This Week on Crypto Twitter: Another One Bites the Dust

It was yet another historic week for the crypto industry, with Tuesday’s shocker—Binance CEO Chengpeng Zhao stepping down and pleading guilty to violating U.S. money laundering laws, and his exchange agreeing to pay a massive $4.3 billion fine—sending Crypto Twitter into a frenzy.

Many Twitter users quickly seized on the irony that Zhao had, prior to this week, routinely used the symbol “4” to dismiss rumors of Binance’s legal troubles as baseless misinformation—now, not only were the rumors proven to be true, but the number four was back with a vengeance. 

With the real possibility that Zhao might be headed to prison hanging in the air, Twitter users processed the surreal reality that, in just over a year, two of crypto’s biggest names have ended up guilty of criminal charges. Some poked fun at the fact that Zhao and his one-time rival, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, might be on track for a prison yard reunion. 

Even this week’s historic Binance settlement, though, could only keep people’s attention so long: several other industry developments came to dominate discourse on the back half of Thanksgiving week. 

Blast, a new layer-2 blockchain from the creators of controversial NFT marketplace Blur, saw an astonishing level of deposits this week, with degens locking over $400 million onto the network in hopes of accumulating lucrative rewards. 

Some Blast users, though, soon began complaining about the network’s lack of transparency, and accused its makers of orchestrating an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

The negative commentary surrounding Blast reached enough of a fever pitch that Blur’s pseudonymous creator, Pacman, took to Twitter Friday afternoon to quell the community’s concerns. 

Meanwhile, on Solana, the emergence of a booming market for SPL20 tokens—digital assets that are inscribed on denominations of Solana in the same way Bitcoin Ordinals are generated—stirred up excitement among the blockchain’s dedicated community. 

Some, though, scratched their heads at the development, given the fact that NFTs already exist in large numbers on Solana, thanks to the network’s support of smart contracts. Bitcoin didn’t have that same capability, which is why Ordinals were born out of necessity. 

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.