This Week on Crypto Twitter

Sep 24

Bitcoin on Venezuela money Bolivar banknotes. Image: Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: 11,000 Venezuelan Soldiers Bring Down Jailhouse Bitcoin Mining Operation

Slow news made for good news as yet another static week for the market has reinforced the sense that the prices of leading cryptocurrencies have somewhat stabilized this year. It was also a quiet week over on Crypto Twitter. It began with a huge apology from crypto-friendly game engine developer Unity after the company substantially revised its controversial Unity Runtime Fee last week, much to the anger of developers over on social media. We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and...

Sep 17

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Idris Elba Falls Flat, and Are We Near the End of Binance?

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt For those who keep an eye on crypto prices, it was yet another fairly uneventful week as market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum—and most other leading cryptocurrencies—barely budged. Among the top thirty cryptocurrencies, Stellar’s XLM was the only one to post notable losses. Last week, XLM rallied 10% off the back of a tweet promising “something cool” in ten days. Lo and behold, ten rotations of the earth later, on Tuesday, and Stellar delivered a high-...

Sep 10

Photo illustration by Decrypt. Images: Jim Henderson and FTX

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Bankman-Fried Roughs it in Brooklyn Jail

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Most leading cryptocurrencies grew in value slightly over the week, as it was a relatively constructive seven days for the industry: Visa now supports USDC payments on Solana, and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) announced it is utilizing blockchain technology for a digital exchange that will sell tokenized traditional financial assets. Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, wrote a thread about the payments giant’s new crypto offerings. He also...

Aug 27

This Week on Crypto Twitter: XRP Gains Wiped Out, Seychelles Exchanges Ramp Up KYC, Circle Expands

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt It was a relatively quiet week over on Crypto Twitter, mirroring the market's slow news cycle this week. Still, that meant some much-needed recovery time for virtually every leading cryptocurrency. On Monday, Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu broke news that ByGet had become the third Seychelles-based crypto exchange to ramp up its Know-Your-Client (KYC) policy. While there were no political developments in the Seychelles to speak of, global reg...

Aug 13

This Week on Crypto Twitter: PayPal Announces Stablecoin While SEC Saves Face in Ripple Lawsuit

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Undoubtedly, the talk of Cryptoville this week was PayPal’s announcement that it would be releasing an Ethereum-based dollar-pegged stablecoin called PayPal USD (PYUSD) as a native payment method integrated into the platform. The fact that an American payments giant like PayPal is openly embracing a technology that is still unregulated was taken as a bullish sign among crypto fans–the market response was cautiously optimistic, breaking six weeks of i...

Aug 6

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at his parents' historic home on the Stanford University Campus. Photo illustration.

This Week on Crypto Twitter: SBF Accused of Executing Massive Rug Pull from House Arrest

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt While most of the leading coins posted light to moderately heavy losses over the week due to the scarcity of regulatory or institutional news, crypto Twitter was ablaze with rumors that disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had rug pulled a memecoin from house arrest. Scimitar Capital analyst Alex, who tweets using the handle @thiccythot_, analyzed on-chain activity to piece together the crazy story of the week’s most scandalous rug pull. It hap...

Jul 30

Twitter's pre-X San Francisco Headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco in 2022. Image: Takako Phillips/Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Will Musk’s Everything App 'X' Tap Crypto for Payments?

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt It was another underwhelming week for crypto markets as they appeared to cautiously price in the effects of yet another interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday. While this change was only 25 basis points, U.S. interest rates are now the highest they’ve been in 22 years. Over on Twitter—or should we call it X? Let’s stick with Twitter for now—many voices reacted loudly to Elon Musk’s rebrand, the first step towards his envisioned “every...

Jul 23

Image: Diego Thomazini / Shutterstock.com

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Xi Jinping NFT Delisted from OpenSea

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt This week was a relatively slow week when it came to crypto news and the Twittering class. Aside from the SEC moving Valkyrie’s Bitcoin spot ETF application to the review round and a couple of legislative proposals in Washington, there was little hype—reflected in the static price performance of market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum. Crypto Twitter matched that sedate energy this week. Apart from Elon Musk's late breaking branding change, there were no...

Jul 16

This Week on Crypto Twitter: XRP Scores Courtroom Victory Against SEC, Cryptoverse Explodes

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt The firestorm was first kindled when an obscure crypto intelligence firm called Arkham tweeted that it was opening an intelligence exchange where people could post bounties to incentivize blockchain analysts to identify the people or companies behind any wallet or transaction. Crypto Twitter went veritably ape and lambasted the idea. Announcing The World’s First On-Chain Intelligence Exchange Buy and sell information on the owner of any blockchain w...

Jul 9

Images: SALT/Rena Schild/Shutterstock.com

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Winklevoss Calls on Silbert to Negotiate, Sues Him 3 Days Later

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt The prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum this week remained trapped in amber due to a dearth of both adoption or regulation stories. The week also saw the launch of Meta’s Threads, an Instagram-based microblogging site that looks suspiciously like Twitter. Don’t expect to see This Week on Crypto Threads just yet, however. In spite of the mass onboarding (ten million users in a few hours), Twitter will probably remain the Cryptoverse’s platform of choice fo...

Jul 2

Images: Coinbase/Frederic Legrand/COMEO/ Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey Blast Apple’s App Store Crypto Clampdown

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt It was a relatively quiet week in the cryptoverse. The most significant bit of adoption news came from Buckingham Palace on Thursday when British King Charles signed his assent to a reform bill that now recognizes crypto trading as a regulated activity. Similarly, European parliamentarians announced their own crypto-focused regulatory reforms. On Tuesday 27/06 @EP_Economics negotiators struck a dealon changes to Capital Requirements Regulation & Dire...

Jun 25

BlackRock is a global investment management company. Image: Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: More BlackRock Banter as Ripple and Crypto.com Grow Globally

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt From the market perspective, crypto’s biggest talking point this week was a carry over from last week: top investment firm BlackRock’s decision to apply to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF. While the SEC has swatted away such proposals like flies for years, there’s a sense that this one’s different. It helps that BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager with a whopping $9 trillion in assets under manag...

Jun 18

Images: Kathy Hutchins and Frederic Legrand/Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: The SEC Registration Hallucination

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Crypto markets recovered a tad this week on news that U.S. inflation appears to have cooled off. General clamor continued on Twitter over the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) crackdown of the sector, in which the regulator filed two high-profile lawsuits against exchange titans Coinbase and Binance last week. On Monday, Fox journalist Eleanor Terrett shared a transcription of remarks by SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who maintains that cryptocurre...

Jun 4

Bitcoin Standard author Saifedean Ammous joins El Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele's crypto team. Image: The National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) of El Salvador

This Week on Crypto Twitter: White House Mining Tax Scrapped, Bukele Hires Bitcoin Expert

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Markets finally began to grow a little this week after four weeks of stagnation. There wasn’t a whole lot of news to drive prices either way. In the U.S., regulators continued to hold the line on their assertion that existing rules are sufficient for the industry. Meanwhile, another domestic crypto exchange—Gemini—continued expanding offshore. The most politically important tweet from Crypto Twitter this week came from Congressman Warren Davidson, who...

May 21

This Week on Crypto Twitter: SEC Dragnet Drags On

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Crypto prices flatlined this week as the battle between U.S. regulators and the blockchain industry dragged on with no substantive developments. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler once more insisted that his agency is ready to help crypto companies register, even though none have been able to so far. Both Gensler and the SEC’s lawyers continued advancing the agency’s position that existing securities laws form clear enough guide...

May 14

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Musk Welcomes New Twitter CEO to Get to X—the Everything App

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt The most important tweet on Crypto Twitter this week was an announcement on Friday by Twitter’s owner and CEO Elon Musk naming his replacement, Linda Yaccarino, as the platform’s new chief executive. Musk will continue serving Twitter as CTO and executive chairman. Yaccarino left her job as head of advertising at NBCUniversal on Friday morning to take on the job of helping Musk transition Twitter into X, his envisioned “everything app" that will inc...

May 7

This Week on Crypto Twitter: CZ Calls Out Justin Sun, Sun Apologizes

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt The Fed’s mid-week announcement of the tenth consecutive interest rate hike since March 2022 capped crypto’s growth this week, leaving many leading cryptocurrencies level with—or a little south of—the prices they were trading at this time last week. On Monday, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao flagged Tron CEO Justin Sun’s $56 million token transfer to the exchange, suggesting the Tron founder might use the funds to farm a soon-to-be-launched token cal...

Apr 23

Famous American rap singer Deandre Cortez Way, known as "Soulja Boy." Image: Shutterstock

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Tom Emmer Grilling Gensler Goes Viral, US and EU Regulators Make Moves

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt This week, markets were at the mercy of macroeconomic factors as some at the Fed have indicated another rate hike is due next month. Crypto was also subjected to intense scrutiny by regulators in both the U.S. and EU. Bitcoin and Ethereum led the downturn, with similar seven-day losses of over 10% impacting many leading cryptocurrencies. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) crackdown on crypto made headlines on Monday when the regulat...

Apr 15

This Week on Crypto Twitter: SEC Commissioner Continues to Condemn SEC

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Bitcoin recrossed the $30,000 support threshold this week and hit a 10-month high. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s lShapella upgrade finally went live, allowing validators to unlock their staked ETH and their rewards accrued so far and freeing up a staggering $34 billion ETH in the process. The coin’s price accordingly hit an 11-month high. These successes went largely unremarked in the thick of Crypto Twitter, a terrain densely packed with industry announceme...

Apr 9

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Musk Goes Full Dogecoin, Pumping the Memecoin

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Crypto prices remained pretty frozen over the last seven days, except for Dogecoin. DOGE was undoubtedly the star of both Crypto and Twitter (and by extension, Crypto Twitter) this week, after the microblogging platform’s illustrious CEO, Elon Musk, changed the iconic blue bird logo to a picture of Doge, the Shiba Inu behind the iconic meme that inspired the coin. Musk memed the makeover on Monday. He also reminded everyone that he first warmed to the...

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