gm Bankless Nation, This was a pretty massive week for crypto, with big regulatory developments, hacks, and internal squabbles. Let's unpack what went down.
1️⃣ Concerns Around LIBRA Loom Over President Milei
Late last Friday, Argentine President Javier Milei tweeted a contract address for a “country-supporting” memecoin called LIBRA which shot up to an FDV of $4.5B within an hour, before collapsing. Milei quickly retracted support for the token, claiming he wasn’t promoting the token but simply sharing it. Understandably, Crypto Twitter was outraged by the series of events and the investigation began over the weekend, with details coming to light about how the launch had been orchestrated by a “fund manager” named Hayden Davis of Kelsier Ventures.
Davis admitted to withdrawing ~$100M from LIBRA’s liquidity pool, framing it as a business failure, not a scam. Over the week, text messages from Davis obtained by CoinDesk alleged he bragged about “controlling” Milei via payments to Milei’s sister, Karina, though he later denied this. The fallout didn’t stop there, though, with many taking to Twitter to declare memecoins over and scrutinizing the involvement of Solana protocols Jupiter and Meteora, where insiders were accused of knowingly profiting from LIBRA. As a result, Meteora’s CEO resigned. LIBRA’s disaster even bled over to traditional markets which saw the Argentinian Stock Index, Merval, crash more than 5% on Monday’s market open. As expected, earlier this week, an Argentine judge was assigned to investigate Milei and the promotion of the token.
I'm getting live reactions to Milei's Libra Memecoin from Argentines
Early Friday morning, CT noticed a large outflow of ETH from a Bybit wallet. Bybit’s official Twitter account later confirmed that an attack occurred during a routine transfer of ETH from their multisig cold wallet to their warm wallet, resulting in all transferred ETH being sent to the wrong address. This raised concerns among Bybit users, as they were unsure whether they would be able to withdraw their funds after such a significant loss. However, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou confirmed that all client assets are backed and that the exchange will cover the loss, even taking out a bridge loan if necessary. It also stated that it would not be buying back the ETH drained yet, causing the token to dump further. As of now, Bybit claims withdrawals are processing at normal, though may be slightly delayed due to high volume.
Bybit detected unauthorized activity involving one of our ETH cold wallets. The incident occurred when our ETH multisig cold wallet executed a transfer to our warm wallet. Unfortunately, this transaction was manipulated through a sophisticated attack that masked the signing…
After two years of development, Monad’s public testnet finally went live on Wednesday. 8.8M wallets loaded their wallets with testnet tokens to play around with the chain’s new high-performance EVM environment, which can theoretically handle up to 14K transactions per second. To get you up to speed, we put together a list of five high-signal opportunities to test out dApps in this new environment. To do so though, you’ll need to get tokens from the testnet’s faucet, which can be claimed here.
It was a big week for the SEC, which is moving to dismiss its lawsuit against Coinbase, the exchange announced. It's also dropping its investigation into OpenSea, which it sent a Wells Notice to last year. These followed the SEC's announcement of a new unit called the Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit (CETU). The goal of this unit is to protect investors from malicious actors in the crypto and AI space.
*SEC LAUNCHES CYBER AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES UNIT
*SEC CYBER UNIT WILL COMBAT FRAUD IN CRYPTO AMONG OTHER AREAS
Early Thursday morning, claims for the KAITO airdrop went live, culminating the end of the Yaps program so far. Some notable KOLs received quite large allocations, valued in the five- to six-figure range in USD terms, for less than 3 months' worth of tweets… Lines were drawn, though, as one of the top yappers on Kaito, agent aixbt, had its allocations revoked as Kaito said its token is reserved for humans. While details about the role the token will play in Kaito’s evolving network are still being outlined, we know it will serve as a network currency, have governance abilities, and be able to be staked.
Very disappointing to see @KaitoAI team sneak this in at the end of the docs to specifically nerf @aixbt_agent from getting the airdrop
Unlock the power of Unichain – a fast, decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 network built to be the home for DeFi and cross-chain liquidity. To bridge tokens to Unichain and start swapping today, get started with Uniswap Labs’s web app or mobile wallet.
In this week’s Weekly Rollup, David and Kain Warwick dive into Argentine President Milei’s LIBRA fiasco and Strategy’s bold $2B Bitcoin play, while we check out the new Kaito airdrop making waves.
We also explore Ethereum’s biggest upgrade yet—Pectra—plus Monad’s high‐speed L1 testnet launch. Finally, we dig into the SEC’s fresh “CETU” cyber unit and what the brand‐new Infinex platform means for DeFi.
Tune in for all the drama and alpha happening in the third week of February!
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