This Week on Crypto Twitter: Bitcoin Miami Mocked by Maxis, Bitcoiners Embrace Anti-Bitcoin Art

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

Although the rally this week was slower than last, many of crypto’s leading coins were still posted remarkable gains over the past seven days, after Credit Suisse became the latest disaster to rock the banking world, driving investors toward riskier assets as a potential hedge against the contagion.

They weren’t the only ones piling into blockchain assets. On Tuesday, it emerged that PlayStation maker and electronics giant Sony was “cross platform” NFT trading, according to Twitch streamer Brycent.

Also that day, a screenshot of an abusive email from BitBoy, alias Brian Armstrong, made the rounds. BitBoy is one of several YouTube influencers who were collectively hit with one $1 billion lawsuit last week for allegedly advertising unregistered securities to its viewers in the form of yield-bearing accounts offered by FTX.

In the US this week, three prominent Republicans rebelled against the idea of ​​a central bank digital currency (CBDC), essentially a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency that would be issued by the Federal Reserve. Warren Davidson, a Republican representative for Ohio’s 8th congressional district, tweeted his protest on Tuesday, claiming that CBDCs were an “Orwellian payment system.” He attached a letter he wrote to his colleagues urging them to reject a CBDC.

Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum handled more transactions than the Ethereum network that day.

Economics and finance analyst John Paul Koning took issue with Coinbase’s claims that it is fully compliant.

He was not alone this week. Payment and digital money regulation/compliance expert Simon Lelieveldt wrote in a multi-tweet thread that Coinbase has pulled similarly evasive maneuvers with Dutch regulators.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin-maxi authoritarian President Nayib Bukele tweeted an announcement about some important incoming legislation. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao applauded him.

The banking crisis has had one pronounced effect on Bitcoin’s liquidity, dropping it to a 10-month low as market makers pull liquidity from exchanges after two of the biggest fiat-to-crypto runs – Silvergate’s SEN and Signature Bank’s Signet – suffered as a result of the banks they were linked to . to be closed. Bitcoin maxi Dylan LeClair made light of the situation.

Footage of Do Kwon leaving the court in handcuffs made the rounds on Friday. Kwon is the founder and CEO of Terraform Labs. He created the disastrous so-called “algorithmic stablecoin” UST, which was linked to the US dollar through smart contracts that maintained its value by burning Terra’s other cryptocurrency, LUNA. UST went into a death spiral last May, quickly draining the Terra ecosystem of capital and spawning a wave of high-profile crypto company bankruptcies throughout the rest of the year.

Also on Friday, crypto bank Custodia shared a message to the Federal Reserve. Custodia has applied to be overseen by US regulators, but has repeatedly been passed over. The recent collapse and subsequent rescue of several crypto-friendly banks that turned out to be insolvent has added insult to injury for Custodia, which claims to be fully solvent and compliant.

NBC reporter Ben Collins highlighted the fact that an account linked to California Congresswoman Grace Napolitano was completely overrun by crypto fraud bots.

The skull of Satoshi

Greenpeace highlighted the Bitcoin network’s relatively high power consumption in a new campaign featuring a cool artwork by artist Von Wong called the “Skull of Satoshi”.

Bitcoiners ended up loving the image. One of them suggested that it was worth at least one Bitcoin. Von Wong himself claimed he was paid less than “a fraction of that”.

He later tweeted that he was happy to be involved in the conversation and that Bitcoin environmentalists added depth to his understanding of the topic.

Von Wong later tweeted that the network’s transition to the less consuming but more centralized Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system (like Ethereum) was against Bitcoin’s ethos. However, a more energy-efficient update is still needed for the world’s favorite cryptocurrency.

Maxis Snub Bitcoin Miami

Bitcoin maxis this week were up in arms about the fact that Ordinals – a protocol that brings non-fungible digital assets to Bitcoin – would appear at the Bitcoin Miami conference.

Some of the less ardent Bitcoin fans took this as the best form of promotion for the conference.