this week on crypto twitter
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

The industry was more optimistic than usual this week. After nearly two months of weeklong price freezes or crashes, it appeared that things are finally starting to rally again. 

This was also the week that Tesla CEO, institutional Bitcoin HODLer and Dogecoin-maxi Elon Musk finally closed his $44 billion Twitter acquisition bid. His new platform was a hive of commotion following the news; though MicroStrategy executive chairman (and fellow Bitcoin whale) Michael Saylor and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao were the most welcoming. 

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Musk officially took over Twitter on Thursday evening and trolled followers with reports that he was already firing people. The two dejected and believable-looking “employees” pictured below were in fact professional trolls. Although Musk previously floated the idea of firing 75% of Twitter’s staff (around 5,000 people), this week, he appeared to have had cold feet on that proposal.

On Friday, Decrypt covered Crypto Twitter’s first day reactions to the new “Chief Twit” (as Musk now calls himself in his Twitter bio).

In other news…

While everyone was talking about a Web3-leaning tech billionaire taking over the world’s biggest microblogging site, security researcher and Forbes 30 Under 30 winner Jane Manchun Wong reported that Musk’s new acquisition already appears to be developing a crypto wallet. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club co-founder Wylie Aronow, best known by his alias “Gordon Goner,” was not impressed by the recent anti-semetic conspiracy theory hogwash that has been coming out disgraced rap megastar Kanye West over the last month. However, several folks tweeted Aronow about his own connection to a white supremacist writer and publisher. 

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 Later that evening, “Shwaz The Manager” posted a chart showing the exponential up-action of Polygon trading on OceanSea thanks to Reddit’s Polygon-based NFT avatars

In a multiple tweet thread, Solana engineer @0xrooter accused FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of market manipulation. It’s not the first time people have implied that the thirty-year-old billionaire could be using his wealth for clandestine profiteering.

On Tuesday, CNBC tech correspondent Ryan Browne spotted Ripple billboards in central London. 

 Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that gold is really just analog crypto on Wednesday .  

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On Thursday, CZ pointed out that Google is currently enabling a pretty glaring crypto security hazard.

 Finally, an NFT researcher managed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what everyone already knew: few people really like to tip if they can help it. 

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