This Week on Crypto Twitter: Bankman-Fried Roughs it in Brooklyn Jail

Most leading cryptocurrencies grew in value slightly over the week, as it was a relatively constructive seven days for the industry: Visa now supports USDC payments on Solana, and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) announced it is utilizing blockchain technology for a digital exchange that will sell tokenized traditional financial assets. 

Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, wrote a thread about the payments giant’s new crypto offerings. He also shed light on its pilot programs with Worldpay and Nuvei. 

At a leadership level, various organizations with global reach continued responding to crypto’s growing adoption, including the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Financial Stability Board (FSB). 

One announcement that made the rounds on Tuesday was the fact that software crypto wallet provider Metamask now facilitates crypto-to-fiat withdrawals. 

Kevin Owocki, the co-founder of open-source funding platform Gitcoin, announced his return that day. 

“My role is to be a network catalyst for all of them—to help everyone synthesize information across the network and grasp the whole elephant of what Gitcoin is,” he told Decrypt. “To be clear, I’m not dictating. I’m bottoms-up gathering intelligence and helping them synthesize their roadmap together.”

Bloomberg ETF expert James Seyffart believes that crypto asset manager Grayscale now has the upper hand against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the company’s ongoing effort to get a Bitcoin spot ETF approved. Last Tuesday, a judge for the federal appeals court told the SEC that its denial of crypto asset manager Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF application would have to be reviewed after the regulator failed to provide a “coherent explanation” for its denial.

Beyond Visa, Circle has many more plans for USDC’s adoption, tweeted co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire on Wednesday. 

Ethereum inventor and company co-founder Vitalik Buterin appeared as a co-author on a paper about “privacy pools”—a concept similar to privacy mixers like the U.S. Treasury-sanctioned Tornado Cash, but one which unambiguously complies with global regulations. 

Southeast Asia’s leading super app, Grab, added a cryptocurrency integration on Thursday, according to Twitter user @0xJaypeg:

Finally, if this report is to be believed—it features credible crypto journalist Tiffany Wong and not-so-credible pharma bro Martin Shkreli—disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is way outside of his comfort zone as he does time in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Centre.