This week in crypto we’ve seen Hodlonaut winning in Norway, Mastercard launching a crypto trading solution for banks, Kanye West bigging up Satoshi, Ruja Ignatova having a spy in the police, and much more. But which stories were the cream of the crop? Get your scythe and start reaping!
No. 3 – Mastercard Announces Institutional Crypto Platform
Mastercard this week announced a new platform, Crypto Source, that will allow financial institutions to offer crypto trading services to their clients. The move comes a few weeks after Mastercard’s anti-fraud tool Crypto Secure, which will be embedded into the platform, and comes after four years worth of research and development by the payment processor into crypto and blockchain.
Mastercard’s blockchain patents go right back to 2018, while recent partnerships have shown that it is clearly invested in crypto, both for institutions and everyday users.
No. 2 – Kayne West Isn’t the Ambassador Bitcoin is Looking For
Kanye West sporting a ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ hat had a lot of Bitcoin supporters groaning in displeasure this week, as the clearly unstable rapper stuck his middle finger up at his former bank, JPMorgan. West was let go after he criticised the bank’s leadership and complained that he wasn’t given access to its CEO, Jamie Dimon, on top of comments West made in recent weeks that were viewed by many as antisemitic, resulting in his Twitter and Instagram accounts being temporarily locked.
While West isn’t exactly the ambassador Bitcoin wants or needs, it can’t be worse than Alex Jones or Max Keiser…or even Michael Saylor. Can he?
No.1 – Hodlonaut Whoops Craig Wright
When Craig Wright launched legal proceedings against Twitter user Hodlonaut in April 2019, he probably didn’t expect that three and half years later a judge would be ruling that Hodlonaut would be walking away with a very convincing win.
Yet, that’s exactly what happened this week, with the judge in the Norwegian court ruling that Hodlonaut’s tweets calling Wright a fraud weren’t defamatory because there was enough doubt about Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto that they weren’t falsehoods. Wright’s parade of witnesses to his Satoshiness were undermined by a forensic report by KPMG which eviscerated his evidence, leaving Hodlonaut toasting a victory.
Honourable Mentions
This week we also learnt that:
- Bitcoin made the Guinness World Records this week in many categories, including first and (obviously) oldest cryptocurrency
- Three Arrows Capital is under investigation by the SEC and CFTC following the collapse of the platform earlier this year
- Dr Ruja Ignatova very probably had a mole inside one of the police forces working together to bring her and her Onecoin scam down.
We’ll be back next week for another review of the week’s top crypto news.
