This Week on Crypto Twitter: Idris Elba Falls Flat, and Are We Near the End of Binance?

By Tim Hakki

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

For those who keep an eye on crypto prices, it was yet another fairly uneventful week as market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum—and most other leading cryptocurrencies—barely budged.

Among the top thirty cryptocurrencies, Stellar’s XLM was the only one to post notable losses. Last week, XLM rallied 10% off the back of a tweet promising “something cool” in ten days. Lo and behold, ten rotations of the earth later, on Tuesday, and Stellar delivered a high-budget commercial with Idris Elba. While the production is faultless, several saw it as a piece of non-news.

Contrary to the team’s intentions, XLM’s price has dropped 11% since last week. Evidently, it was all too tempting a case of “buy the rumor, sell the news” for investors to pass by.  

On Monday, Bitcoin fan Udi Wertheimer warned customers of Swan to pull out their money after he noticed that a hack recently targeted the Bitcoin-exchange’s stash held by Fortress Trust. Many felt that the hack explained Ripple’s sudden acquisition of Fortress. 

Jameson Lopp, CTO of self-custody solution Casa, pointed out the discrepancy between Ripple’s narrative and Fortress’.

CZ announced that he was donating $3 million to Moroccan Binance users from the earthquake-stricken Marrakesh-Safi Province who completed their Proof of Address before September 9.

Journalist Matthew Russell Lee, who tweets as @InnerCityPress, was present at the sentencing of OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin was a $4 billion scam enticing people to invest in a cryptocurrency for a blockchain that didn’t exist. Lee live-tweeted some choice moments from the trial for his followers. The judge sentenced Greenwood to 20 years for fraud. 

More Ethereum spot ETF applications keep coming in every week, says Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart. His colleague Eric Balcunas then provided a breakdown of the current state of play.

On Tuesday, Google Cloud engineer Sam Padilla was very excited to share a teaser about his company’s new collaboration with interoperability protocol LayerZero. Google Cloud is now LayerZero’s default oracle operator, meaning dApps on the protocol will have their transactions automatically verified using Google Cloud.

Crypto analyst Adam Cochran offered a stark glimpse of the future of Binance. This week, the exchange—which is currently facing litigation from the SEC for a litany of alleged securities laws violations—turned heads when the CEO of U.S. arm Briah Schroder resigned on Wednesday amid news of a new round of layoffs; he was replaced this weekend by former Ripple/SEC and First Reserve Bank man Norman Reed. 

Seyffart tweeted more bad omens for Binance on Thursday.

Speaking of layoffs, SuperRare CEO John Crain had an announcement of his own on Friday.

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