Crypto Twitter This Week: The Return of Roaring Kitty, Pump.fun Attackers Reveal All

Crypto Twitter this week was full of characters stealing the show. Some for positive reasons, some for… For darker reasons.

As of last Sunday, a Twitter account named Keith Gill had been dormant for several years. roaring kitty—the meme stock influencer best known for engineering the 2021 short squeeze in GameStop (GME) stock—suddenly became active again, sending both Twitter and financial markets into a frenzy.

Over the next days the account recorded the following scores: movie clips It was adorned with a finance-themed caption, as Roaring Kitty routinely did before going silent on all social media accounts in mid-2021.

The frenzy immediately boosted the value of meme stocks like GME and AMC by multiples. meme coin. (However, by the end of the week, most affected assets will be sudden drop Come back to Earth.)

Despite the fact that the tweet pumped billions of dollars in stocks and meme coins, it remained unclear all week whether Gill was actually behind it. The influencer has not posted any videos or photos of herself, and her once-frequent Reddit and YouTube accounts have remained silent.

In the void of verifiability, some, including conceptual digital artist Shloms, saw an opportunity. assert That (without evidence) they were behind the Roaring Kitty post.

On Tuesday, Alexey Pertsev, developer of Ethereum coin mixer Tornado Cash, shared some grim news. be found guilty He was sentenced to more than five years in prison by a Dutch court on money laundering charges.

Reaction on Twitter was swift, with cryptocurrency industry leaders calling the ruling overly punitive and unfair. Many in the industry have long praised Tornado Cash as an important tool for protecting the privacy of cryptocurrency users.

Pertsev on Thursday contaminated Appeal against conviction.

On the same day, perhaps the most bizarre story of the week unfolded. Residents of Crypto Twitter discovered in real time that Pump.fun, a hugely popular meme coin generator, had been hacked. was live tweet About the exploit.

With every passing minute, cryptocurrency users pieced together that the person was actually the Pump.fun hacker and a completely doxxed Canadian citizen. Industry celebrities who knew the hacker tried to contact him but were concerned. (The hacker withdrew $2 million in SOL from Pump.fun and then airdropped it to random NFT and token holders.)

In a surreal turn of events, Pump.fun posted that it was investigating the hack and would cooperate with the government.As authorities were investigating, self-proclaimed attackers took to Twitter Spaces and stated that they wanted to “kill” the protocol.“I unintentionally hurt people for a long time.”

During the course of this story, the hacker was incredibly active online and openly admitted to anyone who asked that he was likely going to jail, but he didn’t care at all.

Editor: Andrew Hayward