This week in crypto we’ve seen headlines about Celsius (yet again), Kucoin, Vauld, Twitter, Coinflex and more! But which stories were the biggest and baddest on the block? Let’s find out
No. 3 – You’ve Been Served…With an NFT
We thought that Onecoin’s scamming queen Ruja Ignatova being served through email was pretty advanced stuff for the legal system, but this week the The High Court of England and Wales went all futuristic on us by allowing a litigant to serve two targets via NFTs!
Fabrizio D’Aloia, the founder of online gambling company Microgame, was defrauded to the tune of $2.33 million, with the funds (2.1 million USDT and 230,000 USDC) deposited into two wallets which he thought were associated with a crypto brokerage, but the whole thing turned out to be a scam.
Seeing as D’Aloia didn’t know the real identities of the individuals involved, this left the only link between him and the scammers being the two addresses. D’Aloia approached the situation in a very novel and Web 3.0 way – serve the papers to those addresses as NFTs. After being satisfied that the wallet addresses were a legally sound method of delivery the judge agreed, with two sets of legal demands arriving into the Ethereum addresses of the two scammers.
Of all the potential utility cooked up by NFT dreamers, issuing legal papers was probably not on the list.
No. 2 – Celsius Reveals $1.2 Billion Black Hole
We knew that things at Celsius were bad, but its bankruptcy filing this week really brought the truth home. The company announced it was filing for bankruptcy on Wednesday and the filing was obtained by the public on Tuesday, with the figures making harrowing reading.
Celsius’ losses included a $510 million loss when a lender could not return the collateral that Celsius had put up for a loan, a $94 million loss when Tether liquidated collateral to secure a loan, and a $40 million loss when Three Arrows Capital…well, you know the rest by now.
All in all, this left Celsius with liabilities of $5.5 billion, $4.7 billion of which is Celsius users, and assets of just $4.3 billion. CEO Alex Mashinksy, he of the Robin Hood t-shirt, admitted that the company had “made what, in hindsight, proved to be certain poor asset deployment decisions.”
No…
No.1 – Twitter Sues Elon Musk Over Withdrawn Buyout
Elon Musk’s decision to abandon his purchase of Twitter two months after it was accepted landed him with a lawsuit this week, and a potentially costly one. Twitter, which of course is the platform of the entire crypto freak show, was due to be sold to Musk for $44 billion until the board and Musk disagreed over the amount of bots on the platform.
According to Musk this difference was insurmountable and he reneged on the purchase, but Twitter has not taken kindly to this and this week filed a lawsuit against him, claiming that the reason he pulled out was because the tanking Tesla stock price, and the entire tech sector in general, meant he didn’t want to pay his original offer price.
Musk has something of a reputation for using Twitter to manipulate the price of his pet cryptocurrency Dogecoin, but his penchant for affecting prices now extends to tech stocks too – Musk agreed a share price of $54.20 per share but his withdrawal saw it drop to $32.62.
If Musk loses he could be forced to follow through on the purchase, or pay a $1 billion divorce settlement.
Honourable Mentions
While these stories may have been the pick of the bunch, this week has also seen some other crackers, including:
- The judge in the Ripple case called the SEC out for its “hypocrisy” over evidence in the trial
- The founders of defunct hedge fund Three Arrows Capital “have not yet begun to cooperate” with lawyers
- Mt. Gox payouts may be on the horizon, but there are several reasons why the Bitcoin market won’t crash
We’ll be back next Friday to see which stories catch our eye!
