This Week on Crypto Twitter: Sam Bankman-Fried Won’t Stop Talking, Coinbase Challenges Apple

It was a slow news week in the industry, perhaps a cooling-off period after the overheated cycle both during and after FTX’s demise. There were still stories of the contagion spreading—most notably lender BlockFi, which on Monday announced it was filing for bankruptcy—but the general atmosphere on crypto Twitter this week was more sedate than usual.

On Monday, blockchain analytics firm Glassnode announced that crypto’s shrimps have been buying the dip since FTX went bust. They’re probably not making shrimp cocktails out of it though. 

Former TIME President Keith Grossman on that day announced he was leaving his media giant to take up a new position as President of Enterprise at crypto payments startup MoonPay. It’s not such a surprising career transition in light of the fact that Grossman oversaw the magazine’s first steps in NFTs and the metaverse. 

Ethereum inventor and co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Tuesday denounced governance token speculation. 

NSFW crypto fan @DegenSpartan ranted about Huobi and TRON’s new partnership with Dominica to create the “world’s first national token DMC (Domina Coin),” which will entitle holders to get passports issued by the Caribbean country—it all sounds like a very lax Golden Passports scheme. 

Is the singularity near? Greg Osuri, the founder of open-source cloud computing marketplace Akash shared an eerie screenshot with a code-savvy chatbot. Why pay a hacker, huh?

SBF breaks silence: reactions

This week, disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave several interviews this week, notably on Tiffany Fong’s YouTube channel and on Wednesday, he made a public appearance at The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, followed up by a Thursday interview on Good Morning America and an evening Twitter Spaces attended by more than 39,000 people.

Jesse Powell, former CEO of centralized exchange Kraken, who has been one of Bankman-Fried’s toughest critics, continued to lay into him. 

Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary is still pitching his tent in SBF’s camp though. 

On Friday, House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters thanked SBF for being “candid” when talking about FTX. Waters (D-CA) has also invited him to Washington to testify before the committee. The bipartisan hearing will take place on December 13. She was previously caught on camera blowing him a kiss; SBF has a reputation for making friends in high places. 

Coinbase vs Apple

On Thursday, Coinbase announced that Apple had blocked the release of an update for its mobile application until the exchange disabled its NFT transfer feature. Coinbase railed at Apple’s clunky and insatiable policy in a thread. 

Metamask developer Dan Findlay stood by Coinbase.

Maya Zehavi, a founding board member of the Israeli Blockchain Industry Forum, also ranted about the measure, pointing out Apple’s hypocrisy in not taxing TradFi payments apps the same.