This Week on Crypto Twitter: Sam Bankman-Fried Won't Stop Talking, Coinbase Challenges Apple

Also, the Caribbean island of Dominica is issuing the “world’s first national coin,” entitling holders to Dominican passports.

By Tim Hakki

Dec 4, 2022

5 min read

Image: Shutterstock

this week on crypto twitter — Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

It was a slow news week in the industry, perhaps a cooling-off period after the overheated cycle both during and after FTX’s demise. There were still stories of the contagion spreading—most notably lender BlockFi, which on Monday announced it was filing for bankruptcy—but the general atmosphere on crypto Twitter this week was more sedate than usual.

On Monday, blockchain analytics firm Glassnode announced that crypto’s shrimps have been buying the dip since FTX went bust. They’re probably not making shrimp cocktails out of it though.

#Bitcoin Shrimps (< 1$BTC) have added 96.2k $BTC to their holdings since FTX collapsed, an all-time high balance increase.

This cohort now now hold over 1.21M $BTC, equivalent to 6.3% of the circulating supply.

Pro Dashboard: https://t.co/HpXwoav6wO pic.twitter.com/7U4oPAAakD

— glassnode (@glassnode) November 28, 2022

Former TIME President Keith Grossman on that day announced he was leaving his media giant to take up a new position as President of Enterprise at crypto payments startup MoonPay. It’s not such a surprising career transition in light of the fact that Grossman oversaw the magazine’s first steps in NFTs and the metaverse.

After 3.5+ yrs at @TIME, I wanted to inform you that I have accepted the role of President, Enterprise at @MoonPay.

I would like to thank @benioff, Lynne Benioff & the great team @TIME for the opportunity to be a steward of this phenomenal brand’s storied evolution.🙏❤️

(1/17)

— Keith A. Grossman ⏰ (@KeithGrossman) November 28, 2022

Ethereum inventor and co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Tuesday denounced governance token speculation.

The notion of "governance rights" as a narrative for why a token should be valuable is pathological. You're literally saying "I'm buying $X because later on someone might buy it from me and a bunch of other people to twist the protocol toward their special interests"

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 29, 2022

NSFW crypto fan @DegenSpartan ranted about Huobi and TRON’s new partnership with Dominica to create the “world’s first national token DMC (Domina Coin),” which will entitle holders to get passports issued by the Caribbean country—it all sounds like a very lax Golden Passports scheme.

interesting proposition

i do think over the next few decades we will see 2 extremes:

a bunch of smaller countries openly pvping to try and poach over tax paying HNWIs

to the unhappiness of the rest of the countries trying to tax the shit out of everyone that cant migrate away

— 찌 G 跻じ 𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙥𝙖𝙞 of the 𝙃𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙞 (@DegenSpartan) November 29, 2022

Is the singularity near? Greg Osuri, the founder of open-source cloud computing marketplace Akash shared an eerie screenshot with a code-savvy chatbot. Why pay a hacker, huh?

AI (ChatGPT) can exploit a solidity smart contract.

We can pack up now. https://t.co/BVzJaLxEcq

— Greg Osuri (@gregosuri) December 1, 2022

SBF breaks silence: reactions

This week, disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave several interviews this week, notably on Tiffany Fong’s YouTube channel and on Wednesday, he made a public appearance at The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, followed up by a Thursday interview on Good Morning America and an evening Twitter Spaces attended by more than 39,000 people.

Jesse Powell, former CEO of centralized exchange Kraken, who has been one of Bankman-Fried’s toughest critics, continued to lay into him.

You're a pro F1 driver. You take your race car off the track and drive it 200mph through a farmer's market in a residential neighborhood killing 20 people. Is "I wasn't paying attention to the signs, speed limit, the RISKS." exonerating? No. As a pro, you are even more culpable. https://t.co/n2LywcPsSQ

— Jesse Powell (@jespow) December 2, 2022

Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary is still pitching his tent in SBF’s camp though.

Kevin O'Leary:

"... I see everything... I'm a bit advocate of Sam. He has two parents who are compliance lawyers."

"If there's ever a place I could be, that I'm not going to get in trouble, it's gonna be at FTX."https://t.co/gtSCuqxBHc

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 1, 2022

On Friday, House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters thanked SBF for being “candid” when talking about FTX. Waters (D-CA) has also invited him to Washington to testify before the committee. The bipartisan hearing will take place on December 13. She was previously caught on camera blowing him a kiss; SBF has a reputation for making friends in high places.

.@SBF_FTX, we appreciate that you've been candid in your discussions about what happened at #FTX. Your willingness to talk to the public will help the company's customers, investors, and others. To that end, we would welcome your participation in our hearing on the 13th.

— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) December 2, 2022

Coinbase vs Apple

On Thursday, Coinbase announced that Apple had blocked the release of an update for its mobile application until the exchange disabled its NFT transfer feature. Coinbase railed at Apple’s clunky and insatiable policy in a thread.

For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible. Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried.

— Coinbase Wallet (@CoinbaseWallet) December 1, 2022

Metamask developer Dan Findlay stood by Coinbase.

Oh I'll absolutely stand in solidarity here, I assume MM and every other wallet is next. I'm ready to dump the Apple ecosystem. The 30% tax is an abuse of monopoly. @tim_cook has donned the Big Brother screen. https://t.co/tzcA0Ol658

— Dan Finlay 🦊💙 (@danfinlay) December 1, 2022

Maya Zehavi, a founding board member of the Israeli Blockchain Industry Forum, also ranted about the measure, pointing out Apple’s hypocrisy in not taxing TradFi payments apps the same.

Apple’s overreach of trying to tax crypto transactions is uncovering how broad their definition of OS jurisdiction they think they have.
According to Apple any financial tx down through an OS is a Apple taxable event. Now imagine they try to apply that to Zelle or Venmo… https://t.co/ZUlPW82NrH

— Maya Parody Parody (@mayazi) December 1, 2022

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