After Bitcoin’s all-time high boosted traders to altitudes never reached before, the past few days included plenty of surreal and heady moments on Crypto Twitter.
First, remember Leonardo Di Caprio’s dramatic “I’m not leaving!” scene from The Wolf of Wall Street?If not, fear not: the real wolf, a trader called Jordan Belfort, is no different in real life. On Monday, Belfort proclaimed his love of NFT Twitter after sharing his purchase of CryptoPunk #6033. “NOW THAT I’M HERE, I’M NOT FUCKING LEAVING!” he bellowed from his keyboard.
The more the merrier! Or so you might think. After Belfort announced his stake in the revered Punk community, several notable NFT related personas politely asked the wolf to “please leave”, speculating that Belfort could be building up hype before he releases his own NFT collection.
On the same day, NFTs captured the zeitgeist yet again when American actress Reese Witherspoon thanked her Twitter supporters for a number of NFT recommendations ahead of next week’s NFT NYC event - specifically those created by the burgeoning class of female artists and creatives. “So many amazing projects to discover,” she tweeted.
Thanks to everyone who has been sending me NFTs… So many amazing projects to discover. @HelloSunshine wants to highlight & support female creators in every space and that is why we will be at #NFTNYC!
Buried under Tuesday’s voracious price action, Pepe NFT aficionado Matt Garcia tweeted about a discreet “Sothebyverse” auction for a RarePepe NFT called Pepenopolous. He said the NFT, created in 2016, is “much rarer” than the nine Alien CryptoPunks created in 2017 by Larva Labs, since there are just seven RarePepe NFTs.
Garcia said, “considering that a rare punk sold for $12 Mill, this Pepe - rarer and more OG than that punk - is still extremely cheap.” On Wednesday, the NFT later sold for $3.65 million to a pseudonymous collector called “Rhincodon”, who also bought a rare “Solid Gold” Bored Ape for $ 3.4 million.
Next up, Shiba Inu token. As the self-proclaimed "DogeCoin Killer" steadily increased its position on CoinMarketCap global rankings throughout the week, so too did an uptick of 'How it started vs How it's going' tweets. They spread like weeds, with several loyal SHIB hoarders sharing before and after shots of their wallets.
Others, like CryptoCobain, joked about the absurd profits realized by anyone and everyone who invested the meme coin at least one year or more ago. The highest recorded profit shared by Morning Brew recorded one wallet gaining a total of $5.7 billion from an initial $8,000 investment in August 2020.
This wallet bought roughly $8,000 of $SHIB last August.
On Friday, the memetic madness that surrounded Shiba Inu and DOGE was quickly displaced with the Ethereum community, who celebrated a new all-time high of $4,416 by apeing harder into ETH. ETH hit the record two days after the network completed its Altair upgrade.
PSA: This transaction (and a number of others) are not a bug or an exploit, they are being done with “Flash Loans” (https://t.co/Q5bDL1QkWP). In a nutshell, someone bought this punk from themself with borrowed money and repaid the loan in the same transaction. 1/2 https://t.co/EgS7aiga3j
Overall, and although details of the “sale” have been clarified, Punk #9998 has claimed a seemingly insurmountable top spot amongst Larva Labs list of Punks ranked by their top sales by Ether value.
Throughout the week, the team behind Yearn Finance took potshots at Aave, while Aave contributors tried their hardest to soil the reputations of Yearn contributors. All of this span out of a $130 million hack on Cream Finance, a protocol that had integrated with Yearn. Cream was one of several Yearn-integrated protocols to have been hacked over the past few years.
Yearn's developers, in turn, claim that Aave is vulnerable to the same exploit. Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, told Decrypt that things are okay now. That said, “We build together but it’s always tricky once everyone is looking at their own communities," said Kulechov.
What larks will next week in Crypto Twitter bring?
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
This Week on Crypto Twitter
Decrypt's weekend roundup of tweets from the past week that led the crypto conversation.
In a year that has pushed crypto to unprecedented heights of cultural and political prominence, this week brought some of the cycle’s most uncanny moments yet—thanks to Donald Trump.
On Monday, just one day after the former president survived an apparent second assassination attempt, he hosted Rug Radio’s Farokh Sarmad, a prominent Crypto Twitter personality, to discuss digital assets policy at his Mar-a-Lago estate. (Disclaimer: Rug Radio is Decrypt’s sister company.)
Due to the wild timing,...
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Degens had plenty to sink their teeth into last week on Crypto Twitter, with surprise developments emerging from numerous high-profile projects in the space.
At the top of the week, Friend.tech, the once-red-hot decentralized social network with financial incentives, announced that development of the project had effectively ceased after months of flagging momentum.
Admin and ownership parameters have been set to 0x000...000 to prevent any changes to...
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
While Crypto Twitter can often be brutally black-and-white when it comes to narrativizing major events, this week saw the industry splinter into shades of gray after Telegram CEO Pavel Durov broke a days-long silence following his release from police custody in France.
In a lengthy letter to the public on this week—posted first to Telegram and then to Twitter—Durov weighed in for the first time on his arrest and indictment last week by French authori...