This Week on Crypto Twitter: Elon Musk v Binance, Mr. Goxx Passes Away, Hirst Drops More NFTs

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.

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. 

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. 

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.”

You can view the new collection over on digital art marketplace Heni. 

That’s it for our roundup of crypto Twitter this week. Join us next week for more complaints, memes and announcements.