This Week on Crypto Twitter: SEC Commissioner Continues to Condemn the SEC
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Bitcoin re-crossed the $30,000 support threshold this week and hit a 10 months high. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s lShapella upgrade finally went live, allowing validators to unlock their staked ETH and the rewards they’ve earned so far, releasing a staggering 34 billion dollars ETH in the process. The coin’s price consequently hit a 11 months high.
These successes went largely unnoticed on Crypto Twitter, a terrain densely packed with industry announcements and long broadsides.
The week started with a couple of staff changes. Animoca Japan – a subsidiary of Animoca, the developer and publisher of the popular blockchain game The Sandbox – appointed a new CEO on Monday. The company’s press release calls the new boss Daisuke Iwase “a Web3 native with a proven record both as an entrepreneur and company manager.”
In a parallel announcement, Coinbase’s former CEO Vishal Gupta announced his resignation.
Crypto and DeFi enthusiast @no_gmy did some searching on both the blockchain and Google and wrote a long and plausible thread claiming that something is definitely up with crypto market maker DWF Labs.
Bitcoin maxi Pete Rizzo marked the tenth anniversary of an important event in maxi-HODLing history.
Crypto researcher Molly White treated followers to an extremely long and often hilarious Twitter thread on Tuesday. Her provocation? Andreessen Horowitz’s “last annual “state of crypto” ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ report.”
Justin Sun responded to a tweeted report of his arrest in Hong Kong with one number. Readers who have been following this weekend’s recap will likely recognize this as a reference to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s Twitter code for “Ignore FUD“, which has now been widely mememed by the Crypto Twitter community.
Bruce Lee Estate launched an Ethereum NFT to commemorate the late, legendary martial artist and actor.
On Thursday, Kristin Smith, executive director of the pro-crypto lobby group The Blockchain Association, tweeted an SOS from Costa Rica. Just hours before, the group had filed an amicus brief in US District Court in Austin challenging US Treasury Department sanctions against crypto privacy mixer Tornado Cash; the software company’s CEO Robert Salvador saw a possible connection between the two events. She later tweeted that she was just “missing an entry stamp” in her passport.
IT consultant-founder and Ethereum fan Edmund Edgar tweeted an image from a presentation of Amazon Web Services, one of the ten web hosting providers which together control the majority (57%) of Ethereum nodes. This fact is used as fuel in the argument that Ethereum is not really as decentralized as it claims.
On Wednesday, MasterCard announced its MasterCard Artist Accelerator Program with free Polygon-based NFTs provide music/NFT fans with various benefits while providing musicians participating in the program with the tools and guidance needed to release their own NFTs.
OpenAI developer Logan Kilpatrick assured everyone that work has not begun on GPT-5. It seems his team has followed suit the warning by tech luminaries Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. And it’s not just them. There have been a couple of alarming cases surrounding the things GPT-4 is already capable of, including utilize smart contracts, rudimentarily plans his own escape and erroneously accusing people to commit sexual assault – hallucinate one Washington Post the article as a citation to support the claim.
Finally, on Friday, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce outed her own agency and shared hers strongly worded dissent against the regulator’s plan to change its definition of “exchange” to bring crypto exchanges under its jurisdiction. Pierce argued for the move undermines First Amendment protections. She also used the SEC’s own history to point out that the agency was more flexible and open to innovation thirty years ago.
She called the SEC expanding the definition of “exchange” to create Regulation ATS “a relic of bygone times.”
Chairman Gary Gensler—aka the sheriff of Cryptoville– Must have felt it over there in his office.
