This Week on Crypto Twitter: SEC Commissioner Continues to Condemn SEC

By Tim Hakki

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

Bitcoin recrossed the $30,000 support threshold this week and hit a 10-month high. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s lShapella upgrade finally went live, allowing validators to unlock their staked ETH and their rewards accrued so far and freeing up a staggering $34 billion ETH in the process. The coin’s price accordingly hit an 11-month high. 

These successes went largely unremarked in the thick of Crypto Twitter, a terrain densely packed with industry announcements and lengthy broadsides. 

The week started with a couple of personnel changes. Animoca Japan—a subsidiary of Animoca, the developer and publisher of popular blockchain game The Sandbox—appointed a new CEO on Monday. The company’s press release calls new chief Daisuke Iwase ”a Web3 native with a proven record both as an entrepreneur and a corporate leader.”

 In a parallel notice, Coinbase’s former Head of Exchange Vishal Gupta announced he was stepping down. 

Crypto and DeFi enthusiast @nay_gmy did some sleuthing on both the blockchain and Google and wrote a long and plausible thread alleging that something is definitely up with crypto market maker DWF Labs. 

Bitcoin maxi Pete Rizzo marked the tenth anniversary of an important event in maxi-HODLing history. 

Crypto researcher Molly White provided followers with an extremely long and often hilarious Twitter rant on Tuesday. Her provocation? Andreessen Horowitz’s “latest annual "state of crypto"  ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ report.”

Justin Sun replied to a tweeted report of his arrest in Hong Kong with one numeral. Readers who have been following this weekend roundup will probably recognize this as a reference to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s Twitter code for “Ignore FUD,” which has now been widely memed by the Crypto Twitter community.  

The Bruce Lee Estate launched an Ethereum NFT to commemorate the late, legendary martial artist and actor. 

On Thursday, Kristin Smith, the CEO of pro-crypto lobbying group The Blockchain Association, tweeted an SOS from Costa Rica. Just hours prior, the group had filed an amicus brief in United States District Court in Austin opposing the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions against crypto privacy mixer Tornado Cash; software company CEO Robert Salvador saw a possible connection between the two events. She later tweeted that she was just “missing an entry stamp” in her passport. 

IT consultancy founder and Ethereum fan Edmund Edgar tweeted a picture from a presentation by Amazon Web Services, one of ten cloud hosting providers who together control the majority (57%) of Ethereum nodes. This fact is used for fuel in the argument that Ethereum isn’t really as decentralized as it claims.

On Wednesday, MasterCard announced its MasterCard Artist Accelerator Program with free Polygon-based NFTs giving music/NFT fans various perks while providing musicians participating in the program with the tools and guidance needed to release their own NFTs. 

OpenAI developer Logan Kilpatrick assured everyone that work has not commenced on GPT-5. It appears his team has heeded the warning by tech luminaries Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. And it’s not just them. There have been a couple of alarming cases surrounding the things GPT-4 is already capable of, including exploiting smart contracts, rudimentarily planning its own escape and falsely accusing people of committing sexual assault—hallucinating a Washington Post article as a citation to substantiate the claim.

Finally, on Friday SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce lambasted her own agency and shared her strongly worded dissent against the regulator’s plan to change its definition of “exchange” in order to bring crypto exchanges under its jurisdiction. Pierce argued the move undermines First Amendment protections. She also used the SEC’s own history to point out that the agency was more flexible and open to innovation thirty years ago.

She called the SEC that expanded the definition of “exchange” to create Regulation ATS “a relic of bygone times.” 

Chairman Gary Gensler—aka the Sheriff of Cryptoville—must’ve felt that one over in his office.

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