A week can often feel like a lifetime on Crypto Twitter, a place where a cacophony of voices vie to bury each other in a sea of complaints, announcements and controversial ideas. Lucky for you, Decrypt is on hand to roll up all the notable Crypto Twitter happenings into one bite-sized missive.
The first major event happened on Tuesday, when Elon Musk took it upon himself to represent the Binance contingent of the Doge army, who are currently unable to withdraw their Dogecoin on the exchange due to a serious technical error following a Dogecoin network upgrade on November 10.
Binance issued a statement the following day saying that “due to the complex nature of this issue” it expects Dogecoin withdrawals to be suspended for 10-14 days.
Elon Musk then mentioned Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in a tweet: “Hey @cz_binance, what’s going on with your Doge customers? Sounds shady.” CZ responded that the issue was to do with Dogecoin’s new wallet. He also threw a not-so-subtle shade on Musk by linking a Guardian story about a Tesla car software safety glitch.
Elon, we are pretty certain it is an issue with the latest #doge wallet. We are in communications with the devs. Apologies for any inconvenience that may have caused you.
Musk replied with a Binance complaint of his own: “I don’t use Binance (tried at one point, but signup was too many hoops to jump through), so no inconvenience to me personally. Just raising this issue on behalf of other Doge holders.” Musk’s a Coinbase man, after all.
On Wednesday, Binance tweeted that customers have to wait another week for Dogecoin withdrawals as it has to “rebuild the wallet entirely”.
Now onto a sad bit of news. Mr. Goxx, the crypto trading hamster, has passed away. At the height of his trading, three months after he started, Mr. Goxx was up 30%, outperforming financial titans like Warren Buffett and Cathie Wood.
We feared this day like no other and are truly shocked for it to happen just now.
In deep sorrow, we have to announce the loss of our beloved furry friend.
You’re probably wondering how a rodent achieves anything in finance.
Mr Goxx was raised by a lecturer who wanted to demonstrate the randomness of crypto trading.
His cage was adjoined with a “trading desk” consisting of a hamster wheel and two tunnels labelled “buy” and “sell”. The wheel’s rungs were labelled with the names of thirty different cryptocurrencies. When Mr. Goxx completed his workout and picked a tunnel to go back to his bed/food bowl, his owner would read off the name of the cryptocurrency on which Goxx had landed, and buy or sell it depending on which tunnel the hamster returned. On Thursday, the crypto world lost a major player. RIP Mr. Goxx.
Also on Thursday, Adidas announced a partnership with Coinbase on Twitter. The sportswear giant tweeted the news: “We’ve partnered with @coinbase. Probably nothing.” Adidas’s new Coinbase deal has something to do with the metaverse, but not much else is known at this stage. It also came to light the day before that Adidas has some territory in the open-world blockchain game The Sandbox, though whether it bought the digital land or was granted it is another mystery.
Finally, some hip hop NFT news rounded out the week. Snoop Dogg announced his debut NFT “DECENTRAL EYES DOGG”. It’s a 1/1 collaboration with crypto artist Coldie and it will be auctioned on Superare.
I am excited to announce DECENTRAL EYES DOGG. A collaborative 1 of 1 that @Coldie conceptualized and created in collaboration with me! This piece will evolve over time!Make Art n Make Change. The work will will be auctioned on @SuperRare and at Art Basel. https://t.co/LSalLMbF5L
Attention-grabbing British conceptual artist Damien Hirst announced another collection of 10,000 NFTs. The artwork is based on his widely panned cover for Drake’s sixth studio album Certified Lover Boy, released back in September. Work from the new collection, which is dubbed “Great Expectations” will be airdropped to everyone who owns one of the previous 10,000 NFTs he released earlier this year in a collection called “The Currency”.
Hirst tweeted: “Everything done well is art. With Drake’s support and blessing, I’ve created this free Thanksgiving gift for all currency NFT holders.”
Great Expectations
(1/10) Everything done well is art. With Drake’s support and blessing, I’ve created this free Thanksgiving gift for all currency NFT holders; it’s loosely based on the album cover I made for Drake. pic.twitter.com/IlB0EjpGrg
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...