This Week on Crypto Twitter: Discord Backs Out of Crypto, Twitter Wades In

This week on crypto Twitter: Jimmy Fallon joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT craze, Discord CEO Jason Citron hinted that the messaging platform will integrate with crypto, then backtracked a few days later, AMC CEO Adam Aron flaunted the success of AMC’s new crypto payments options, and many more things happened besides.

Read on to see our weekly roundup of Twitter’s cryptosphere.

On Monday, Discord CEO Jason Citron tweeted a screenshot of what appeared to be a MetaMask wallet connectivity feature inside the popular messaging platform’s user settings. The tweet was a response to a blog post tweeted by blogger Packy McCormick, who discussed the idea of a “Discord-native crypto wallet” — an idea that first appeared on a Discord user survey back in August. McCormick was sold on the idea. 

However, Citron backtracked days later, tweeting that Discord has “no current plans to ship” this MetaMask integration. Reasons for Citron’s U-turn are unclear, but it could be due to the amount of backlash in responses to his initial tweet. Many of Discord’s core audience of gamers greeted the potential crypto update with cynicism, citing environmental concerns, and the oft-repeated taunt that crypto is a “pyramid scheme”. 

On Wednesday, Twitter announced it was setting up a crypto team to explore decentralized apps. The team will be led by Berlin-based crypto engineering leader Tess Rinearson, who announced her new role on the platform the day the news broke, saying: “I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined Twitter, to lead a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and other decentralized technologies — including and going beyond cryptocurrencies.”

Details of exactly how Twitter plans to get into dApps are scarce, however, the company mentioned that it is ““We’re exploring ways to incorporate decentralized technologies into our products and infrastructure”.

On Wednesday’s “Tonight Show” Jimmy Fallon interviewed NFT artist Beeple, who earlier this year made crypto history when he sold an NFT at auction for $69.3 million.  Fallon told the artist that he bought his first NFT — an ape — which Beeple quickly surmised was a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.

The following day, Fallon changed his Twitter profile pic to his Bored Ape Yacht Club avatar and tweeted “Permission to come a bored?”

That same day, the CEO of movie theatre chain AMC flaunted the success of his company’s decision to start accepting crypto for payments. Adam Aron told his 210,600-plus followers: “We proudly now accept: drumroll, please… Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin. Also Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal. Incredibly, they already account for 14% of our total online transactions! Dogecoin next.”

Meanwhile, Coinbase added buttons to its applications enabling users to share price charts or images of their portfolios on Twitter or Instagram profiles. The move pivots Coinbase toward financial platforms like Venmo or Public, which have long integrated social media features into their applications. 

On Friday, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called ConstitutionDAO announced plans to buy an extremely rare first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution, which is being auctioned through Sotheby’s later this month. 

The DAO has quickly attracted support, gaining 4,688 followers on Discord and 5,561 on Twitter at the time of writing. It’s also getting a helping hand from crypto exchange FTX US. The exchange’s president Brett Harrison tweeted: “FTX will gladly exchange the crypto raised by @ConstitutionDAO into dollars to facilitate purchase of The Constitution at @Sothebys!”

On Saturday, decentralized lending protocol CREAM Finance announced its compensation plan to users affected by an exploit that cost the network $130 million in crypto. It’s the third hack this year to hit the protocol. It published this announcement on Twitter and Medium: 

“We will distribute 1,453,415 CREAM tokens to impacted users. We are utilizing remaining CREAM tokens within the treasury, and removing the project team's remaining CREAM token allocation. There will be no further CREAM allocations to the team.”

While the payout will be proportional to users’ positions at the time of the exploit, it won’t quite cover their losses. At today’s rate of $56.95 to a CREAM token, the promised payout amounts to $82,771,984, which is almost $50 million short.

Finally, today’s news: The biggest upgrade to the Bitcoin network since 2017 went live today. Taproot boosts Bitcoin’s transaction privacy and facilitates the implementation of lightweight smart contracts. It means transactions that require multiple signatures are now cheaper and easier to execute. Chaincode Labs engineer Pieter Wiulle tweeted: “The real work will be in building wallets/protocols that build on top of it to make use of its advantages. I'm very excited to see where that takes us.”

So it’s been a dense week for news on crypto Twitter. No doubt with a new crypto-savvy team, the Twitter platform itself will become one-to-watch for dapp innovations in the near future. Discord probably won’t be going there soon, though.