Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
The prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum this week remained trapped in amber due to a dearth of both adoption or regulation stories.
The week also saw the launch of Meta’s Threads, an Instagram-based microblogging site that looks suspiciously like Twitter. Don’t expect to see This Week on Crypto Threads just yet, however. In spite of the mass onboarding (ten million users in a few hours), Twitter will probably remain the Cryptoverse’s platform of choice for the foreseeable future.
The week began with a DAO hack that severely disrupted the NFT market. Azuki DAO was formed by disgruntled Azuki NFT holders who banded together to coordinate a lawsuit demanding a $38 million refund from the Azuki’s creator, Chiru Labs, after its most recent release appeared to shamelessly plagiarize the original collection and do even better.
The DAO itself was exploited for tens of thousands of dollars and appeared to have a knock-on effect on Yuga Labs’s iconic blue chip Bored Ape and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collections, tweeted blockchain journalist Colin Wu.
Beeple, the digital artist who currently holds the record for the most expensive NFT sold at auction—$69.3 million for his 10,000 Days collection—resurfaced in a headline in The Art newspaper. He donated a censored NFT of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried having an orgy with himself to an Italian art gallery. Molto bene!
The Twitter account for crypto trading platform Bitfinex was seen dispensing some serious hopium on Monday.
The next day, Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss shared an open letter to Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert who, according to Winklevoss, owes users of Gemini’s Earn program around a billion dollars. This feud has appeared in our Twitter roundup before, but this week Winklevoss channeled it into its logical conclusion: the courtroom. He warned Silbert about it three days in advance.
Silbert may have just put his head in the sand, because it appears he didn’t respond to Winklevoss’s offer to negotiate. On Friday, Winklevoss posted a lengthy lawsuit thread with screenshots of his filing, alleging some very underhand stalling tactics on Silbert’s part.
Billionaire Shark Tank star, Dallas Mavericks owner, and high-profile crypto fan Mark Cuban jumped on a thread by crypto skeptic lawyer John Reed Stark in order to praise Japan’s regulatory approach to crypto. The pair exchanged essays; Stark replied: “To me, crypto is not innovation – it’s mathematical computational blather typically dressed up by trickery and marketing theater.”
On Friday, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was swatting away rumors that his workforce was shrinking. The exchange and its CEO was recently sued by the SEC for alleged securities violations.
That day, Polygon Labs’ president Ryan Wyatt announced he’s leaving his position at the end of the month, but he’s staying adjacent to both the industry and Polygon.
The founder of DeFi lending protocol Swivel Finance, Julien Traversa, noticed that something’s up with the now-defunct stablecoin issuer Fei Protocol’s Discord. It was taken over by the Superior Court of California for San Francisco County!
Finally, machine learners can now pay each other in Bitcoin. Should we be worried?
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