Bitcoin experienced a small market-wide rally this week, following a decline in the shares of First Republic Bank due to a dip in deposits shown in their latest quarterly report. Although some major cryptocurrencies appeared to be shrugging off their intraweek gains, there has not been any explosive price movement in either direction.
A trending topic on Crypto Twitter recently was artificial intelligence (AI). The conversation began when electro-pop singer Grimes offered 50% royalties to anyone who creates a hit using her machine-generated voice. She mentioned in a follow-up tweet that she would use smart contracts to distribute the royalties. Later in the week, Avenged Sevenfold singer and Ethereum supporter M. Shadows gave his take on Grimes’s proposal, stating that he would like to help facilitate their “sound” to producers and fans using this technology.
CoinCentre’s Neeraj Agrawal sought donations for Bitcoin developers currently battling notorious industry troll Craig Wright, an Australian software developer who claims to be Satoshi Nakomoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. The developers are fighting against Wright’s attempt to patent troll open-source software developers.
Crypto lender Voyager, which recently filed for bankruptcy following Terra’s collapse, revealed that a deal to acquire the company’s assets was scrapped by Binance US. In a statement, Binance cited “the hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States” as the primary reason for backing out of the deal. Solana announced a new integration with ChatGPT in response to these events.
Twitter user @Odin_Free shared a pie chart highlighting how regulators have driven Ethereum principal deposits away from the Kraken exchange, finding that 64% of all ETH principal withdrawals have come from regulatory-forced Kraken exits. Bitcoin briefly plummeted on Wednesday, with Reflexivity Research founder Will Clemente observing massive open interest loss within a span of 45 minutes. The brief drop was linked to reports from blockchain firm Arkham, which stated that wallets connected to the defunct Mt. Gox exchange and the U.S. government moved massive Bitcoin stashes. However, Arkham later offered a somewhat confusing explanation, stating that they fixed a bug related to the alerts, and this fix was not connected to the labels generated by Arkham.
Analytics firm Glassnode showed followers how to track the Mt. Gox and U.S. government balances in question. According to their data, the U.S. government and Mt. Gox trustee hold 205,514 and 137,890 BTC, respectively. In the midst of what has been dubbed “Crypto Winter,” FTX creditor Sunil tweeted about the contrasting fortunes for lawyers and advisers during the industry downturn. Additionally, blockchain investigator ZachXBT has been tracking a scammer who has created over 100 different memecoins to deceive investors.
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao addressed rumors of his wealth and competitiveness, stating that the reported figures were incorrect and that he did not view FTX as a rival. Meanwhile, a self-proclaimed Bitfinex/Tether whistleblower criticized recent Coinbase investors, suggesting that the company may be planning to relocate due to the hostile regulatory climate in the U.S. Last week, Coinbase mentioned plans for global expansion, possibly targeting Bermuda or the crypto-friendly free economic zone, Abu Dhabi Global Market.
Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev returned to Twitter after being released on bail while he awaits his trial at home. Dutch authorities arrested him nine months ago on alleged charges of facilitating money laundering; U.S. authorities also sanctioned the cryptocurrency transaction privacy tool for reportedly being linked to North Korean state hackers Lazarus Group, alleging it may have laundered approximately $7 billion since 2019. Lastly, Joshua Browder discussed his experience outsourcing his personal finance management to ChatGPT using Donotpay chat, sharing some of the savings he has achieved so far.