This Week on Crypto Twitter: SBF Accused of Executing Massive Rug Pull from House Arrest

While most of the leading coins posted light to moderately heavy losses over the week due to the scarcity of regulatory or institutional news, crypto Twitter was ablaze with rumors that disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had rug pulled a memecoin from house arrest. 

Scimitar Capital analyst Alex, who tweets using the handle @thiccythot_, analyzed on-chain activity to piece together the crazy story of the week’s most scandalous rug pull. It happened on Coinbase’s new Layer 2 blockchain, Base, which is built on the Ethereum extension, Optimism.

A lot of people thought it was SBF:

Crypto trader Bran spotted a connection between the Bald deployers and a wallet that triggered the epic death spiral of UST in May 2022. The collapse of Terra’s dollar-pegged UST was one of the worst cases of contagion the industry had ever seen, and the contagion spread so far that it had a hand in the downfall of several major crypto companies—including Celsius, Voyager, Vauld, Three Arrows Capital, and even FTX. 

Blockchain researcher Igor Igamberdiev wrote a lengthy thread observing that the rug was probably not carried out by SBF, but was still would have to have been perpetrated by someone connected to Alameda, the trading firm and sister company of FTX to which the exchange sent customer funds in order to patch over the former’s poor balance sheet. 

Crypto journalist and YouTuber Tiffany Fong also wasn’t convinced it was SBF.

Even so, SBF was the star of the show that day. In a tweet that’s too lengthy to reproduce here, crypto trader DeFi^2 (@DeFiSquared) followed the movements of the exploiter of the multichain protocol and it led him to a $40 million bribe that the FTX founder allegedly paid to the Chinese government.

“The rumor up to this point was that the multichain funds may be held by the Chinese government, and this seems to confirm it," DeFi^2’s analysis concludes. "The liquidation of the funds tonight also seems to confirm they have no intention of returning it.”

The rest of Crypto Twitter…

Crypto Twitter was also ablaze with activity elsewhere. It was truly a busy week. On Monday, U.S. Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr continued to signal his pro-Bitcoin stance.

News broke that day that notorious crypto influencer and scammer Richard Heart is getting sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Crypto enthusiast and trademark attorney Jessica Neer McDonald broke down the salient points in the copyright trial between Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs and digital art troll, conceptual artist, and Yuga hater Ryder Ripps. 

Peter Van Valkenburgh, the Director of Research at pro-crypto policy lobbyists Coin Centre, wrote a great thread about why the IRS’s decision to tax block rewards at the moment of their creation rather than their sale is just “bad law."

NFT artist Beeple, who set the record for the biggest NFT sale ($69.3 million), decided to buy his first NFT profile pic. Just last week he was soliciting advice from followers about how to make the purchase. 

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino threw some subtle shade at True USD, a Binance-affiliated dollar-pegged stablecoin that promises total regulatory compliance, reserves backed entirely by cold hard fiat, and real-time attestations of those reserves using Chainlink’s proof-of-reserve monitoring tool.

Finally, Bloomberg journo James Seyffart counted not ten, not eleven, but thirteen applications for Ethereum Futures ETFs filed to the SEC this week!