This Week on Crypto Twitter: SBF Resurfaces, Yuga Labs Resets, and Elon Musk’s Xmail May Challenge Gmail

Just when you thought the world was ready to forget the catastrophic collapse of FTX and the conviction of its once-untouchable founder Sam Bankman-Fried, a photo of the incarcerated former executive along with a handful of other prisonmates hit Twitter, thanks to Tiffany Fong.

Fong, who herself calls attention to the absurdity of her involvement in the FTX drama (“it’s just like this random fucking chick wandered into this very serious situation,” she told Rolling Stone), secured the image after befriending Bankman-Fried’s former prisonmate “G Lock,” who referred to the FTX founder as his “son” and issued a call to U.S. President Joe Biden to pardon his now-bearded friend.

Sufficiently scandalized, Crypto Twitter then enrolled in a course in crypto history.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the U.K. high court trial over whether litigious computer programmer Craig Wright is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, are the archives of correspondence between Nakamoto and his collaborators (which include first Bitcoin transaction recipient Hal Finney and no one named Wright) that have been unearthed and entered into evidence.

First came emails between Nakamoto and cryptographer and cypherpunk Adam Back—CEO and co-founder of Blockstream—going back well before Bitcoin’s launch.

Then came the testimony and associated email archives of computer scientist and software developer Martti Malmi, an early Bitcoin contributor who went by the nickname Sirius.

Intriguingly, while Bitcoin is hailed today as a solid investment (acknowledged by regulated financial markets in the form of new and red-hot spot exchange traded funds) that’s also an anonymous means of payment, Nakamoto was hesitant to tout either trait, asking to remove related promises from the Bitcoin website.

In the degen suburbs of Crypto Twitter, it was oddly a corporate shakeup that got tweeps tweeting, as Greg “Garga” Solano announced that he was returning to Yuga Labs as its CEO—replacing Daniel Alegre, who came over from Activision but lasted less than a year at the helm.

“We want to unshackle the BAYC team at Yuga as much as possible to execute against its vision,” Garga wrote. To do so, he promised to reinvigorate Otherside and position it as ”the living room of Web3,” and to lean more into gaming—from ”mass market,” fun titles like Dookey Dash to more “crypto native mechanics and platforms.”

Finally, Twitter was the root of a briefly viral false rumor that Google was killing its immensely popular Gmail email service. No, Google is not killing Gmail—something the tech giant had to affirm—but it sparked enough of a controversy that it prompted fans of Elon Musk to ask whether he had a competitive service in mind as part of his “everything app” ambitions.

”It’s coming,” he said.