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By Tim Hakki
Image: Shutterstock
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Bitcoin and Ethereum managed to escape a broader slide this week as the market briefly reclaimed a trillion dollar market capitalization. XRP, Cardano, Chainlink and Cosmos posted the biggest losses among the twenty leading currencies.
The week began on crypto Twitter with Ukraine DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that has so far raised millions for Ukraine’s defense and relief work since the start of the Russian invasion—tweeting that it is setting up “Iran DAO” to support Iranian women, many of whom have been protesting against Iran’s islamist regime since the death of activist Mahsa Amini in police custody on September 16.
That day, hacker Corben Leo made the elusive world of white hat hacking a little more transparent. A white hat hacker is typically a cybersecurity vigilante who finds vulnerabilities in code and exploits them, typically in order to claim the bounty for doing so.
Also on Monday, a cybersecurity researcher named James Edwards published a theory that last month’s $160 million Wintermute hack was an inside job. Edwards’s claims have yet to be corroborated by other blockchain security experts, but some believe it’s certainly a possibility.
On Tuesday, Cameron Winklevoss, who co-founded crypto exchange Gemini with his identical twin Tyler, weighed in on Bitcoin’s recent decoupling from the stock market.
Climate journalist Ketan Joshi on Wednesday posted a pretty damning observation about Bitcoin’s carbon footprint.
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This week some big changes happened at crypto exchange FTX. For a start, Brett Harrison, who joined FTX US as its first president back in May last year, announced he’s stepping down and moving into an advisory role.
Head honcho Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted farewell and sounded optimistic for FTX’s U.S. push.
Akash Pasricha, a reporter for tech industry publication The Information, posted a brief analysis of FTX’s fresh-faced team on Friday.
Terra CEO Do Kwon wants everyone to know he’s not feeling the heat from either the fuzz or his own conscience. When headlines emerged earlier this month saying a South Korean court had issued an arrest warrant for him for violating capital market rules (while the Ministry of Finance was seeking to void his passport), Kwon reassured followers that he’s not on the lam.
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On Wednesday, Kwon responded to rumors that he’d tried cashing out $67 million in Bitcoin a day after the warrant was issued.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is currently knee-deep in a lawsuit against him filed by Twitter for trying to back out of his deal to buy the social media platform. As part of the legal discovery process, courts have released over a hundred pages of correspondence between Musk and various others, including Twitter’s Bitcoin loving co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Turns out even CEOs need help with their homework sometimes. Twitter user Santosh Kumar took a cynical view of Musk’s brevity.
