the week’s most important news- The Cryptonomist

An interesting week also regarding the Twitter crypto community. An in-depth look at all the most important news from the last few days.

News: Twitter’s crypto community regarding Paul Krugman.

The crypto community has aimed at the economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman‘s Twitter post about problems with a traditional finance payments app.

Krugman, who is known for his anti-crypto stances, confessed to being banned by Venmo, a payments app like PayPal.

Apparently, the “software has taken over.” Krugman posted on Twitter Wednesday and confessed that despite being a regular customer of Venmo for years, he suddenly could no longer make payments through the popular online app.

Krugman wrote the following in the tweet:

“Too busy to tweet. But not to vent. I’ve been using Venmo for years, but now it won’t allow me to make payments. I spent a lot of time in chat with representatives, and they told me they can’t explain why — or fix it. The software has taken control.”

Two hours later, the economics professor and Nobel laureate in 2008 wrote a tweet informing that he had been contacted again by Venmo, which had fixed the problem. As it reads:

“[…] and we seem to be up again.”

The reaction of the most active members of the crypto and Bitcoin community on Twitter was not long in coming. One of the most active members of the community, Neeraj K. Agrawal, asked the following:

were you trying to buy drugs or assassination? pic.twitter.com/5qghQizEu9

— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) March 8, 2023

Attached is a screenshot in which Krugman previously argued that Venmo and other electronic money transfer services are as good as cryptocurrencies “unless you’re buying drugs, murder, etc.”

Others, however, have joked that even the distinguished economist Krugman struggles to make financial services that operate with current currency work.

Silvergate’s stock plummeted as much as 50 percent, Twitter post

Pro-crypto bank Silvergate announced that it has begun voluntary liquidation proceedings, a blow to the future of crypto adoption.

California’s notoriously pro-crypto Silvergate Bank has capitulated, and an official statement from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) has been circulating for the past few days confirming its intention to divest from the company.

The announcement of Silvergate Bank’s liquidation came just a day after news of the start of discussions with U.S. federal officials to avoid closure. It reads, in fact, on Twitter as follows:

“Silvergate shares plunged as much as 50 percent in post-close trading after announcing plans to wind down banking operations and liquidate.” 

A large portion of the bank’s many customers closed their accounts earlier this month, leading to further instability in stock prices.

All it took to trigger the panic was a delay in the submission of the annual report to the regulator of publicly traded assets, the SEC.

Despite various reasons to justify the delay, including the need to respond to requests from auditors and ongoing investigations, the confidence of current account holders was reset.

Early signal

Silvergate had already given early indications of instability when it warned that it would not be able to guarantee normal operations throughout the year. The decline became inevitable.

Recently, the most well-known of its services, the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN), a sort of crypto/fiat exchange that allowed 24/7 transfers between investors and crypto exchanges, was suspended.

In addition, Silvergate reported a $1 billion loss in the last quarter of 2022 due to the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. The connections between the bank and FTX prompted account holders to withdraw $8 billion from the bank late last year.

Finally, the most recent news was a few hours ago: Silvergate Bank officially declared bankruptcy. 

Crypto news

More crypto news for Twitter: Will Meta be the alternative?

In recent months, the social network Twitter has been at the center of a real storm after it passed into the hands of Elon Musk: the avalanche of layoffs, the controversial choices of the current owner, and the new subscription service to get the blue tick.

In short, it is not an easy time, and now it seems that Meta is intent on taking over the Twitter space with a proprietary alternative codenamed P92. Hence, Meta is reportedly at work on an alternative to Twitter.

Crypto Crib‘s Twitter profile reads the following:

“Meta is building a decentralized social media platform to rival Twitter.”

It appears that yet another innovation known by the code name P92 is in development. Precisely it should be a decentralized social network (for text sharing) with a style very similar to Twitter.

Access should be via Instagram credentials, or by creating a new profile. At present, there is no release date and it would be a project in development.

It would be headed by Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram. According to what has been leaked so far, some sort of Reddit-style approach can also be seen.

Twitter’s new social rival would offer a decentralized network, where users would also be able to set up their own independent servers and their own rules regarding content moderation.

There would then be common terms and then variable standards based on individual communities.