This Week on Crypto Twitter: XRP Gains Wiped Out, Seychelles Exchanges Ramp Up KYC, Circle Expands

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

It was a relatively quiet week over on Crypto Twitter, mirroring the market’s slow news cycle this week. Still, that meant some much-needed recovery time for virtually every leading cryptocurrency. 

On Monday, Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu broke news that ByGet had become the third Seychelles-based crypto exchange to ramp up its Know-Your-Client (KYC) policy. While there were no political developments in the Seychelles to speak of, global regulators are scrutinizing crypto like never before, and companies’ KYC and anti-money laundering practices are firmly in their crosshairs. 

Last month, XRP rallied following Judge Annalise Torres’s ruling that the token is not a security. It was widely perceived as a major victory for token issuer Ripple, a company locking horns in court with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The crypto-skeptic regulator has previously alleged that every cryptocurrency except Bitcoin is a security.

Bitcoin fan Kaleo said that XRP’s victory rally felt like more than it was.

Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffert said Grayscale’s long efforts to convert its flagship Bitcoin trust into an ETF appears to be working.

Crypto researcher NFTStats.eth (@punk9059) shared an interesting NFT fact.

Stablecoin issuer Circle announced on Wednesday that it was expanding the blockchain presence of its flagship dollar coin. 

Colin Wu that day shared the news that the co-founder of sanctioned privacy tool Tornado Cash—Roman Semenov—was added to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC’s) specially designated nationals list. His co-founder and namesake, Roman Storm, was arrested that day for alleged crimes related to money laundering.

Kaiko researcher Riyad Carey spotted something interesting in his studies.

Chipmaker Nvidia’s trillion-dollar market capitalization overtook crypto this week thanks to hype over artificial intelligence  (AI) technology, one of the strengths of the company’s hardware offerings. Hey, let’s not forget that miners are Nvidia customers too.

Finally, as meme coin PEPE continued its freefall for the second week running, the team’s multi-sig Ethereum address transferred 16.045 trillion PEPE—worth $16.85 million at the time—to Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit on Thursday. And that’s not all it did.

A PepeCoin developer—the last one left, if they are to be believed—eventually confirmed that the maneuvers were an orchestrated rug pull by other founders. Despite the “bad actors,” however, they said they still had hope for the future of PEPE.