This Week on Crypto Twitter: NFT Community Wants Creator Royalties Back

There were ubiquitous losses among the leading cryptocurrencies this week as the latest inflation readings prompted fears among investors that the Federal Reserve will keep raising interest rates this year, as it did all of last year.

Prices were the last thing on people’s minds when there was a plethora of other issues on people’s minds this week. M Shadows, the singer for California metal band Avenged Sevenfold, took umbrage on Monday with NFT marketplace OpenSea, after the latter last week stopped enforcing the practice of ensuring creators get a 5-10% cut on the future resale of their work. 

That day, the Financial Times broke a story that Galois Capital, a crypto-focused hedge fund, had closed down after having earlier deposited half of it $200 million in assets-under-management at the time in the now-collapsed FTX exchange. Co-founder Kevin Zhou appeared to be tweeting from the fund’s account.

On Tuesday, NFT news account @NFTnow broke the story of what appears to be an elaborate, multimillion-dollar rug pull. 

Fox Business journalist Eleanor Terrett that day gave an update on the ongoing case against FTX founder and former CEO Samuel Bankman-Fried, who stands charged with eight crimes, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

That day, self-professed “Crypto Data Nerd” @0xKofi expressed his concerns that upstart NFT marketplace Blur, which recently surpassed OpenSea in sales volume, was being dominated by a handful of professional traders. He called the lack of creators’ royalties “short-sighted” in a later tweet. 

Similar numbers to Kofi’s made the rounds again the following day. 

That same day, crypto-friendly Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) introduced a bill proposing to bar the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) directly to individuals, a move which he argues would erode Americans' rights to financial privacy. The CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act would also require the American central bank to report to Congress about its experiments with digital currencies.

Crypto sleuth Isabel Hunter on Wednesday posted the results of an investigation into where the $1 billion in Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens that Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin donated to India’s COVID-19 relief effort actually went. It turns out $58 million of it reached its intended recipients in the end. The rest is a wild story…

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s Hester Pierce, who last week broke ranks to criticize her agency’s crypto custody proposal, tweeted her mind again this week. On Wednesday, she appeared to fire a subliminal shot at her boss, chairman Gary Gensler, who is unpopular in the crypto industry for his regulation-by-enforcement strategy, which has so far involved suing high-profile crypto companies while offering the industry little guidance on how to be compliant. 

That day, Bitcoin bull @ZK_Shark hyped up Bitcoin NFTs, although he conceded between the lines that they have less utility than their Ethereum counterparts. 

On Thursday Ryan Selkis, founder of crypto market intelligence company Messari, announced a 15% cut to his company's workforce. 

Also that day, Montana state’s decision to protect the interests of crypto miners went down a treat on Crypto Twitter. 

On Friday, an NFT researcher who tweets as @punk9059 shared a chart that no doubt worried a lot of Bored Ape Yacht Club fans. 

Finally, Polygon (MATIC) crashed hard this week, shedding 21% in seven days to trade at $1.22 at the time of writing. MATIC began its downward slide on Tuesday when news broke that Polygon Labs was laying off 100 employees (20% of its workforce) after restructuring. Avalanche (AVAX) founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer fired some shots at the rival blockchain. 

Meanwhile, Uniswap founder/CEO Hayden Adams offered technical advice.