Executioners, Celsius and prison for BitBoy?

Crypto News: We give you an overview of what has happened in crypto this week. While the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is showing no signs of failure in his crypto crackdowns, Gary Gensler finds himself making headlines for other reasons.

Footage emerged this week, recorded at a 2021 conference where Gensler sang the praises of Italian computer scientist Silvio Micali. Micali, for those who don’t know, is the founder of Algorand.

What does Gary Gensler eat?

Yes, Algorand, the project that the SEC called out as a security when it imposed a Wells Notice on the Bittrex exchange this week.

In fact, Gensler’s pro-crypto credentials go back a few years. Of Micali, he said: “Silvio Micalis Algorand, he’s a Turing Award winner at MIT I work with … Silvio has an amazing technology, it has performance, you can create Uber on top of it.”

And this wasn’t an isolated compliment (or shill), he appears to have spoken highly of Algorand at several public events since at least 2019.

Despite his anti-crypto stance at the SEC, Gensler is also listed as an instructor on an MIT Open Learning course, “Blockchain and Money.” All of this is quite at odds with his public expressions of displeasure towards the crypto industry.

News about crypto coins

The top gainer this week was OKB, which rose almost 15%. Caspar (CSPR) rose 7%, while (ZIL) was up 6.5%.

At the other end of the charts, Stacks (STX), fell 20%. And Conflux (CFX) and Loopring (LRC) fared slightly better, both falling around 19%.

Celsius breathes easily

Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius must have breathed a sigh of relief when Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade finally went live on April 12. The Shapella hard fork is a combination of an execution-layer upgrade called Shanghai and a consensus-layer upgrade called Capella, and allowed withdrawals of ETH staked on the network .

On-chain investigator Lookonchain reported that Celsius withdrew 6,521 stakes of Ethereum – worth over $13 million at the time. A drop in the ocean compared to the amount owed to creditors, but we’re sure it was appreciated.

Crypto News – Socially

Bitcoin Diary Dates

Bitcoin traders, get ready. It emerged this week that the US government plans to release 41,500 Bitcoin seized from criminal organizations into the market this year.

The first batch, consisting of almost 10,000 BTC, was sold on March 14 this year, with a total value of $215 million. That day there was a significant drop in price. You can find the remaining four release dates here, if you want to plan your strategy.

BitBoy broke up?

Everyone’s favorite crypto YouTuber Ben Armstrong, aka BitBoy, has ruffled feathers again. This time he failed to appear in court for allegedly harassing lawyer Adam Moskovitz.

Moskowitz represents a proposed class of investors who are bringing legal action against a number of celebrities who worked with FTX, including BitBoy.

Armstrong and others are accused of promoting the crypto exchange FTX and misleading investors without disclosing compensation.

Moskowitz claims Armstong harassed him with “endless phone calls, tweets and emails to him privately and publicly by posting abusive and threatening posts on Twitter, YouTube and other social media.”

Armstrong denies the allegations and tweeted a photo of himself spending some downtime on the beach. His lawyer, Jason Rindenau, told the court that Armstrong could appear in a month when he will be in Miami for the annual Bitcoin conference.