By Tim Hakki
6 min read
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Like the rest of tech Twitter, crypto Twitter spent most of this week obsessed with Elon Musk’s will-he-or-won't-he-buy-the-platform saga. On Monday, the microblogging giant accepted Musk’s $44 billion takeover bid.
That put El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukkele, in a festive mood. Like Musk, Bukele is bullish on Bitcoin—so much so that he made it legal tender in El Salvador last summer. (Research published this week suggests Salvadorans haven’t embraced the currency as much as he'd hoped.)
Ethereum CEO Vitalik Buterin was less celebratory. He warned his followers that Twitter was beginning to feel like an Elon Musk echo chamber, although he later clarified he wasn't throwing shade on the Tesla CEO.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey was in a Radiohead kinda mood at the news. Now focused on his blockchain-pivoting payments company Block, he took a break to tweet his support, calling Musk “the singular solution I trust.”
Before leaving Twitter in November, Dorsey proposed creating a decentralized standard for social media platforms. In 2019, he funded an initiative called “Bluesky,” led by Twitter’s then-CTO Paral Agrawal, to work toward this goal.
In August 2021, Dorsey tapped Jay Graber, creator of events social network Happening, to take over as project lead from Agrawal, who became Twitter's CEO after Dorsey’s departure.
Graber confirmed the next day that Musk’s takeover changes nothing. Bluesky’s official Twitter account also reiterated the project’s independence.
On Thursday, Musk did some public brainstorming.
MicroStrategy CEO and fellow Bitcoin HODLer Michael Saylor pitched in with an idea to disincentivize spambots.
Musk must have felt like a bigger winner than Charlie Sheen that day. Not content with running merely Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX, he briefly pondered adding a global beverage producer to his growing portfolio.
Earlier today, Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of tech VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted a video of Warren Buffett laying into Bitcoin. Musk thought it made a pretty ironic ad.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem was another popular topic on crypto Twitter this week. On Monday, the project’s official Instagram page was hacked and used to scam $2.8 million in NFTs from followers.
Still, a multimillion dollar hack did little to derail the rapidly expanding BAYC franchise. On Tuesday, the Twitter team for Otherside—the BAYC-inspired metaverse project—announced a drop of 55,000 “Otherdeed” NFTs on Saturday.
The NFTs sold out in 24 hours. While their purpose in the upcoming metaverse isn’t entirely clear, many believe them to be virtual land deeds for the game.
Crypto investor DCinvestor.eth remarked on the eye-watering amount of Ether getting burned in gas fees by the project.
The week wasn’t entirely about BAYC and Musk though. An account called @cryptofelon on Thursday posted the unique story of how they bought a crypto domain for $16 and then negotiated its sale for more than $400,000 after initially receiving a $500 offer.
On Saturday, crypto blogger Wong Joon Lan alerted us to the plight of Malaysian NFT artist Fahmi Reza, whose biting satire of Malaysian royalty has previously gotten him arrested. Now Reza found his fundraising website has been blocked by DNS tampering from multiple Malaysian Internet Service Providers.
No doubt Crypto Twitter will throw up plenty of surprises in time for next week’s column. One thing is certain though: We haven’t heard the last from Musk. Will Musk’s beloved DOGE actually become Twitter’s native currency?
“Sure,” said another crypto-savvy billionaire, “why not DOGE?”
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