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

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 for the foreseeable future.

The week began with a DAO hack that severely disrupted the NFT market. Azuki DAO was formed by disgruntled Azuki NFT holders who banded together to coordinate a lawsuit demanding a $38 million refund from the Azuki’s creator, Chiru Labs, after its most recent release appeared to shamelessly plagiarize the original collection and do even better.

The DAO itself was exploited for tens of thousands of dollars and appeared to have a knock-on effect on Yuga Labs’s iconic blue chip Bored Ape and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collections, tweeted blockchain journalist Colin Wu.

Affected by the Azuki incident, the NFT market fell sharply again in the past 24h. BAYC fell 16% and fell below 30 ETH, MAYC fell 20% and fell below 5 ETH, and Azuki fell 11% and fell below 6 ETH. The overall market value of the NFT market has fallen by 53% to 3.33million ETH in…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 3, 2023

Beeple, the digital artist who currently holds the record for the most expensive NFT sold at auction—$69.3 million for his 10,000 Days collection—resurfaced in a headline in The Art newspaper. He donated a censored NFT of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried having an orgy with himself to an Italian art gallery. Molto bene!

The Twitter account for crypto trading platform Bitfinex was seen dispensing some serious hopium on Monday.

The current #BTC 30-31k level is critical. This zone served as a rebound point in Jan 2021 after a 35% depreciation, leading to the $64,800 peak. https://t.co/wtjPwPhal9

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) July 3, 2023

The next day, Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss shared an open letter to Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert who, according to Winklevoss, owes users of Gemini’s Earn program around a billion dollars. This feud has appeared in our Twitter roundup before, but this week Winklevoss channeled it into its logical conclusion: the courtroom. He warned Silbert about it three days in advance.

Silbert may have just put his head in the sand, because it appears he didn’t respond to Winklevoss’s offer to negotiate. On Friday, Winklevoss posted a lengthy lawsuit thread with screenshots of his filing, alleging some very underhand stalling tactics on Silbert’s part.

1/ Today, @Gemini filed a lawsuit against @DCGco and @BarrySilbert personally in New York court. Barry was not only the architect and mastermind of the DCG and Genesis fraud against creditors, he was directly and personally involved in perpetrating it.

— Cameron Winklevoss (@cameron) July 7, 2023

Billionaire Shark Tank star, Dallas Mavericks owner, and high-profile crypto fan Mark Cuban jumped on a thread by crypto skeptic lawyer John Reed Stark in order to praise Japan’s regulatory approach to crypto. The pair exchanged essays; Stark replied: “To me, crypto is not innovation – it’s mathematical computational blather typically dressed up by trickery and marketing theater.”

You should read up on how Japan deals with regulation. https://t.co/yHCVwZAqvG

When FTX crashed, NO ONE IN FTX JAPAN LOST MONEY.

If the USA/SEC had followed their example by setting clear regulations that required the separation of customer and business funds and clear… https://t.co/Msvn9o9PCU

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) July 4, 2023

On Friday, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was swatting away rumors that his workforce was shrinking. The exchange and its CEO was recently sued by the SEC for alleged securities violations.

4. More FUD about some departures. Yes, there is turnover (at every company). But the reasons dreamed up by the “news” are completely wrong.

As an organization that has grown from 30 to 8000 people in 6 years, from 0 to the world’s largest crypto exchange in less than 5 months…

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) July 6, 2023

That day, Polygon Labs’ president Ryan Wyatt announced he’s leaving his position at the end of the month, but he’s staying adjacent to both the industry and Polygon.

The founder of DeFi lending protocol Swivel Finance, Julien Traversa, noticed that something’s up with the now-defunct stablecoin issuer Fei Protocol’s Discord. It was taken over by the Superior Court of California for San Francisco County!

Finally, machine learners can now pay each other in Bitcoin. Should we be worried?

Artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT have learned how to send bitcoin payments.

To put this in other words…

Machines can pay other machines.pic.twitter.com/j9VtLxpJc8

— Documenting ₿itcoin (@DocumentingBTC) July 7, 2023