This Week on Crypto Twitter: Tornado Cash Dev Alex Pertsev Returns! CZ Says He’s Not That Rich

Bitcoin this week led a small market-wide rally after shares in First Republic Bank nosedived when the institution’s latest quarterly report revealed a decline in deposits. On Sunday, some of the leading cryptocurrencies appear to be shrugging off their intraweek gains, but there has been no explosive price movement in either direction.

AI was a hot topic on Crypto Twitter this week. Electro-pop singer Grimes started the conversation on Monday when she offered 50% royalties to anyone that creates a hit using her machine-generated voice. In a follow-up tweet she said she would use smart contracts to issue the royalties.

I think it’s cool to be fused w a machine and I like the idea of open sourcing all art and killing copyright

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) April 24, 2023

Later in the week, Avenged Sevenfold singer and Ethereum maxi M. Shadows gave his two cents to Grimes’s proposal.

I like what @Grimezsz is doing with her likeness and AI. I’m not sure the logistics while on a label… but moving forward I would love to help facilitate our “sound” to producers and fans to create original “@TheOfficialA7X ” songs using this technology. 👇

— M. Shadows (@shadows_eth) April 26, 2023

On Tuesday, Neeraj Agrawal—who heads communications at pro-crypto policy think tank CoinCentre—solicited donations for some Bitcoin developers who are currently embroiled in a legal battle with notorious industry troll Craig Wright, an Australian software developer who claims to be the man behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakomoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.

https://t.co/F07tYFnjt9 is fighting back against Craig Wright’s attempt to patent troll open source software developers. This goes beyond Bitcoin.

They rely on donations for legal fees.

I think we can all agree this is a good cause https://t.co/FkZfkTsrht pic.twitter.com/XsnOTQE1Ar

— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) April 25, 2023

Bankrupt crypto lender Voyager broke the news that Binance US had axed a deal to acquire the company’s assets. Voyager was one of the high-profile casualties stemming from Terra’s collapse last May. In a statement to Decrypt, Binance cited “the hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States” as the main reason behind the decision to back out.

1/ Today we received a letter from https://t.co/yG7Airmib5 terminating the asset purchase agreement. While this development is disappointing, our chapter 11 plan allows for direct distribution of cash and crypto to customers (a “toggle option”) via the Voyager platform.

— Voyager (@investvoyager) April 25, 2023

Solana announced a new integration with ChatGPT that day.

(1/2) Solana Labs has created an open-source reference implementation for a ChatGPT plugin that lets users interact with the @solana network directly from ChatGPT.

Users will be able to check wallet balances, transfer tokens, and purchase NFTs once ChatGPT plugins are available. pic.twitter.com/08z1IX76zJ

— Solana Labs (@solanalabs) April 25, 2023

Avid tech fan @Odin_Free shared a pie chart highlighting how regulators have driven Ethereum principal deposits out of the Kraken exchange.

64% of all ETH principal withdrawals (all time) have come from regulatory-forced Kraken exits. pic.twitter.com/YjyAKNTRli

— odin free ✨🐺 — 🦇🔊 (@odin_free) April 26, 2023

Bitcoin briefly plummeted on Wednesday. Will Clemente, founder of blockchain research firm Reflexivity Research, was watching the red candles.

~$300 million of Bitcoin open interest wiped out in 45 mins what a savage move pic.twitter.com/yq6XQMPlLd

— Will Clemente (@WClementeIII) April 26, 2023

It turns out the world’s favorite crypto had fallen 7% in an hour after reports from Blockchain analytics firm Arkham said that wallets linked to the defunct Mt. Gox exchange and the U.S. government had moved huge Bitcoin stashes. Arkham CEO Miguel Morel said the transactions weren’t connected and Arkham itself later offered a somewhat perplexing explanation.

Today we fixed a bug related to Bitcoin alerts that caused us to no longer under-send alerts to a small subset of user’s private labels. This was one of them. This fix won’t affect any additional users, and was unrelated to labels generated by Arkham — we understand the impact… https://t.co/VqbX04J2bM

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) April 26, 2023

The following day, analytics firm Glassnode showed followers how to track the Mt. Gox and U.S. government balances in question.

According to our data, the US government and the Mt. Gox trustee hold 205,514 and 137,890 #BTC, respectively.

Monitor their balances and set alerts for coin movements in Studio.

US government chart: https://t.co/cfQFqSfN0m
Mt. Gox trustee chart: https://t.co/3YxvDTGGyq pic.twitter.com/MhCiSiLfqx

— glassnode (@glassnode) April 27, 2023

Last year may have been hailed “Crypto Winter” for those in the thick of the industry, but for their lawyers and advisers it was a sunnier story, tweeted FTX creditor Sunil.

Bankruptcy cost comparison
FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi

Note: Pro-rata fees for missing (TBD) months: FTX (E&Y); PH, YC, FTI; BlockFI (Kirkland), month 4

Debtor lawyers/advisors pic.twitter.com/mRQK0465vW

— Sunil (FTX 2.0 Champion) (@sunil_trades) April 26, 2023

Blockchain gumshoe ZachXBT is hot on the heels of a scammer who has so far created over a hundred different memecoins to rug investors with.

Over the past 1.5 months one person has created 114 meme coin scams.

Each time stolen funds from the scam are sent to the exact same deposit address.

0x739c58807B99Cb274f6FD96B10194202b8EEfB47 pic.twitter.com/uwVAiG9WGG

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) April 26, 2023

Binance CEO Changpeng «CZ» Zhao wants you to know he’s not as wealthy or as competitive as everyone says he is.

4

Numbers all wrong. I don’t have anywhere near as much. Don’t know why they do this. 🤷‍♂️

Also, never viewed FTX as a rival. We welcome more (well run) exchanges in the space. pic.twitter.com/xfa31RZp7t

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) April 27, 2023

A self-proclaimed Bitfinex/Tether whistleblower posted a scathing critique of recent Coinbase investors. They’re not alone in thinking that Coinbase may be planning to relocate. The company itself has frequently mentioned the hostile regulatory climate in the U.S. recently and last week announced plans for global expansion, including Bermuda and, possibly, the crypto-friendly free economic zone, Abu Dhabi Global Market.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong dumps more shares of Coinbase onto retail suckers.

Imagine a CEO of a company, that’s dumping stock, and telling you that they’re going offshore.

Imagine people dumb enough to be buying their shares. https://t.co/dd6d0fe7BB pic.twitter.com/NWm2knrYNI

— Bitfinex’ed 🔥🐧 Κασσάνδρα 🏺 (@Bitfinexed) April 27, 2023

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev returned to Twitter after he was released on bail to wait for his trial at home. Dutch authorities arrested him nine months ago on alleged charges of facilitating money laundering shortly after U.S. authorities sanctioned the crypto transaction privacy tool, claiming it was linked to North Korean state hackers Lazarus Group and may have laundered as much as $7 billion since 2019.

Sorry I was afk for a while, what did I miss? 👀

— Alexey Pertsev (@alex_pertsev) April 28, 2023

Finally, why think about personal finance when you can just outsource it to ChatGPT?

I decided to outsource my entire personal financial life to GPT-4 (via the @donotpay chat we are building).

I gave AutoGPT access to my bank, financial statements, credit report, and email.

Here’s how it’s going so far (+$217.85) and the strange ways it’s saving money. (1/n): pic.twitter.com/JO9p1A5ipc

— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) April 29, 2023

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