Sam Bankman-Fried provides bailouts, ‘Bitcoin dead’ searches soar, and debate over hidden themes behind BAYC continues: Hodlers Digest, June 19–25

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

SBF and Alameda step in to prevent crypto collapse contagion

Sam Bankman-Fried stated on June 20 that his firms Alameda Research and FTX would be “stepping in” to help companies with liquidity troubles amid the current bear market. Over the course of the week, Alameda dished out a loan of roughly $500 million to Voyager Digital, which is suffering from exposure to the potentially insolvent Three Arrows Capital, while FTX supplied BlockFi with $250 million worth of credit.

New video revives debate over Bored Ape Yacht Club’s alleged ‘racist’ imagery

YouTuber Philip Rusnack, known as Philion, published a video this week on Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club nonfungible token (NFT) project, arguing that the team has embedded alt-right inside jokes, Nazi imagery and racist caricatures of Black and Asian people in the artwork depicted in the tokenized avatars. Such a notion has been a long-running conspiracy theory in the NFT community, and while many people laugh it off, others take the supposed evidence as gospel.

‘Bitcoin dead’ Google searches hit new all-time high

With Bitcoin crashing back down to the lower $20,000s, Google searches for “Bitcoin dead” spiked in the week of Friday, June 18, and hit some of the highest levels on record. Google Trends tracks search interest over time and assigns scores of 1 to 100 based on the total number of user searches. During this period, “Bitcoin dead” achieved a perfect score of 100.

Bitcoin S2F model gives false sense of certainty, says Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has critiqued the stock-to-flow (S2F) model popularized by pseudonymous investor PlanB. The BTC-focused S2F drew significant attention during the bull run last year, as it went on a relatively long streak of accurate predictions before falling way off the mark in late 2021. Commenting on the S2F model, Buterin noted, “I know it’s impolite to gloat and all that, but I think financial models that give people a false sense of certainty and predestination that number-will-go-up are harmful and deserve all the mockery they get.”

Solend invalidates Solana whale wallet takeover plan with second governance vote

Solana-based DeFi lending protocol Solend created a counter governance vote to the controversial “SLND1 : Mitigate Risk From Whale” poll this week after listening to the strong pushback from the community. The initial vote was intended to allow Solend to reduce the market risk of a massive whale’s potential liquidation by letting the platform access the whale’s wallet. However, the idea has been vetoed after the countervote polled 1,480,264 votes in favor of not going through with the whale takeover.

Winners and Losers

At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) is at $21,241.99, Ether (ETH) at $1,214.06 and XRP at $0.37. The total market cap is at $952 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Storj (STORJ) at 89.27%, Synthetic (SNX) at 74.21% and Polygon (MATIC) at 51.76%. 

The top three altcoin losers of the week are Harmony (ONE) at 4.06%, KuCoin Token (KCS) at 1.93% and PAX Gold (PAXG) at 1.55%.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.

Most Memorable Quotations

“Particularly in the area of digital asset trading, I feel that the UK has missed a trick […] We are getting very close to the point where it will be too late. Other jurisdictions are racing ahead of us.” 

Philip Hammond, former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer 

“In short, they are just ‘bad’ projects. These should not be saved. Sadly, some of these ‘bad’ projects have a large number of users, often acquired through inflated incentives, ‘creative’ marketing, or pure Ponzi schemes.” 

Changpeng Zhao, founder and CEO of Binance 

“The SEC now seems to take the position when they sued us that ‘XRP is a security and always has been,’ but they approved Coinbase going public even though Coinbase is not a registered broker-dealer.” 

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple

“Web3 and crypto, in general, is very market-driven, so you have highs and downs. When we build, we always are considering the long game.” 

Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave 

“When things are a bit harder in the market, you discover who’s actually building something that might last for the long longer term and what is going to pass away.” 

Hester Peirce, commissioner of the SEC 

“Even if we weren’t the ones who caused it, or weren’t involved in it. I think that’s what’s healthy for the ecosystem, and I want to do what can help it grow and thrive.” 

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of Alameda Research

Prediction of the Week 

‘Foolish’ to deny Bitcoin price can go under $10K — Analysis

With the price of BTC hovering around $20,000 and the Fed yet to reveal any new information regarding efforts to reel in inflation, crypto commentators have argued that the outlook of the price in the immediate term is uncertain. However, a potential fresh pullback may only involve a trip to $16,000, according to some, while others have urged investors to consider a drop to $10,000 as a potential scenario also. 

“Consolidating $BTC in a broad range and then going up. MDD (maximum drawdown) is not that big like -20%,” Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, wrote in part of a Twitter post.

“At this stage, nobody can say with certainty whether BTC will hold this range or if it will go to sub $10K price levels ever again, but it would be foolish not to have a plan for that possibility,” a tweet argued.

FUD of the Week 

Harmony’s Horizon Bridge hacked for $100M

The Horizon Bridge to the Harmony layer-1 blockchain was exploited for $100 million worth of altcoins on June 24. From 7:08 am EST until 7:26 am EST, 11 transactions were made from the bridge for various tokens before sending the tokens off to Uniswap to exchange for ETH. The Harmony team said it is working with “national authorities and forensic specialists” to determine who was responsible, and a post-mortem will follow.

China’s WeChat bans crypto and NFT-related accounts

Social media and payments app giant WeChat updated its policies to ban accounts that provide access to crypto or NFT-related services. Under the new guidelines, accounts involved with the issuance, trading and financing of crypto and NFTs will be categorized as an “illegal business” and will either be restricted or banned outright.

Iranian government to cut power supply for the country’s legal crypto mining rigs

According to reports from local media outlets this week, Iran’s Ministry of Energy will have started shutting off the power supply to all of the country’s licensed crypto mining firms by the beginning of July. The government entity cited a potential electricity deficit during the peak summer season as the reason.

Best Cointelegraph Features

The community-centered approach to Web3 — Aave founder and CEO

“What if we actually can have ownership on our own presence in social media — our profiles, our social identities?” asked Stani Kulechov.

Is there a way for the crypto sector to avoid Bitcoin’s halving-related bear markets?

BTC’s high volatility and halving-related bear markets tend to drag down investment and interest in the entire crypto market. Can this be avoided?

Lummis–Gillibrand crypto bill comprehensive but still creates division

The senators introduced new approaches to familiar questions concerning digital assets and how to divide regulatory responsibilities.