Last Week on Crypto Twitter: Stairs Down Elevator Up

Gm,

Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, crypto got rescued by an unexpected hero.

The next generation of crypto main characters may be wearing suits instead of donning animal jpegs as their avatars. We covered last week’s bombshell news in a full explainer article here:

Macro Brief Q2 2023: The Institutions Are Coming

So right when Bitcoin looked like taking the stairs down, BlackRock pushed it into the elevator going up.

But that was far from the only thing that happened last week…

Whose Threads Are a Must-Read?

The ETF application had a firm grip on last week’s thread section. CT was (predictably) high on hopium. Here are two threads that didn’t make the cut for our long-form explainer:

DaanCrypto explained when we can expect bullish price action in anticipation of the ETF decision:

And redphonecrypto analyzed why Bitcoin whales are rather small compared to TradFi blue whales:

All in all, Crypto Twitter got its hopes up rather high, so Larry Fink better not disappoint this time.

The tech in question (Bitcoin, that is) hasn’t gotten the best of rap over the last months. First, we had Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens bricking the network. And there was the New York Times article about Bitcoin, which (again) ran the same old “Bitcoin network bad for climate” narrative.

But there are some ingenious folks in the Bitcoin community working on proving the NYT wrong. One of them is Daniel Batten, and his short thread covers how Bitcoin can help reduce methane emissions and fight climate change:

He followed it up with another thread going into the details of how this works on the ground:

Interesting stuff and a Bitcoin narrative worth keeping an eye on!

Last but not least, we need to talk about the market. Bitcoin got off between the $30K and the $31K stop on the elevator and you must be wondering:

Will it be the stairs down again like last time?

DeFi Man read the tea leaves on that and predicts a slow grind up, but not before a possible banana slip or two along the way:

Story continues

Who Is Arguing In Way Too Public a Place?

In a period long long forgotten (precisely, seven months ago), we covered a wondersome new account going by the name of Mario Nawfal. Back then, he was working hard on “exposing” the FTX scam (ah, those were the times):

But as you can see, Crypto Twitter don’t take too kindly to folks that pump shitcoins and bot their Twitter spaces.

Lucky for Mario though, the new CEO of Twitter very much does like the way he is doing business. This has helped our old pal Mario run up his account to almost a million followers in the last few months:

But Crypto Twitter still don’t take too kindly to folks that converted their crypto grift to citizen journalism grift:

By now you know the drill. Anyone that’s on Crypto Twitter (besides ZachXBT apparently) has a few skeletons in his closet. And the law of gravity stipulates that the bigger your account, the harder those skeletons come after you:

Drama to be continued. Which brings us to the next bit of drama…

Elon Building Twitter

The CEO of Twitter dot com did not disappoint last week.

Peak Twitter was in fact hit just before the weekend, when Elon informally challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Yup, you read that right:

Has he really thought this through? Is it going to happen? Will he do a Prigozhin and turn around just before arriving at his enemy’s doorstep?

Questions for the next few episodes. Mark Zuckerberg seems to be ready either way:

Talk of the Town

And only now we get to the crypto-exclusive part of this circus. Much exciting! So Twitter

There was a lot of talk about the ETF, which we already covered elsewhere. The TLDR of the market turnaround was covered by DonAlt:

And the one-two punch to bears was completed on Friday with the SEC’s approval of a leveraged futures ETF:

Impressive, very nice. Now let’s see the effects on financial privacy:

Yikes! But that may not be as far-fetched as it seems now, considering payments of significant amounts in cash are already challenging. But suits and regulators seem to be converging on the idea that they cannot completely get rid of crypto anymore. Jay Powell said as much last week:

Now how much crypto, and specifically Bitcoin, will be used for actual payments is a whole different question altogether. One that George Gammon posed last week and that he got a quite straightforward answer to:

No one’s actually using the orange coin to pay for stuff. And will not be for a long time. So hyperbitcoinization will likely have to wait for a bit longer. Meanwhile, we can enjoy Crypto Twitter’s unlimited expertise on literally everything:

What a time to be alive!

Memes

You bet that in a week as eventful as last one’s, there’s a few good memes. Let’s cover the main events…

The ETF application:

The Russian coup attempt:

Truly the best timeline. See you next week!