This Week on Crypto Twitter: Kraken CEO on Corporate Culture, Plus Reactions to Celsius, 3AC, TRON

This week was by far the worst in the industry in 2022: prices crashed across the board, with every flagship falling by double digit percentages more than seven days.

Market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum hit lows not seen since 2020 as the crypto’s total market capitalization briefly bottomed out at nearly $845 billion, more than two-thirds below the all-time high of $3 trillion seen in November. As of this writing, it’s around $859 billion, a rally of 1.85% in the last 24 hours.

There were more than prizes to shout about, however. Many on Crypto Twitter were discussing Celsius’s decision to freeze all withdrawals last Sunday. That night, the decentralized finance platform’s native CEL token suffered a 70% hit in an hour, raising fears that the entire industry was in jeopardy. After all, it was only last month that Terra collapsed.

Jon Wu, who leads the growth of Ethereum Layer-2 privacy network Aztec, launched a long and popular campaign against Celsius, accusing lenders of luring customers with “dangerous use of meaningless platitudes“while continuing”truly degenerate trading strategies.”

Wu explained how Celsius’s insolvency was linked to the company’s decision to use funds on deposit to purchase a batch of ETH staked from Lido (stETH), a cryptocurrency believed to be pegged to Ethererum, but has been trading significantly below its peg since last week. Lido’s stETH is also not currently exchangeable for Ethereum, but will be when the network finally moves to proof-of-stake later this year.

At one point in Wu’s thread, he called Celsius’ business strategy a “delicious dish of degenerate delights.”

Bloomberg Podcaster Joe Weisenthal highlighted a tweet from Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky just 27 hours before the company suspended withdrawals. “Why spread FUD” indeed.

Twitter didn’t hear from Mashinsky for three days after the freeze, but when he returned, he sent a message of support to the Celsius team and community. But no word on resuming withdrawals.

TRON depegs

Another event reminiscent of Terra’s historic collapse last week was Tron’s USDD stablecoin. depeg in progress. On Monday, CEO Justin Sun said he was deploying $2 billion of TRON’s reserves to guard against short sellers as the company’s other token, TRX, also depreciated.

Sun was aware that the situation looked like a scene-by-scene rewrite of the Terra disaster, as at one point his tweet echoed one of Do Kwon.

Crypto Twitter analyst Byzantine General was unimpressed.

Despite some similarities to Terra, TRON has yet to collapse. USDD is still selling below its 95 cent peg, but TRX has risen 3.5% in the past 24 hours, and although it has lost nearly 20% of its market value over the past seven last days, it still had a better week in terms of price. than Bitcoin and Ethereum.

“The Remaining 99%”

On Wednesday morning, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell launched an 11-tweet thread outlining his commitment to fostering a crypto-first culture to the exchange while announcing that Kraken would continue to hire “and hopefully do a better job of screening from the start”. Powell also mentioned that the company had a small number of mutineers.

As the thread unraveled, Powell accused the 20 “woke activists” of undermining productivity. He also championed the diversity of Kraken.

“We will never ask our employees to adopt a specific political ideology as a requirement for our workplace,” the company wrote in a statement. blog post released that day. “That said, we ask our employees to respect the individual rights, privacy and freedoms of others. Crypto is a freedom movement, and Kraken will remain a freedom business.

Dogecoin-loving Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed.

An empty quiver?

Another potential industry time bomb that dominated Twitter conversation this week was Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. insolvency rumor.

On Tuesday, a passing crypto trader moon lord shared a screenshot from the Nansen blockchain data platform showing that wallets associated with Three Arrows Capital were linked to five of the largest transactions in the past week. He alleged that 3AC had sold at least 30,000 stETH (see above) and accused 3AC founders Zhu Su and Kyle Davies of ghosting the public.

According to researchers and analysts on Twitter, the stETH sale was to prevent the liquidation of a $264 million Aave loan and a $35 million compound loan.

Zhu broke his silence on Wednesday, saying… not much.

On Friday, Davies had also broken his silence, telling the the wall street journal that 3AC hired legal and financial advisers “to help find a solution for its investors and lenders”. Davies also mentioned several other options, including selling assets or bailing out another company. Davies said the company hopes to buy more time by negotiating an agreement in principle with existing creditors.

Finally, economist Peter Schiff tweeted on Saturday that while he thinks crypto will survive, Bitcoin “won’t be one of them.”

It’s also worth noting that he runs a website where investors can buy and sell real, not digital, gold.