Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Although it was the first two following weeks of losses this year, Crypto Twitter was largely unaffected. Instead, a number of other topics took center stage this week.
Monday a crypto-savvy lawyer tweeting under the handle @MetaLawMan took aim at Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler for his agency’s opaque approach to crypto and for the SEC’s bellicose regulation-by-enforcement strategy. Three tweets into his thread, he summarized the main points of his criticism of Gensler.
The SEC made the rounds again later that day on Legal Twitter when attorney Lisa Rubin commented on the agency’s lawsuit against Terraform Labs, the company that created the collapsed algorithmic stablecoin UST. Later in the thread, Rubin tweeted: “The strangest argument is that UST is a security because it can be traded for other securities. Remember that these are only allegations, a court has not ruled on these allegations.”
The next day, crypto scout @ZachXBT tweeted news of a multi-million dollar heist at Algorand.
On the same day, @ZachXBT responded to a multi-tweet thread by blockchain researcher Ivor Igamberdiev accusing trading firm Jane Street Group of having a massive hand in the collapse of UST. The blockchain detective agreed, sharing a screenshot in which he appears to have messaged Terra CEO Do Kwon around the time of UST’s collapse, arguing that Jane Street Group’s trading contributed to the spectacular depeg.
Popular crypto exchange Coinbase announced that day a new political crypto lobbying initiative called “Crypto 453” that aims to guide policymakers toward drafting pro-crypto policies if and when they begin formulating comprehensive crypto legislation.
NFT collection Bitcoin Punks posted huge volumes on Tuesday, according to NFTstatistics.eth.
Dogecoin creator Billy Markson – who is a fervent no-coins— jumped on a thread started by MicroStrategy chairman/Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor to argue that if Bitcoin isn’t a security, then neither is Dogecoin.
Also that day, Visa’s crypto chief Cuy Sheffield took himself by surprise with a Reuters article saying the payments giant was halting its crypto run. Sheffield argued that no matter how the industry evolves, blockchain will certainly have a place in the next generation of commercial fintech.
On Thursday, John Rising, co-founder of the open source user-friendly blockchain developer toolkit Stackup, raved about the usability of the latest Ethereum Improvement Proposal.
Finally, Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter CEO and Bitcoin/Dogecoin investor Elon Musk appeared to have gone cold on crypto.
Pssh! Musk was interested in AI long before he dabbled in crypto.
