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 announcements and lengthy broadsides.
The week started with a couple of personnel changes. Animoca Japan—a subsidiary of Animoca, the developer and publisher of popular blockchain game The Sandbox—appointed a new CEO on Monday. The company’s press release calls new chief Daisuke Iwase ”a Web3 native with a proven record both as an entrepreneur and a corporate leader.”
In a parallel notice, Coinbase’s former Head of Exchange Vishal Gupta announced he was stepping down.
1/6 After an amazing 2.5 years at @Coinbase, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move on. As Head of Exchange/Markets @Coinbase, I’m proud of the accomplishments we achieved together
— Vishal K. Gupta (@vishalkgupta) April 10, 2023
Crypto and DeFi enthusiast @nay_gmy did some sleuthing on both the blockchain and Google and wrote a long and plausible thread alleging that something is definitely up with crypto market maker DWF Labs.
12/ …portfolio management which led to 100% losses, and his ties to OneCoin, a $4 billion crypto ponzi.
He was photoed speaking at their Moscow meetups, and as CEO of Huobi Russia at the time, hoped to “exclusively list it on Huobi”. https://t.co/cASA98L06B
— Nay (@nay_gmy) April 10, 2023
Bitcoin maxi Pete Rizzo marked the tenth anniversary of an important event in maxi-HODLing history.
Crypto researcher Molly White provided followers with an extremely long and often hilarious Twitter rant on Tuesday. Her provocation? Andreessen Horowitz’s “latest annual “state of crypto” ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ report.”
but perhaps best of all, they display electricity consumption as… height???
i quote: “PoS Ethereum
Half a penny
0.95 cm
(0.0026 TWh)
WHAT?
have you been sending your people on those ayahuasca retreats again?
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) April 11, 2023
Justin Sun replied to a tweeted report of his arrest in Hong Kong with one numeral. Readers who have been following this weekend roundup will probably recognize this as a reference to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s Twitter code for “Ignore FUD,” which has now been widely memed by the Crypto Twitter community.
The Bruce Lee Estate launched an Ethereum NFT to commemorate the late, legendary martial artist and actor.
On Thursday, Kristin Smith, the CEO of pro-crypto lobbying group The Blockchain Association, tweeted an SOS from Costa Rica. Just hours prior, the group had filed an amicus brief in United States District Court in Austin opposing the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions against crypto privacy mixer Tornado Cash; software company CEO Robert Salvador saw a possible connection between the two events. She later tweeted that she was just “missing an entry stamp” in her passport.
IT consultancy founder and Ethereum fan Edmund Edgar tweeted a picture from a presentation by Amazon Web Services, one of ten cloud hosting providers who together control the majority (57%) of Ethereum nodes. This fact is used for fuel in the argument that Ethereum isn’t really as decentralized as it claims.
On Wednesday, MasterCard announced its MasterCard Artist Accelerator Program with free Polygon-based NFTs giving music/NFT fans various perks while providing musicians participating in the program with the tools and guidance needed to release their own NFTs.
The Mastercard #ArtistAccelerator uses #Web3 music tools like never before. Join and mint your free Mastercard Music Pass #NFT to access exclusive music content and experiences.
Elevating the next generation of music: #priceless.
— Mastercard (@Mastercard) April 12, 2023
OpenAI developer Logan Kilpatrick assured everyone that work has not commenced on GPT-5. It appears his team has heeded the warning by tech luminaries Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. And it’s not just them. There have been a couple of alarming cases surrounding the things GPT-4 is already capable of, including exploiting smart contracts, rudimentarily planning its own escape and falsely accusing people of committing sexual assault—hallucinating a Washington Post article as a citation to substantiate the claim.
Despite what you see here on Twitter and all the hype, GPT-5 is not being trained right now, nor will it be for some time.
GPT-4 took 6 months post training to ensure a safe and aligned model. This is likely to increase for future models.
TLDR; focus on GPT-4!
— Logan.GPT (@OfficialLoganK) April 14, 2023
Finally, on Friday SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce lambasted her own agency and shared her strongly worded dissent against the regulator’s plan to change its definition of “exchange” in order to bring crypto exchanges under its jurisdiction. Pierce argued the move undermines First Amendment protections. She also used the SEC’s own history to point out that the agency was more flexible and open to innovation thirty years ago.
She called the SEC that expanded the definition of “exchange” to create Regulation ATS “a relic of bygone times.”
Chairman Gary Gensler—aka the Sheriff of Cryptoville—must’ve felt that one over in his office.
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