Craig Wright, a long-time claimant of the Satoshi Nakamoto title, was exposed and forced to admit his lie on Twitter and all social handles.
Defi Squared, a blockchain investigator, accused Worldcoin of manipulating its token price and running a scam.
Match Systems may have identified the developers behind the notorious Angel Drainer tool.
A massive $230 million exploit hit WazirX, with the Lazarus Group suspected as the main culprit.
Ryan Selkis, the CEO of Messari, was forced to step down after offensive and discriminatory pro-Trump tweets.
The crypto market seemed to wake up suddenly last week, posting impressive gains across several sectors, including ETFs, regular crypto prices, and the NFT market.
However, more than the main market sectors did during the week, several other things went on.
For example, we have the story of Craig Wright, the man who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto for years.
A federal judge ordered Wright to publicly admit that he had lied about being Bitcoin's creator since 2016.
We had another multi-hundred-million dollar hack on a popular crypto exchange and a well-known CEO who had to resign after taking to Twitter to call Vitalik Buterin "useless"—among other discriminatory and offensive statements.
Here are all the events from last week, summarized into a single article.
Last week, we saw Craig Wright, one of the longest claimants to the Satoshi Nakamoto name, get forced to admit that he’d been lying all along.
Wright's claims have been going on since 2016.
However, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (or COPA) dragged the would-be Nakamoto to court last year, seeking a definitive ruling to prevent Wright from claiming copyright over the Bitcoin whitepaper.
A few months ago, in March 2024, Judge James Mellor of the UK High Court finally ruled that Wright was not Bitcoin's creator and that he had lied and even forged documents to support his claim.
After this, Judge Mellor left Wright in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on grounds of perjury (or lying in court).
Wright's legal notice
In addition to the charges, Wright has also been ordered to post a disclaimer on his website, Slack, and Twitter pages stating that he was "dishonest in his claims" and "lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly."
Last week, Defi Squared, a blockchain investigative account on Twitter, came out with “proof” that Worldcoin was running a scam.
The lengthy post, published on 17 July, claimed that the Worldcoin team was actively engaging in practices to control and profit from the price of $WLD.
Defi Squared alleged that the Worldcoin team manipulated the cryptocurrency's short-term price movements through shady token emissions, market maker contracts, and well-timed announcements.
Independent blockchain investigator ZachXBT also commented, labeling Worldcoin "the biggest scam token of the bull run."
As of writing, Worldcoin has not responded to these allegations, with WLD continuing its decline from the $3 price level.
Another interesting event from last week was how the possible developers behind Angel Drainer (one of the most notorious wallet-draining tools) were reportedly being tracked down.
Keep in mind that Angel Drainer has been responsible for more than $25 million worth of scams in the past.
This state of multi-million dollar scams prompted Match Systems to investigate the identities of the masterminds behind it all.
On 16 July, the blockchain security firm posted on Twitter that it was "actively investigating" the thefts.
Interestingly, while no individual names were mentioned, users of the drainer tool started to report that the app was no longer functioning a mere two hours after the announcement.
This meant that the developers believed Match Systems was on to something and likely had shut down the app.
Last week, several cryptos worth $230 million were stolen from WazirX, India's largest crypto exchange.
The attack happened on 18 July, when several alerts started to go up about "unusual activity" in one of the exchange's multi-sig wallets.
Interestingly, this wallet required multiple private keys to authorize transactions, but it was still compromised and drained of millions worth of Shiba Inu, Ether, Matic, and others.
Interestingly, according to a blog post by Elliptic, this hack may have been carried out by the notorious North Korean Lazarus Group.
Elliptic also noted that the stolen funds were being laundered, not via mixers as usual, but via decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
By the end of the week, the attackers had sold off much of the stolen tokens, including $100 million worth of SHIB and $52 million in ETH.
Last week, Messari co-founder Ryan Selkis was forced to step down after making several discriminatory and politically charged comments on Twitter.
One of these tweets read, "Anyone who votes against Trump at this point can die in a F*cking fire”.
Another read, "Do not initiate violence. But if it is brought to your door, finish with violence."
Prior to this, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post urging voters not to make decisions based solely on a candidate's pro-crypto stance.
For the blog post, he called Buterin "the most naive and useless political commentator" he had ever seen. Soon after this, on 19 July, he was forced to announce his resignation from the CEO position via his X account.
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