This Week on Crypto Twitter: Xi Jinping NFT Delisted from OpenSea

This week was a relatively slow week when it came to crypto news and the Twittering class. Aside from the SEC moving Valkyrie’s Bitcoin spot ETF application to the review round and a couple of legislative proposals in Washington, there was little hype—reflected in the static price performance of market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum. 

Crypto Twitter matched that sedate energy this week. Apart from Elon Musk's late breaking branding change, there were no shocking revelations or furious public debates between industry figures. Just a few announcements, reflections and interesting bits of information.

On Monday, Peckshield shared some infographics in a thread breaking down the monumental cost of hacks in Web3 in the first half of 2023.

That same day, anonymous crypto trader @AltcoinPsycho criticized the legal team overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy. 

Twitter-only crypto news account @Tier10k shared allegations from the founder of dollar-pegged stablecoin TrueUSD’s progenitor Archblock that TRON chief Justin Sun acquired a lot of TUSD “without stakeholder approval” nearly three years ago. 

 Chainlink announced its new Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol that day. The CCIP announcement helped the LINK token to rally 17% this week. 

An NFT critical of China’s leader Xi Jinping was delisted on OpenSea, according to anonymous NFT trader @Anonymoux2311.

A video made the rounds this week of SEC chair Gary Gensler smiling through the pain after being asked to comment on the verdict of Judge Analisa Torres in the Commission’s case against Ripple, which has been ongoing since December 2020.

Gensler alleged that XRP was a security, Torres said it’s "not neccessarily" a security, depending how it’s sold. For retail buyers, she said it’s not a security at all. 

OpenSea and Rarible have both joined the Opepen train by the looks of it. Opepen is an NFT collection that redraws the famous Pepe meme from squares and circles (and combinations of the two). 

And as noted, Valkyrie’s refiled Bitcoin Spot ETF application made it to the review round, a week after BlackRock’s. Bloomberg journalist James Seyffart pointed out that like BlackRock, Valkyrie lists Nasdaq as its exchange. It should also be noted that Valkyrie also listed its surveillance sharing partner as Coinbase, after BlackRock. Who said copying doesn’t pay off?

On Wednesday, Solana announced the launch of Solang, a protocol that enables developers who are savvy with Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity, to start building on Solana.

Jerry Brito, the executive director of pro-crypto policy lobbyists Coin Centre, explained why you should care about Congress’s expansion of Section 6050I of the tax code.

Finally on Friday, Gabriel Shapiro, the General Counsel at Web3 incubator Delphi Labs, explained in a thread why he’s disappointed by a new 212-page crypto policy bill that was introduced this week by Republican lawmakers.