Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Crypto prices remained pretty frozen over the last seven days, except for Dogecoin. DOGE was undoubtedly the star of both Crypto and Twitter (and by extension, Crypto Twitter) this week, after the microblogging platform’s illustrious CEO, Elon Musk, changed the iconic blue bird logo to a picture of Doge, the Shiba Inu behind the iconic meme that inspired the coin.
Musk memed the makeover on Monday. He also reminded everyone that he first warmed to the idea last month.
In response to logo change, DOGE ballooned 20% in less than an hour, although the rally ran out of steam by Thursday, when the coin posted an intraday loss of over 8%. Twitter has since reverted to the old logo.
Also on Monday, Will Clemente, who co-founded digital asset research firm Reflexivity Research, shared some stats from blockchain analytics firm Kaiko highlighting the fact that throughout March, Bitcoin had reached its strongest correlation with gold in more than a year.
This was largely down to a lack of confidence in TradFi institutions after serious liquidity crises swept through banks on both sides of the Atlantic, affecting Credit Suisse, and crypto/tech-friendly banks like Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. In most cases, governments intervened.
On Tuesday, Uniswap’s inventor Hayden Adams shared some stats that showed his exchange outpacing Coinbase throughout most of 2023 so far. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong jumped on the tweet to inform readers that his exchange had a lot to do with Uniswap’s hefty numbers.
That day, Mark Lamb, the co-founder of crypto exchange CoinFLEX issued an open letter to Bitcoin evangelist and Bitcoin Cash promoter Roger Ver offering him an “olive branch” of “two years of free trading on OPNX,” a newly-launched claims exchange co-founded by Lamb. Alongside Ver, he included in his tweet Peter Smith, CEO and founder of crypto exchange Blockchain.com, which allegedly also owes CoinFLEX millions.
The “olive branch” refers to ending a longstanding feud between the two. Lamb alleges that Ver owes CoinFLEX for an outstanding loan, the debt for which Lamb currently claims is $84 million. In June last year, Lamb previously claimed the debt was $47 million.
On Wednesday, MicroStrategy chairman Michael Saylor went and—yep, you guessed it—bought more Bitcoin.
That day, Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal wrote a multi-tweet thread summarizing the arguments of a prominent legal challenge to the sanctions imposed on crypto transaction privacy mixer Tornado Cash back in August last year.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who will be challenging Biden for the presidency in 2024, posted a long rant against the idea of a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency being released by the Federal Reserve. The problem is, Kennedy either accidentally or purposefully misread the very news article he linked. The Fed’s new digital payments system “FedNow” is not a CBDC! “Fake news!” as 45 would say.
In real CBDC news, the European Central Bank appeared to be getting closer to releasing a digital euro this week.
On Thursday, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao made his views on the AI arms race known.
Finally, on Saturday, Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu tweeted a reminder that Meta’s experiment with NFTs is about to come to an end.
