Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
It was another quiet week for crypto prices. No news is good news, chimes the old saying and this week it proved especially true. It turns out that Bitcoin’s recent flat prices are an indication that it is currently less volatile than equities and has been throughout October.
Over on crypto Twitter, everybody was talking about the Ballon d’Or, an annual French soccer award for male players. As you can see below, they were giving out Ledger hardware wallets instead of awards. Turns out the awards are stored in the device in NFT form; very zeitgeisty, but not so fetching on your trophy cabinet.
Notorious hacker Avraham Eisenberg—who claimed he was acting in the interests of Mango Markets depositors last week when he stole over $100 million from the crypto trading platform, returned $67 million of it, and got away with it—tweeted some hot tips for crypto trading on Aave. That is, if you’re a billionaire.
I’ve been advised aave is perfectly safe so here’s the potential trading strategy. Not financial or legal advice, but if you do make 9 figures on this feel free to send a tip
Note that starting with more initial capital increases success odds and profit percentage pic.twitter.com/HKAF7Y5ogM
— Avraham Eisenberg (@avi_eisen) October 19, 2022
Tom Emmer, a Republican Congressman for Minnesota’s 6th district, shared some alarming news about the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) staff turnout. How exactly does Gary Gensler plan to be the sheriff of cryptoville if he can’t even police truants at the SEC?
A new investigation into @GaryGensler’s regime at the SEC found that peak staff occupancy across all SEC buildings this year has averaged a mere SEVEN PERCENT… Why are the taxpayers funding hundreds of millions of dollars of SEC office space when no one’s showing up to work?
— Tom Emmer (@RepTomEmmer) October 19, 2022
Twitter comedian Gabriel Haines on Thursday protested “the lack of ‘up only’ in cryptocurrency.” Mood.
The Great British Pound was looking a little wild that day.
Magnus Granath, who goes by the Twitter handle “Hodlonaut,” won a lawsuit in Norway against a man named Craig Wright on Thursday. Wright has long claimed to be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto—but Granath and many others have challenged his claims. Holdonaut declared his victory to his 71k followers.
I won. Welcome to law.
— hodlonaut 🌮⚡🔑 🐝 (@hodlonaut) October 20, 2022
Also Thursday, Stuart Alderoty, the general counsel of XRP progenitors Ripple, announced that Ripple’s defense had finally been granted access to a trove of internal SEC emails and documents. Ripple has been facing a lawsuit from the regulator for almost two years, after the SEC alleged that XRP was being sold as an unregistered security.
Over 18 months and 6 court orders later, we finally have the Hinman docs (internal SEC emails and drafts of his infamous 2018 speech). While they remain confidential for now (at the SEC’s insistence), I can say that it was well worth the fight to get them.
— Stuart Alderoty (@s_alderoty) October 20, 2022
The materials in question—dubbed “the Hinman documents”—concern former SEC director William Hinman and his much-publicized speech in 2018 declaring that Ethereum—like Bitcoin—was “sufficiently decentralized” and not subject to federal securities regulation.
On Friday, it came to light that Tron founder Justin Sun might be one of the smoothest movers in crypto.
Bitcoin maxi Cory Swan had a bone to pick with FTX’s CEO that day.
The DCCPA
One big topic in the United States this week was the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), a bill outlining how the Commodities Futures Trading Commission would regulate the crypto industry.
The DCCPA was introduced by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR) in August and has garnered support from both Coinbase and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for offering an alternative to what several have perceived as a regulation-by-enforcement strategy from the SEC. However, many of the DCCPA’s critics have described it as “DeFi killing” and have even heavily criticized Bankman-Fried for supporting it.
On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried begged to differ.
2) I’m optimistic that the Stabenow-Boozman’s bill will provide customer protection on centralized crypto exchanges without endangering the existence of software, blockchains, validators, DeFi, etc.
If I were convinced I was wrong about that, I would not support it.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) October 19, 2022
Several hours later, a draft copy of the in-progress DCCPA was uploaded to GitHub by Gabriel Shapiro, a crypto attorney and general counsel at Delphi Labs.
I have long been a believer in transparency and open discussion of the future of cryptolaw.
Accordingly, I have obtained a copy of a draft of the notorious DCCPA circulating secretly in D.C. and am hereby making it available to the public. https://t.co/JdyomquQi6
— _gabrielShapir0 (@lex_node) October 19, 2022
The Aptos incident
Before launch, newcomer blockchain Aptos was touted as “the safest, most scalable layer-1 blockchain.” The project was founded by developers who had previously worked on Facebook’s abandoned cryptocurrency Diem. Many hailed Aptos a potential “Solana killer,” but Monday’s kickoff was fraught with enough problems to turn even the most heedless investors off.
We covered crypto Twitter’s reaction to the affair the next day. It was widely perceived as a shambles. The blockchain appeared to have a far lower transaction throughput than promised, and a large portion of the token supply (49%) was allocated for developers and private investors, giving rise to quips that Aptos is a blockchain catering to venture capital.
On Tuesday, Aptos co-founder and CEO Mo Shaikh addressed people’s concerns in a thread.
It’s exciting to finally bring Aptos to mainnet.
Acknowledged that it could have gone better. Building a decentralized protocol from the ground up is tough! Aptos is fortunate to have a fantastic community that’s constantly evolving together.
Addressing some concerns below:
— Mo Shaikh (@moshaikhs) October 18, 2022
But one investor was still cynical on Wednesday.
the near categorical rejection of Aptos,
created by ex-Libra devs as a fairly blatant cash grab (and ofc funded by the usual suspects who extract billions from the space),
may be one of the most important social shifts we’ve seen in the space in a while
— DCinvestor.eth ⌐◨-◨ (@iamDCinvestor) October 19, 2022
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Source: https://decrypt.co/112666/this-week-on-crypto-twitter
