This week's Crypto Twitter was chock-full of personalities that stole the show. Some reasons were positive, others were dark.
Last Sunday, Keith Gill's Twitter account was launched after years of being dormant. Roaring Kitty— the meme stock influencer best known for engineering the short squeeze in GameStop (GME) stock in 2021 — was suddenly back in action, sending Twitter and financial markets alike into a frenzy.
Over the next few days, the account posted the following scores: movie clip It's adorned with financial-themed captions, just as Rolling Kitty routinely did before going radio silent on all social media accounts in mid-2021.
This frenzy instantly increased the value of meme stocks like GME and AMC several times over. meme coin. (However, by the end of the week, most of the affected assets were plummeted Return to Earth. )
Despite the fact that this tweet boosted stocks and meme coins by billions of dollars, it remained unclear throughout this week whether Gill was actually behind it. The influencer has not posted any videos or photos of himself, and his once-frequented Reddit and YouTube accounts remain silent.
In the vacuum of verifiability, some, including conceptual digital artist Shloms, have seized the opportunity. claim (Although I have no proof) that they are behind the Roaring Kitty posts.
In more grim news on Tuesday, Alexei Pertsev, the developer of Ethereum coin mixer Tornado Cash, was found guilty He was charged with money laundering by a Dutch court and sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Reaction on Twitter was swift, with crypto industry leaders condemning the ruling as too punitive and unjust. Many in the industry have long praised Tornado Cash as an essential tool for ensuring the privacy of cryptocurrency users.
Thursday, Pertsev It has been submitted To appeal against a conviction.
That same day, perhaps the strangest story of the week unfolded. That's when crypto Twitter denizens discovered in real time that Pump.fun, a hugely popular meme coin generator, had been hacked.And that hacker was a disgruntled former employee of Protocol. live tweet About the exploit.
Minute by minute, crypto users pieced together that the man was indeed the Pump.fun hacker and a fully identified Canadian citizen. Prominent figures in the industry who knew the hacker were concerned and tried to contact him. (Hackers withdrew $2 million of SOL from Pump.fun and airdropped it piecemeal to random NFT and token holders.)
It was a surreal sequence when Pump.fun posted that it was investigating the hack and intended to cooperate with the government.While authorities were investigating it, the self-proclaimed attacker appeared on the Twitter space and added to the protocol:For a long time, I was inadvertently hurting people. ”
Amidst this incident, the hacker remained incredibly active online, openly admitting to anyone who asked that he could face prison time, and had no qualms about it. I didn't.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
