This Week on Crypto Twitter: Idris Elba Falls Flat, and Are We Near the End of Binance?

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

For those who keep an eye on crypto prices, it was yet another fairly uneventful week as market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum—and most other leading cryptocurrencies—barely budged.

Among the top thirty cryptocurrencies, Stellar’s XLM was the only one to post notable losses. Last week, XLM rallied 10% off the back of a tweet promising “something cool” in ten days. Lo and behold, ten rotations of the earth later, on Tuesday, and Stellar delivered a high-budget commercial with Idris Elba. While the production is faultless, several saw it as a piece of non-news.

Waste of time , I was waiting from past 10 days —- where is the news 🗞️??

— Milan D (@MMAA_KD) September 12, 2023

Contrary to the team’s intentions, XLM’s price has dropped 11% since last week. Evidently, it was all too tempting a case of “buy the rumor, sell the news” for investors to pass by.

On Monday, Bitcoin fan Udi Wertheimer warned customers of Swan to pull out their money after he noticed that a hack recently targeted the Bitcoin-exchange’s stash held by Fortress Trust. Many felt that the hack explained Ripple’s sudden acquisition of Fortress.

CONFIRMED: Swan Bitcoin’s custodian “Fortress” was HACKED

CUSTOMER FUNDS WERE LOST

Ripple had to step in and acquire Fortress to COVER CUSTOMER LOSSES

Did Ripple just bail out Swan?

Why is the Swan team silent about this?

Anyone with funds at Swan should withdraw IMMEDIATELY pic.twitter.com/if14PibxfM

— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) September 11, 2023

Jameson Lopp, CTO of self-custody solution Casa, pointed out the discrepancy between Ripple’s narrative and Fortress’.

🚩🚩🚩Ripple (which now owns Fortress) says there was a loss of funds even though Fortress explicitly said there were no funds lost. 🚩🚩🚩https://t.co/0hQ3xXzF8R

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 11, 2023

CZ announced that he was donating $3 million to Moroccan Binance users from the earthquake-stricken Marrakesh-Safi Province who completed their Proof of Address before September 9.

Our hearts go out to the people in Morocco🇲🇦#Binance to donate $3,000,000 in #BNB to our users in Morocco🇲🇦

We standby our users in times of need. Stay strong. 🙏https://t.co/lQzLvhuuQ3

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) September 11, 2023

Journalist Matthew Russell Lee, who tweets as @InnerCityPress, was present at the sentencing of OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin was a $4 billion scam enticing people to invest in a cryptocurrency for a blockchain that didn’t exist. Lee live-tweeted some choice moments from the trial for his followers. The judge sentenced Greenwood to 20 years for fraud.

Folly: Greenwood targeted the unbanked. Then in private he called them idiots. Money was drawn from college funds. It was laundered.
[Mark Scott still out of jail; Armenta light sentence with much sealed and redacted]Folly: The Scott trial showed the maze

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) September 12, 2023

More Ethereum spot ETF applications keep coming in every week, says Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart. His colleague Eric Balcunas then provided a breakdown of the current state of play.

Re live ETF filings, there’s now 15 Eth Futures, 12 spot bitcoin, 3 spot Eth and a partridge in a pear tree. https://t.co/e8p4pK1hqk

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) September 12, 2023

On Tuesday, Google Cloud engineer Sam Padilla was very excited to share a teaser about his company’s new collaboration with interoperability protocol LayerZero. Google Cloud is now LayerZero’s default oracle operator, meaning dApps on the protocol will have their transactions automatically verified using Google Cloud.

So freaking excited to put this one out there.

Shoutout to the entire @LayerZero_Labs team and our team @GoogleCloud that made this possible.

The future is multichain! https://t.co/QGlBpIkuzm

— Sam Padilla (@theSamPadilla) September 12, 2023

Crypto analyst Adam Cochran offered a stark glimpse of the future of Binance. This week, the exchange—which is currently facing litigation from the SEC for a litany of alleged securities laws violations—turned heads when the CEO of U.S. arm Briah Schroder resigned on Wednesday amid news of a new round of layoffs; he was replaced this weekend by former Ripple/SEC and First Reserve Bank man Norman Reed.

I’ve been saying if Binance blows up, we’ll be fine in no time.

Got a tip that I’ve not yet been able to fully verify but I would lean towards it being true on… and if it’s true it’ll be a longer more painful ride than I thought.

And life behind bars would be the good outcome…

— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) September 13, 2023

Seyffart tweeted more bad omens for Binance on Thursday.

Well… this cannot be a good sign for whatever is going on with Binance h/t @NYCStein

Reporting by @Vlajournaliste pic.twitter.com/ik7fpDX1of

— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) September 14, 2023

Speaking of layoffs, SuperRare CEO John Crain had an announcement of his own on Friday.

Very sorry to share that today we had to let go of a number of valued @SuperRareLabs team members and friends, everyone who has been a part of our journey has been instrumental in our success and we thank you all.

— SuperRare John 💎 (@SuperRareJohn) September 15, 2023

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