This Week on Crypto Twitter: Did Israeli Regulators Know How Insolvent Celsius Was? And Did Bitboy Really Let Atozy Off the Hook?

By Tim Hakki

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

It was an underwhelming week; the prices of all leading cryptocurrencies went down over the last seven days, but not by much. There were relatively fewer stories of crypto adoption, or regulation, or fresh disasters from the ongoing crypto winter, than usual.

Over on crypto Twitter, things were more animated. On Monday, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, shared a table of how crypto regulations are developing among G20 states.

But how much is Armstrong really celebrating? A graph shared that day by blockchain research group Arcane Research shows that the amount of Bitcoin that has left exchanges has hit new highs since Terra’s collapse.

Billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lambasted U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler for not providing crypto lenders with guidelines clear enough to give feedback on.

Maya Zehavi, a founding board member of the Israeli Blockchain Industry Forum, spilled the beans that Israeli regulators may have known more about the insolvency of the now-bankrupt crypto lender Celsius than U.S. authorities, since Celsius is partly run from offices in Tel Aviv. Back in March, former Celsius CFO Yaron Shalem was one of ten suspects arrested on suspicion of massive crypto fraud, alongside crypto mogul Moshe Hogeg.

YouTube crypto commentator Ben Armstrong, who brands himself “BitBoy Crypto,” announced on Wednesday that he’s dropping his lawsuit against Erling Mengshoel Jr., aka Atozy, because he never intended the case to be made public. Crypto podcaster Cobie tweeted that the actions of Bitboy’s lawyers tell a different story.

Maggie Love, the co-founder and director of cloud computing and storage provider W3BCLOUD, asked an important question: How decentralized is Ethereum if most of its nodes are hosted on cloud services, and most of those nodes are under the control of Amazon Web Services?

NFT Twitter

On Monday, Farokh Sarmad, the founder of the crypto-centered Rug Radio, was taken aback at the sale price of a Pudgy Penguin NFT. Crypto sleuth ZachXBT smoothly exposed Sarmad’s tweet as a shameless pump.

NFT investor @franklinisbored accidentally dropped a lot of ETH on 60 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. That’s not just a first-world problem. It’s a Web3 first-world problem.

ZachXBT returned on Wednesday with an impressive exposé on Cameron Redman, a man who hacked various notable Twitter accounts in the NFT space, including NounsDAO and leading crypto artist Beeple.

Finally, software engineer Molly White thinks NFT projects are generally in way over their heads when it comes to making video games.

Tornado Cash

The U.S. Treasury Department's move to ban crypto transaction privacy tool Tornado Cash was still bringing fresh revelations on crypto Twitter. Crypto reporter Brady Dale pointed out that Tornado Cash’s Wikipedia page appeared to be suppressed on Google. (As it turned out, the page was created after the sanction, and Wikipedia routinely blocks search engine crawls on new pages.)

Finally Jerry Brito, the executive director of crypto think tank Coin Center, said the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control likely doesn’t have the authority to go after Tornado Cash.

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