This Week on Crypto Twitter: NBA Stars Buy Bitcoin, Vitalik Welcomes Trolls, FWB DAO Ejects a Co-Founder

In last week’s Crypto Twitter roundup, we included, “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria’s open announcement that she was “jumping into the #NFT space.” She had asked her 7 million followers for advice on where to start, and the replies were predictably crammed with folk shilling her their NFT projects.

She didn’t dally. On Monday, she changed her profile picture to her first NFT purchase: a World of Women NFT. World of Women is a collection of illustrations by artist Yam Karkai “featuring 10,000 artworks of diverse and powerful women” according to the description. (Karkai made Decrypt’s list of the most innovative NFT artists of 2021.)

Longoria joins Reese Witherspoon as a World of Women holder. And whether it was thanks to Longoria buying in, or thanks to the collection signing with Guy Oseary for Hollywood reputation (just as Bored Ape Yacht Club has), the price floor surged this week.

Andre and Klay go crypto

NBA legend Andre Iguodala announced on Monday that he and Golden State Warriors teammate Klay Thompson are taking part of their salaries in Bitcoin via mobile payment service Cash App. 

The two NBA stars join a long list of pro athletes who have put part of their salary into Bitcoin, including Aaron Rodgers, Odell Beckham Jr., Russell Okung, and Trevor Lawrence. (FTX investor and pitchman Tom Brady has said he’d “love to request that,” but hasn’t.)

Not everyone applauded the move. University of Toronto law professor Anna Su responded: “love you and Klay but hope you can use your platform to advocate for more sustainable crypto mining practices. no future if crypto ends up destroying the planet.”

Vitalik asks to get roasted

On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin created some fun for all when he swallowed his pride and shared some of the cruellest roasting he’s received on Twitter, and also asked for more: “What are the craziest and most unhinged criticisms of me you've seen on twitter or elsewhere?”

Some of the jokes were very dark, like one from user @FirstFedora: “His destiny was to shoot up a school, alas he failed.” Many respondents teased Vitalik’s skinny frame, like this from @XRPmemeguy: “The most positive part of Vitalik going to jail is he will finally get 3 square meals a day.” 

But our favorite was this harmless wordplay gag on “italic” Buterin, which was our meme of the week in the Decrypt weekend debrief email on Saturday.

Buterin also posted a series of polls asking his Ethereum-loving followers which altcoins they’d use in a world without Ethereum. In the first round, the options were Bitcoin, USDC, Solana, and Cardano. Surprisingly, Cardano beat out Bitcoin with 43% of the 600,000 votes to Bitcoin’s 38%. 

Buterin then asked the same question in another poll, this time with different options: TRON, Binance Coin, Neo, and China’s digital yuan (CNY). TRON was the clear winner, netting 51% of the 359,000 votes, more than double any other option’s votes. 

FWB boots one of its own

Tuesday brought what could be a touchstone moment for the future of how decentralized organizations deal with issues around member conduct—and it all played out on Twitter.

It started when 25-year-old Cooper Turley, a mega-influencer in DAO land, tweeted: “What you do after 8PM shows how badly you want to win.” Jackson Dame, a fellow crypto influencer who does community and content for Rainbow wallet, called out Turley’s tweet for promoting unhealthy work-life balance—something Turley’s tweets had been criticized for in the past. Dame called Turley a “bad influence.” (Turley is also an advisor to PubDAO, the media DAO Decrypt launched with other partners.)

Dame then found and tweeted some of Turley’s tweets from high school, which included repeated use of the n-word and homophobic slurs. 

Turley apologized for the tweets on Wednesday morning, saying, “Back then, I developed a terrible habit of casually using racial and homophonic slurs to fit in.” He wrote “they were unacceptable and deeply hurtful. I was young, stupid and careless. That does not discount how horrible these remarks were, and still are.”

By Friday, the popular DAO Friends With Benefits (FWB), a crypto-backed social club that Turley helped create, announced that after a committee vote, Turley’s removal from the DAO’s leadership and also his suspension as a member for two “seasons.”

FWB’s actions met with their own criticism from those who feel it was a step too far for a decentralized crypto organization to boot a member over tweets from nine years ago.

Turley has announced he will take a step back from the many DAOs he’s involved in, but this isn’t likely to be the end of the discussion around this event. It raises crucial questions for how crypto communities will deal with similar controversies.