April Fools’ Day 2019: Crypto roundup

With fake news going mainstream over the last couple of years, April 1st is the one day of the year when it’s still OK to have a chuckle at the crazy goings on in the crypto space. Take a look below to see the best selection of fake news we found today.

Bitfinexed is backing Tether

Staunch Tether (USDT) critic Bitfinexed feigned a complete 180 by announcing his own audit of the project’s fiat holdings in the form of being shown “pallets of cash” that look like they may have something to do with the missing money from the Iraq war.

But the stablecoin sceptic didn’t stop there as he went on to announce that Tether has now hired him “to FUD other stable tokens”.

Blockstream to release its own Ethereum block explorer

Off the back of its Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid network block explorers, Blockstream appeared to have finally heard the cries of the community and claimed it had released one for the Ethereum network. According to the attached link, the blockchain is still “looking for peers” and is only 0.0000663009% into its network sync at the time of writing.

I may have believed the hoax if it had been for Ethereum Classic…. Better luck next year!

The Ethereum Governance Lobby Group

Ethereum core developer Vlad Zamfir also took to Twitter this morning to announce the long-awaited formation of the first official “lobbying organization specializing in blockchain governance”. The well-connected group of ETH developers and researchers “who know Vitalik (personally)” are apparently quite passionate about blockchain governance.

Plans for the new group include putting “direct pressure on the relevant actors to virtually guarantee desirable changes to the Ethereum protocol”.

Carlos Matos is Satoshi

According to Crypto Sampo, it seems that “Mr hey hey heyyyyyy” may actually be the one true Satoshi after making a historic transfer of 50 BTC from the Bitcoin genesis block. In the spirit of Don’t Trust, Verify, we checked this one out ourselves, but unfortunately still couldn’t see any outgoing transactions leaving this address. What a shame!

All in on XRP

After a “long and painful internal discussion”, it seems nodl has finally given in to the inevitable and decided to drop BTC support to go all in on XRP. The company also said that “all the new nodls will come in gold-plated plastic with a sticker on top”, but I guess that should be affordable given their projected $2,000 price target for the new ‘gold’ standard in crypto projects.

#XRPthestandard