While the majority of the world stopped and took time to gather around the Christmas tree to spend time with family and loved ones, the sleepless land of crypto was still whirring away, with a number of major developments going down over the Christmas period. Here’s the crypto news you missed over Christmas.
Crypto news from this Christmas
SBF gets a new judge and pisses everyone off (again)
The biggest slice of crypto news came when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was appointed to a new judge after US District Judge Ronnie Abrams recused herself on Friday.
According to a report from Reuters, Abram’s decided not to take on the trial because her husband is a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, which gave counsel to FTX in 2021.
SBF’s new judge Lewis Kaplan has a history of supervising some pretty high-profile legal cases, currently overseeing a defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump and formerly presiding over sexual misconduct charges pressed against Prince Andrew.
While all of this was going down, SBF managed to once again, single handedly enrage the entire crypto community after pictures of him hanging out in the business class lounge at John F Kennedy airport surfaced on Twitter.
Still, it seems like the good times for SBF may not last too much longer, and Pharma Bro ‘Martin Shkreli’ seems to have some advice for the failed founder when things officially turn south. According to Shkreli, SBF needs to shave his head, drop his voice an octave and start listening to rap if he wants to have less of a hard time in prison.
Christmas Crypto: Pudgy Penguins bucks the NFT bear market in a big way
The floor price of Pudgy Penguins has soared more than 70% over the past week, following a series of green financial lights from the project.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Schnetzler said that in spite of the bear market, the Pudgy Penguins project is in a strong enough position financially to begin returning profits to holders.
Since Schentzler purchased the project midway through the year, he’s been hard at work leveraging the collections Intellectual Property (IP) to develop new income streams for the collection of plump little flightless birds. These include a new line of Pudgy-themed plush toys and children’s books, as well as an Instagram account that focuses on promoting mental health.
Earlier this month, the Pudgy Penguins sold out its “Snowed In” collection at luxury auction house Sotheby’s, racking up an impressive US$128,000 in sales.
The biggest NFT projects on Solana are moving to new blockchains
Solana’s top NFT projects, Y00ts and DeGods are officially saying goodbye to Solana and migrating to new blockchains.
In what can only be called a severe blow to Solana (SOL), Y00ts will be moving to the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain while DeGods will transfer over to Ethereum (ETH).
The creator of both projects, Rohun Vora, who goes by his pseudonym ‘Frank’ on Twitter addressed the news in a Twitter space on Monday, saying that both projects had essentially “capped out” on Solana.
“It’s hard to accept, but it’s been tough to grow at the rate we want to grow. If Ethereum is where we have to go to keep growing, it’s what we have to do.”
Frank, Creator of DeGods & Y00ts
Seeing as the two collections account for roughly 70% of the all the sales volume on Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden, the move will have serious repercussions for what is currently Solana’s leading NFT sales platform.
Christmas Crypto: What are you going to do, arrest me?
Avraham Eisenberg, the hacker behind the US$110 million Mango Markets exploit has tempted fate a little too well it seems.
After taunting both the authorities and the investors that he took advantage of with his strange, yet nifty hack of DeFi protocol Mango Markets where he supposedly forced the protocol to give up any potential legal recourse in exchange for returning some of the stolen funds, Eisenberg has been arrested in Puerto Rico.
According to a complaint filed with the Southern District of New York (SDNY) that was unsealed this morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) slapped Avraham Eisenberg with one count commodities fraud and one count of commodities manipulation pertaining to his previous exploits.
That’s kind of it for the most essential crypto news this Christmas.
