This week on Crypto Twitter: NBA stars buy bitcoin, Vitalik welcomes trolls, FWB DAO kicks out a co-founder

In last week’s Crypto Twitter roundup, we included “Desperate Housewives.” Star Eva Longoria’s candid announcement that she’s “Leap into the #NFT space.” She had asked her 7 million followers for advice on where to start and, as you might expect, the replies were replete with people telling her about their NFT projects.

She didn’t dally. On Monday, she changed her profile picture to her first NFT purchase: a World of Women NFT. World of Women is a collection of illustrations by artist Yam Karkai “with 10,000 artworks of diverse and powerful women,” according to the designation. (Karkai made decrypt‘s list of most innovative NFT artists from 2021.)

Longoria joins Reese Witherspoon as owner of World of Women. And whether it was thanks to Longoria, or thanks to the collection signing with Guy Oseary for Hollywood reputation (just like Bored Ape Yacht Club), that Price floor rose this week.

Andre and Klay go crypto

NBA legend Andre Iguodala announced Monday that he and Golden State Warriors teammate Klay Thompson receive a portion of their salaries in Bitcoin through mobile payment service Cash App.

The two NBA stars join a long list of professional athletes who have poured a portion of their salary into Bitcoin, including Aaron Rodgers, Odell Beckham jr., Russel Okung, and Trevor Lawrence. (FTX investor and pitchman Tom Brady has said he would “I wish that“, but it didn’t.)

Not everyone welcomed the move. University of Toronto law professor Anna Su replied: “Love you and Klay but hope you can use your platform to advocate for more sustainable crypto mining practices. no future if crypto destroys the planet.”

Vitalik asks to be roasted

On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made sure everyone had some fun as he swallowed his pride and shared some of the cruelest roasts he’s received on Twitter, also asking for more: “What are the craziest and craziest reviews of me? seen on Twitter or elsewhere?”

Some of the jokes were very dark, like one made by users @FirstFedora: “His destiny was to shoot down a school, unfortunately he failed.” Many interviewees teased Vitalik’s skinny physique @XRPmemeguy: “The most positive thing about Vitalik going to jail is that he finally gets 3 decent meals a day.”

But our favorite was this harmless wordplay gag on “italic” Buterin, which was our meme of the week in the Decrypt email for weekend debriefing on Saturday.

Buterin also released a series of polls asking his Ethereum-loving followers which altcoins they would use in a world without Ethereum. In the first round, the options were Bitcoin, USDC, Solana, and Cardano. Surprisingly, Cardano beat Bitcoin with 43% of the 600,000 votes versus Bitcoin’s 38%.

Buterin then asked the same question in another poll, this time with different options: TRON, Binance Coin, Neo, and China’s digital yuan (CNY). TRON was the clear winner, garnering 51% of the 359,000 votes, more than double the votes of all other options.

FWB boots its own

Tuesday brought a moment that could be a touchstone for the future of how decentralized organizations deal with issues surrounding member behavior — and it all played out on Twitter.

It started when 25-year-old Cooper Turley, a mega influencer in DAO land, tweeted, “What you do after 8pm shows how badly you want to win.” Jackson Dame, another crypto influencer, the community and makes content for the Ethereum wallet Rainbow, called Turley’s tweet promoting an unhealthy work-life balance – something Turley’s tweets had been criticized for in the past. Dame called Turley a “bad influence”.

Dame then found and tweeted some of Turley’s tweets from high school, which included repeated use of the n-word and homophobic slurs.

Turley apologized for the tweets on Wednesday morning, saying: “It was then that I developed a terrible habit of casually using racial and homophonic slurs to conform.” He wrote: “They were unacceptable and deeply hurtful. I was young, stupid and carefree. That doesn’t change how awful those comments were, and still are.”

On Friday, popular DAO Friends With Benefits (FWB), a crypto-backed social club that Turley helped found, announced that Turley had been removed from the DAO leadership following a committee vote and also suspended as a member for two “seasons.”

FWB’s actions drew their own criticism from those who think booting a member over tweets from nine years ago is a step too far for a decentralized crypto organization.

Turley has announced that he will be retiring from the many DAOs he is involved with, but that probably won’t be the end of the discussion surrounding this event. It raises crucial questions about how crypto communities will deal with similar controversies.