Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Bitcoin recrossed the $30,000 support threshold this week and hit a 10 months long. In the meantime, the lShapella upgrade on Ethereum has finally gone live, allowing validators to unlock their staked ETH and their rewards accumulated so far and release a surprise. $34 billion ETH in process. The price of the coin hit a 11 months long.
These achievements have gone largely unnoticed in the thick of Crypto Twitter, a land full of industry announcements and long broadsides.
The week started with some personnel 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 chief Daisuke Iwase ”a native Web3 with a proven record as an entrepreneur and a corporate leader. “
In the same announcement, Coinbase’s former Head of Exchange Vishal Gupta announced that he was resigning.
Crypto and DeFi enthusiast @nay_gmy did some sleuthing on the blockchain and Google and wrote a long and believable thread saying that crypto market maker DWF Labs is definitely up to something.
Bitcoin maxi Pete Rizzo marks the tenth anniversary of an important event in the history of maxi-HODLing.
Crypto researcher Molly White gave followers an extremely long and often hilarious Twitter rant on Tuesday. His challenge? Andreessen Horowitz “recent annual “state of crypto” ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ report.”
Justin Sun responded to a tweet report of his arrest in Hong Kong with a number. Readers following this roundup over the weekend may recognize this as a reference to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s Twitter code for “Ignore the FUD” which is currently being widely meme’d by the Crypto Twitter community.
The Bruce Lee Estate launched an Ethereum NFT in memory of the late, legendary martial artist and actor.
On Thursday, Kristin Smith, the CEO of the pro-crypto lobbying group The Blockchain Association, tweeted an SOS from Costa Rica. Just a few hours later, the group had filed an amicus brief in the United States District Court in Austin opposing US Treasury Department sanctions against crypto privacy mixer Tornado Cash; The software company CEO Robert Salvador saw a possible connection between the two events. He later tweeted that he just “no entry stamp” in his passport.
IT consultancy founder and Ethereum fan Edmund Edgar tweeted a picture from a presentation on Amazon Web Services, one of the ten cloud hosting providers which together control the majority (57%) of Ethereum nodes. This fact is used to fuel the argument that Ethereum is not real as decentralized as it claims.
On Wednesday, MasterCard announced this MasterCard Artist Accelerator Program with free Polygon-based NFTs providing music/NFT fans with a variety of perks while providing musicians who participate in the program with the tools and guidance needed to release their own NFTs.
OpenAI developer Logan Kilpatrick assured everyone that work has not yet begun on GPT-5. It appears his team is listening the warning of tech luminaries Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. And it’s not just them. There are a couple of alarming cases surrounding the things GPT-4 can do, including leveraging smart contracts, planned his own escape and lies accusing people to commit sexual assault—hallucinating a Washington Post article as a citation to substantiate the claim.
Finally, on Friday, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce blamed her own agency and shared her strong words of opposition against the regulator’s plan to change its definition of “exchange” to bring crypto exchanges under its jurisdiction. Pierce justified the move undermines First Amendment protections. He also used the SEC’s own history to point out that the agency was more flexible and open to innovation thirty years ago.
He called the SEC expanding the definition of “exchange” to do so ATS Regulation “a relic of bygone times.”
Chairman Gary Gensler—aka the Sheriff of Cryptoville– must have felt that one in his office.