and accessory brands, and to purchase art.” ¶2 — Summary
“In fact, contrary to Jordan-Jones’ representations to Investor A, Zeo was not operational, and Amalgam’s cash balance was negative, it had no revenue-generating contracts, and its purported assets did not exist.” ¶4 — Summary
“By February 24, 2022, Jordan-Jones had spent all of Investor A’s $500,000 investment, primarily on expenses unrelated to Amalgam’s purported business.” ¶6 — Summary
“Unless Jordan-Jones is restrained and enjoined, he will engage in the acts, practices, transactions, and courses of business set forth in this Complaint or in acts, practices, transactions, and courses of business of similar type and object.” ¶8 — Violations
“Amalgam’s Product Deck falsely claimed that Amalgam had the necessary technical capabilities and infrastructure to launch Zeo. In fact, throughout the Relevant Period, Amalgam did not possess the necessaryThe Department of Justice has a press release on Jeremy Jordan-Jones: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ny-man-charged-using-sham-blockchain-venture-defraud-investors
The SEC also has a thing about Jeremy Jordan Jones’ blockchain scam: https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26309
And like always, Bloomberg Law beat me to the punch in writing an article about this scandal: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/crypto-ceo-spent-startup-cash-on-lavish-lifestyle-sec-suit-says
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