Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Although the upward price action this week was slower than the last, many of crypto’s leading coins still posted notable gains over the last seven days, after Credit Suisse became the latest catastrophe to roil the banking world, driving investors towards 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 manufacturer and electronics giant Sony for “cross platform” NFT trading, according to Twitch streamer Brycent.
Also that day, a screenshot of an abusive email by BitBoy, alias Brian Armstrong, made the rounds. BitBoy is one of several YouTube influencers who were collectively slapped with a $1 billion lawsuit last week for allegedly advertising unregistered securities to their viewers in the form of yield-bearing accounts offered by FTX.
In the U.S. 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, arguing that CBDCs were an “Orwellian payments 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 mainnet that day.
Economics and finance analyst John Paul Koning took issue with Coinbase’s claims that it’s fully compliant.
He wasn’t alone this week. Payments and digital money regulation/compliance expert Simon Lelieveldt wrote in a multi-tweet thread that Coinbase has pulled similarly evasive maneuvers with Netherlands’ regulators.
El Salvador’s Bitcoin-maxi authoritarian president Nayib Bukele tweeted an announcement of some vital incoming legislation. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao applauded him.
The banking crisis has had a pronounced effect on Bitcoin’s liquidity, plunging it to 10-month lows as market makers pull their liquidity off exchanges after two of the biggest fiat-to-crypto on-ramps—Silvergate’s SEN and Signature Bank’s Signet—suffered as a result of the banks they were attached to getting shut down. Bitcoin-maxi Dylan LeClair made light of the situation.
Footage of Do Kwon leaving 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 pegged to the U.S. dollar through smart contracts that maintained value by burning Terra’s other cryptocurrency, LUNA. UST went into a death spiral last May, rapidly depleting 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 U.S. regulators but has been repeatedly passed over. The recent collapse and subsequent bailout of several crypto friendly banks that proved to be insolvent has added insult to injury to 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 got totally overrun by crypto scam bots.
The Skull of Satoshi
Greenpeace highlighted the Bitcoin network’s relatively high electricity consumption in a new campaign that features a cool piece of art by artist Von Wong called “Skull of Satoshi”.
Bitcoiners ended up loving the image. One of them proposed that it was worth at least one Bitcoin. Von Wong himself claimed he was paid less than “a fraction of that.”
He later tweeted he was glad to be involved in the conversation and that Bitcoin environmentalists were adding depth to his understanding of the topic.
Von Wong later tweeted that transitioning the network to the less consumptive but more centralized Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system (like Ethereum) went against the ethos of Bitcoin. However, a more energy-efficient update for the world’s favorite cryptocurrency is still needed.
Maxis snub Bitcoin Miami
Bitcoin maxis this week were up in arms about the fact that Ordinals—a protocol which brings non-fungible digital assets to Bitcoin—would be making an appearance at the Bitcoin Miami conference.
Some of the less zealous Bitcoin fans took this as the best form of promotion for the conference.
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