Last Week [in] Crypto: The Friday Roundup of the Week in News

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to reflect on another glorious week in crypto.

This week has had it all. There were hacks, regulatory smackdowns and prank phone calls, and Michael Saylor keeps moving forward despite the Bitcoin price knocking him to the canvas more times than we can count.

Forget Saylor, my head is spinning just thinking about it. Let’s do this.

MicroStrategy buys the dip. Again

In a Ctrl+C Ctrl+V news event, MicroStrategy bought Bitcoin this week. 

Whatever else you can say about co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor, you can never doubt his resolve or conviction.

MicroStrategy now holds 130,000 Bitcoin (BTC) bought at an average price of $30,639 per coin. Ouch. The price collapse of BTC in 2022 may have left Saylor bloodied and bruised, but this punch drunk warrior isn’t about to give up on his BTC fever dreams just yet.

Perhaps it is apt that MicroStrategy’s headquarters is (honestly) located on Tysons Corner. As Saylor himself once said, “It ain’t about how hard you hit, it is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

No wait, that was Rocky. Same energy though.

Stablecoins a threat to stability

Michael Barr, the Vice Chair for Supervision of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, said that stablecoins could pose a threat to financial stability. On Wednesday we reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen is proposing to bring forward legislation which would make new stablecoins illegal.

Crypto heads of cynical mind might argue that the greater risk to financial stability is wonky inflationary fiat currencies such as the rupee, euro and yen, but Janet Yellen isn’t listening. So there.

Crypto legal updates

Who is being sued this week? Ian Balina.

Which stablecoin issuer lost a major court order? Tether.

Who claims to have authority over the entire Ethereum network? The SEC.

Who is rumored to be approaching a settlement with the SEC? Ripple.

Binance is centralized. Fears?

A Be[In]Crypto analysis has revealed that 94% of BUSD is held by just four addresses. While such centralization issues might sink other projects – this is Binance. It’s not clear that Binance customers care all that much about hyper centralization or any of the other hot button issues which animate the rest of the crypto industry. They just want stuff that, on the surface of things seems to work, and good for them.

In other Binance news that will depress crypto libertarians, the exchange maintained its top spot in the market with a massive 55.1% share of the total exchange volume while the rest of the industry has to split the minority share between them.

Lastly, in a strange moment of serendipity, WazirX, the Indian exchange that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao categorically denied owning, announced that it would now convert all stablecoins to BUSD, just like Binance.

The big hack

Wintermute suffered a $160 million exploit earlier this week in a case that has since had its fair share of twists and turns. At least now we can put a price tag on vanity.

FTX says “that wasn’t me”

In perhaps the weirdest story of the week Sam Bankman-Fried told the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that it was being punk’d. According to SBF, “a scammer has been impersonating FTX in the U.K. by phone.”

This came as a response to the FCA saying that FTX does not have proper authorization to operate in the country. Great pushback Sam. It will be interesting to see if the FCA changes their mind on the matter now he’s told them they don’t even know who the hell they’re talking to.

Oh, one more thing before you go. Has anyone seen Do Kwon lately?