This Week on Crypto Twitter: Did SBF Move Money? Man Utd NFTs Under Fire. Eisenberg Arrested!

Markets were mostly frozen this week, with most of the leading cryptocurrencies seeing very little price movement to end the year, except for the unlucky few—in particular Solana and Dogecoin, which suffered double-digit percentage drops.

It was another week of relatively few adoption moves or crypto dispatches from Washington. The industry has all of its eyes on the courtroom saga of FTX’s unraveling. But there were still enough news moments to get Crypto Twitter excited.

On Tuesday, news broke of the arrest of Avraham Eisenberg, a New Yorker who has allegedly milked millions from crypto exploits. 

Eisenberg’s name resurfaced in October when he stole over $100 million from crypto trading platform Mango Markets, returned $67 million of it, and (at the time) got away with it, claiming his actions were in the interests of depositors, fully legal, and backed by a larger organization behind him. 

Meanwhile, the widow of Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin contributor and receiver of the first transaction on the network, announced a Bitcoin-themed fundraiser marathon to raise money for research into ALS, the neurodegenerative disease that killed Finney back in 2014. 

One disgruntled investor in crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital shared a missive they’d received that should really have been sent back in November, when the FTX crisis started. Multicoin appears to have been heavily affected by both direct and indirect exposure to FTX, in particular its whale-sized hoard of Solana (SOL).

Due to Solana’s strong ties to FTX, SOL has been in freefall for the last two months; it just hit a two-year low while struggling to stay above the $10 support level. 

Vitalik Buterin on Thursday tweeted his support for Solana’s community of deeply disappointed developers and fans. 

On Tuesday, eagle-eyed NFT enthusiast @ClownVamp spotted what looks like outright plagiarism in Manchester United’s new Tezos-based NFT collection. ClownVamp tweeted their compelling evidence in a thread. 

The following day, a fan-made South Park spoof of FTX and its disgraced former CEO made the rounds on CT.

Finally, on Friday, on-chain sleuths like @ZachXBT noticed that seven-digit funds from wallets linked to Alameda Research were being moved through transaction privacy mixers. 

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was quick to deny all involvement, but Twitter was quick to roast him. 

As you were, everyone… 

Sam came back online an hour later to deliver a follow-up in which he offered to advise regulators. That seems unlikely to happen while he faces eight criminal fraud charges, but anything is possible in crypto.