This Week on Crypto Twitter: Ripple Wrenches SEC Documents Loose, Mango Markets Hacker Tweets Trading Tips

It was another quiet week for crypto prices. No news is good news, goes the old saying, and this week it proved especially true. It turns out that Bitcoin’s recent flat prices are an indication that it is at the moment less volatile than shares and has been for the whole of October.

On crypto-Twitter, everyone was talking about the Ballon d’Or, an annual French football award for male players. As you can see below, they released Ledger hardware wallets instead of prices. It turns out that the prices are stored in the device in NFT form; very zeitgeist, but not as catchy on your trophy cabinet.

Notorious hacker Avraham Eisenberg – who claimed he was acting in the interests of Mango Markets depositors last week when he stole over $100 million from the crypto trading platform, returned $67 million of it and got away with it – tweeted some hot crypto trading tips on Aave. That is, if you’re a billionaire.

Tom Emmer, a Republican congressman for Minnesota’s 6th District, shared some alarming news about the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) attendance. Exactly how Gary Gensler plans to be sheriff of cryptoville if he can’t even police who is a truant at the SEC?

Twitter comedian Gabriel Haines on Thursday protested the “lack of ‘just up’ in cryptocurrency. Mood.”

The British pound looked a little wild that day.

Magnus Granath, who goes by the Twitter handle “Hodlonaut,” won a court case in Norway against a man named Craig Wright on Thursday. Wright has long claimed to be Bitcoinhis pseudonym creator Satoshi Nakamoto– but Granath and many others have challenged his claims. Holdonaut declared victory to his 71,000 followers.

Also on Thursday, Stuart Alderoty, the general counsel of XRP ancestor Ripple, announced that Ripple’s defense was finally done given access to a trove of internal SEC emails and documents. Ripple has faced a lawsuit from the supervisory authority for nearly two years, after the SEC alleged that XRP was being sold as an unregistered security.

The materials in question – called the “Hinman documents” – concern former SEC director William Hinman and his much talked about speech in 2018 and declared that Ethereum – like Bitcoin – was “sufficiently decentralized” and not subject to federal securities regulation.

On Friday, it emerged that Tron founder Justin Sun may be one of the smoothest movements in crypto.

Bitcoin maxi Cory Swan had a bone to pick with FTX’s CEO that day.

DCCPA

A big topic in the US this week was the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), a bill outlining how the Commodities Futures Trading Commission would regulate the crypto industry.

The DCCPA was introduced by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR) in August and has received support from both Coin base and FTX manager Sam Bankman-Fried to offer an alternative to what many have perceived as a regulation-by-enforcement strategy by the SEC. However, many of the DCCPA’s critics have described it as “DeFi killing” and even has strongly criticized Bankman-Fried to support it.

On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried begged to differ.

Several hours later was a draft copy of the ongoing DCCPA uploaded to GitHub by Gabriel Shapiro, a crypto attorney and general counsel at Delphi Labs.

The Aptos incident

Prior to its launch, blockchain newcomer Aptos was touted as “the most secure, most scalable layer-1 blockchain.” The project was founded by developers who had previously worked on Facebook’s abandoned cryptocurrency Diem. Many hailed Aptos as a potential “Solana killer,” but Monday’s kickoff was fraught with problems enough to turn off even the most reckless of investors .

We covered crypto Twitter’s reaction to the affair the next day. It was widely perceived as chaos. The blockchain appeared to have a far lower transaction throughput than promised, and a large portion of the token supply (49%) was allocated to developers and private investors, giving rise to jokes that Aptos is a blockchain targeting venture capital .

On Tuesday, Aptos co-founder and CEO Mo Shaikh addressed people’s concerns in a thread.

But one investor remained cynical Wednesday.