This week in crypto we’ve seen the U.S. Treasury threatened with a lawsuit over Tornado Cash, Anonymous go ape over BAYC and Tether inching towards an audit. But which story was Top of the Pops? Let’s find out…
No. 3 – Tether to Get a Full Audit?
This week saw Tether take “the next step” in its journey towards getting a full audit by signing up the Italian wing of accounting giant BDO to do its quarterly backing attestations (protestations?). Tether said that its plan was to move from quarterly to monthly attestations, with a view to a full audit at some point in the future, probably when we’re all dead.
Tether said that the move represented “the next step in the company’s path toward a complete audit” and reinforced its commitment to transparency…yada yada yada. Just get the damn audit done and this will all go away, or you will, one or the other.
No. 2 – Anonymous Takes on BAYC
Hacking group Anonymous has had its fair share of high profile targets in the past, including Church of Scientology, the Ku Klux Klan and Elon Musk, and now it’s going after a bunch of fictional apes. The group announced this week that it is investigating Yuga Labs and the rationale behind its Bored Ape Yacht Club franchise, suggesting that people like Ryder Ripps are right and the cartoon apes are laced with Nazi, peadophilic and racist imagery, and not that they’re just a bunch of random drawings.
Anonymous’ video dropped the same day that Ripps doubled down on his conspiracy theory over the BAYC designs after Yuga Labs took him to court to “silence” him after he infringed their copyright by making his own very similar looking collection.
No.1 – Tornado Cash Ban Could be Challenged in Court
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) could be in for a legal battle over its decision to sanction Tornado Cash. Coin Center, whose Executive Director Jerry Brito was influential in helping the crypto space battle the crypto elements of the Infrastructure Bill last year, suggested this week that Coin Center is looking into whether OFAC is contravening the First Amendment of the constitution by trying to ban computer code, which is protected by freedom of speech.
Similarly, Kraken founder Jesse Powell called the ban “unconstitutional”, thoughts that have been echoed by many in the space, who have called the banning of Tornado Cash similar to banning cars because some people use them to cause death and destruction. There have also been concerns raised over the treatment of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, whose wife says she has not been allowed to speak to him after his arrest last week over allegations of assisting in money laundering.
Honourable Mentions
Other cakes from the crypto bakery worth tasting this week included:
- Celsius Mining has been allowed to sell its bitcoin to help pay off creditors
- Crypto crime fell in the first half of 2022, but hacks and thefts increased, according to Chainalysis
- Binance has helped recover 83% of the coins stolen in the Curve Finance hack after the hackers tried to use the platform to launder it
We’ll be back next week for another review of the week’s top crypto news.
