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.

Following OKX and KuCoin, Bitget announced that it will strengthen its KYC policy. From October 1st, users who have not completed Level 1 KYC verification will only be able to withdraw funds, cancel orders, and close positions. To complete Level 1 KYC, you need to submit…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 21, 2023

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.

It’s actually wild that the $XRP pump after the SEC news in July has already fully retraced only one month later. pic.twitter.com/0LxPuLFg0o

— K A L E O (@CryptoKaleo) August 21, 2023

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

The odds of $GBTC converting into an ETF within the next 6 months have drastically increased since June. Will be interesting if GBTC is already an ETF & all the underlying #Bitcoin is accessible before this gets much further

(Though $ETHE is a different story/timeline) https://t.co/IJ4qMp1Y6f pic.twitter.com/47Ni4wdtBF

— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) August 21, 2023

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

Still more than 75% of most major collections haven’t yet traded in 2023. Lots of NFTs sitting in wallets through this downturn. pic.twitter.com/9F9XM5KPbs

— NFTstats.eth (@punk9059) August 22, 2023

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

1/ The wait is finally over. Throughout September & October, $USDC will launch natively on mainnet for @BuildOnBase, @cosmos via @noble_xyz, @NEARProtocol, @optimismFND, @Polkadot & @0xPolygon – expanding access to USDC from nine ecosystems to 15. https://t.co/E62XvWkQ3s

— Circle (@circle) August 23, 2023

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.

Breaking: Roman Semenov, the co-founder of Tornado Cash, have been added to US OFAC’s SDN List.

The announcement shows that Roman Semenov is of Russian nationality and is located in Dubai; the announcement lists his 8 Ethereum addresses; involves Secondary sanctions risk:… pic.twitter.com/G1mtXlgTBp

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 23, 2023

Kaiko researcher Riyad Carey spotted something interesting in his studies.

Working on a stablecoin story and noticed that Bequant and HitBTC have identical monthly volume on all of their stablecoin-stablecoin pairs, after some quick research it seems they’re owned by the same company.

Laziest wash trading of all time? pic.twitter.com/NTuenHZe5W

— Riyad Carey (@riyad_carey) August 23, 2023

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.

Nvidia is worth more than the entire crypto sector

— Size Chad (@SizeChad) August 23, 2023

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.

Any reason why the PEPE multisig wallet changed the threshold to just 2/8 signatures? Seems weird, this isn’t standard right?

Also, seems that some has been sent to exchanges pic.twitter.com/1DVZIOvef8

— CryptoNoddy (@Crypto_Noddy) August 24, 2023

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.

an announcement to the $PEPE community:

Yesterday on August 24th, 2023, a series of unexpected transactions took place from the $PEPE multisig CEX
Wallet in which ~16 Trillion $PEPE tokens (worth roughly $15m USD) were transferred to various crypto exchanges (OKX, Binance,… pic.twitter.com/iZmXV1TAvw

— Pepe (@pepecoineth) August 26, 2023

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