This Week on Crypto Twitter: Lawyers Lay Into SEC, Elon Musk Cools on Crypto

By Tim Hakki

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

Even though it was the first two consecutive weeks of losses this year, Crypto Twitter was largely unfazed. Instead, a host of other topics took center stage this week.

On Monday, a crypto-savvy lawyer who tweets under the handle @MetaLawMan took aim at Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler for his agency’s opaque approach to crypto and for the SEC’s belligerent regulation-by-enforcement strategy. Three tweets into his thread he summarized the salient points of his criticism of Gensler. 

The SEC made the rounds again later that day on Legal Twitter when lawyer Lisa Rubin commented on the agency’s lawsuit against Terraform Labs, the company that created the collapsed algorithmic stablecoin UST. Later in the thread, Rubin tweeted: “The strangest argument is that UST is a security because it can be traded for other securities. Remember, these are just allegations, a court has not ruled on these claims.”

The following day, crypto sleuth @ZachXBT tweeted news of a multimillion-dollar heist on Algorand. 

That same day, @ZachXBT replied to a multi-tweet thread by blockchain researcher Ivor Igamberdiev that accused trading firm Jane Street Group of having a massive hand in the collapse of UST. The blockchain detective concurred and shared a screengrab in which he appears to have messaged Terra CEO Do Kwon around the time of UST’s collapse arguing that Jane Street Group’s trading contributed to the spectacular depeg.

Popular crypto exchange Coinbase that day announced a new political crypto lobbying initiative called “Crypto 453” which aims to guide policymakers toward drafting pro-crypto policies if and when they do start formulating comprehensive crypto legislation.

NFT collection Bitcoin Punks posted mammoth volumes on Tuesday, according to NFTstatistics.eth.

Dogecoin creator Billy Markson—who is a fervent no-coiner—jumped on a thread started by MicroStrategy chairman/Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor to argue that if Bitcoin isn’t a security, then Dogecoin isn’t either. 

Also that day, Visa’s head of crypto Cuy Sheffield took umbrage with a Reuters article saying that the payments giant was halting its crypto drive. Sheffield argued that however the industry evolves, blockchain will certainly have a space in the next generation of commercial fintech. 

On Thursday, John Rising, co-founder of the open-source user-friendly blockchain developer toolkit Stackup enthused about the user-friendliness of the latest Ethereum Improvement Proposal. 

Finally, Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter CEO and Bitcoin/Dogecoin investor Elon Musk appeared to have grown cold towards crypto. 

Pssh! Musk was into AI long before he was into crypto.

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