This week on Crypto Twitter Kraken CEO on corporate culture

This week on Crypto Twitter: Kraken CEO on corporate culture, plus reactions to Celsius, 3AC, TRON

Business News / By /

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

This week was easily the industry’s worst of 2022, with prices plummeting across the board, with every leading project falling by double-digit percentages in seven days.

Leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum hit lows not seen since 2020, when the total crypto market cap briefly bottomed at nearly $845 billion, more than two-thirds below November’s all-time high of $3 trillion. As of this writing, it’s around $859 billion, a 1.85% recovery over the past 24 hours.

However, there was more than just awards to yell about. On Crypto Twitter, many discussed Celsius’ decision to freeze all payouts last Sunday. That night, the decentralized finance platform’s native CEL token took a 70% hit in an hour, sparking fears that the entire sector is at risk. After all, Terra had collapsed just last month.

Jon Wu, who is spearheading the growth of Ethereum Layer 2 privacy network Aztec, launched a popular and lengthy broadside against Celsius, accusing lenders of charging customers with “dangerous use of meaningless platitudes“in pursuit”truly degenerate trading strategies.”

Wu explained how Celsius’ bankruptcy is linked to the company’s decision to use custodial funds to buy a lot of Lidos Staked ETH (stETH), a cryptocurrency that is said to be pegged to Ethererum but has fallen significantly short of its peg over the past week was traded. Lido’s stETH is also currently not redeemable for Ethereum, but will be when the network finally moves to proof-of-stake later this year.

At one point in Wu’s thread, he called Celsius’s business strategy a “lovely dish of degenerate delights.”

Bloomberg podcaster Joe Weisenthal highlighted a tweet from Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky just 27 hours before the company paused payouts. “Why spread FUD” indeed.

Twitter didn’t hear from Mashinsky for three days after the freeze, but when he came back he sent a message of support to the Celsius team and community. But no word on resuming payouts.

TRON depegs

Another event reminiscent of Terra’s historic collapse over the past week was the ongoing depeg of Tron’s USDD stablecoin. On Monday, CEO Justin Sun said he was deploying $2 billion from TRON’s reserves to protect against short sellers as the company’s other token, TRX, also fell in value.

Sun was aware that the situation felt like a scene-by-scene paraphrase of the Terra disaster because at one point his tweet was reminiscent of one of Do kwon.

Twitter crypto analyst Byzantine General was not impressed.

Despite some similarities to Terra, TRON has not collapsed yet. USDD is still selling below its peg at 95 cents, but TRX is up 3.5% over the past 24 hours, and despite losing nearly 20% of its market value over the past seven days, price-wise it still had one better week than bitcoin and ethereum.

“The Other 99%”

On Wednesday morning, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell fired off an 11-tweet thread detailing his commitment to promoting a crypto-first culture in the stock market, while also announcing that Kraken will continue to hire “and hopefully filter better ahead of time.” becomes”. Powell also mentioned that the company had a small number of mutineers.

As the thread unraveled, Powell accused the 20 “awakened activists” of interfering with productivity. He also championed Kraken’s diversity.

“We will never require our employees to adopt any particular political ideology as a requirement of our jobs,” the company wrote in a blog post published that day Crypto is a Freedom Movement and Kraken will remain a Freedom Company.

Dogecoin-loving Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed.

An empty quiver?

Another potential industry time bomb dominating the Twitter conversation this week was the alleged bankruptcy of Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

A crypto trader comes by on Tuesday moon overlord shared a screenshot from blockchain data platform Nansen showing that wallets linked to Three Arrows Capital were linked to five of the largest transactions over the past week. He claimed 3AC had sold at least 30,000 stETH (see above) and accused 3AC founders Zhu Su and Kyle Davies of concealing the public.

According to researchers and analysts on Twitter, the stETH sale should prevent a $264 million Aave loan and a $35 million Compound loan from going into liquidation.

Zhu broke his silence on Wednesday and said… not much.

By Friday, Davies had also broken his silence, telling the Wall Street Journal that 3AC had hired legal and financial advisors “to help work out a solution for its investors and lenders.” Davies also mentioned several other options, including selling assets or a bailout from another company. Davies said the firm hopes to buy more time by negotiating a tentative agreement with existing creditors.

Finally, economist Peter Schiff tweeted on Saturday that he believes if crypto will survive, Bitcoin “won’t be a part of it.”

It should be noted that he also runs a website where investors can buy and sell real, non-digital gold.

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