This week on Crypto Twitter: Musk Dogeroll’s Twitter, Pumping the Memecoin
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Crypto prices remained quite frozen during the last seven days, except for Dogecoin. DOGE was undoubtedly the star of both Crypto and Twitter (and by extension Crypto Twitter) this week, after the microblogging platform’s famous CEO, Elon Musk, changed the iconic blue bird logo to an image of Doge, the Shiba Inu behind the iconic meme. which inspired the coin.
Musk tweeted the makeover on Monday. He also reminded everyone that he first warmed to the idea last month.
In response to logo change, DOGE balloon 20% in less than an hour, although the rally ran out of steam on Thursday, when the coin posted an intraday loss at over 8%. Twitter has since reverted to the old logo.
Also on Monday, Reflexivity Research co-founder Will Clemente shared some statistics from blockchain analytics firm Kaiko that highlighted the fact that during March, Bitcoin had reached its strongest correlation with gold for more than one year.
This was largely due to a lack of confidence in TradFi institutions after severe liquidity crises swept through banks on both sides of the Atlantic, affecting Credit Suisse, and crypto/tech-friendly banks such as Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. In most cases, governments intervened.
On Tuesday, Uniswap inventor Hayden Adams shared some statistics that showed his exchange outperformed Coinbase through most of 2023 so far. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong jumped on the tweet to inform readers that his exchange had a lot to do with Uniswap’s hefty numbers.
On that day, Mark Lamb, the co-founder of the crypto exchange CoinFLEX, issued an open letter to Bitcoin Evangelist and Bitcoin Cash promoter Roger Ver is offering him an “olive branch” of “two years of free trading on OPNX,” a recently launched claims exchange co-founded by Lamb. Alongside Ver, he included in his tweet Peter Smith, CEO and founder of crypto exchange Blockchain.com, who also reportedly owes CoinFLEX millions.
The “olive branch” refers to ending a long-standing feud between the two. Lamb claims that Ver owes CoinFLEX an outstanding loan, the debt that Lamb is currently claiming is $84 million. Last June, Lamb previously claimed the debt was $47 million.
On Wednesday, MicroStrategy Chairman Michael Saylor went and — yep, you guessed it — bought more Bitcoin.
That day, Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal wrote a multi-tweet thread summarizing the arguments for a prominent legal challenge to the sanctions imposed by crypto transaction privacy mixer Tornado Cash back in August of last year.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who will challenge Biden for the presidency in 2024, posted a long rant against the idea of a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency issued by the Federal Reserve. The problem is that Kennedy either accidentally or intentionally misread the very news article he linked to. The Fed’s new digital payment system “FedNow” is not a CBDC! “Fake news!” as 45 would say.
In real CBDC news, the European Central Bank appeared close to releasing a digital euro this week.
On Thursday, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao made his views on the AI arms race known.
Finally, on Saturday, Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu tweeted a reminder that Meta’s experiment with NFTs is coming to an end.
