Dencun Goes Live, Dogwifhat Goes Vegas, Craig Wright Goes Down

Despite a drop in crypto prices set off by discouraging inflation figures, Crypto Twitter managed to have quite a lot of fun this week, inspired by reasons ranging from genuine technological progress to good old-fashioned schadenfreude.

On Wednesday, Ethereum’s much-anticipated Dencun upgrade went live, substantially lowering transaction costs across Ethereum layer-2 networks via a novel data storage method called blobs, which developers say could soon make gas fees a thing of the past.

In the hours and days following the software update’s successful adoption, multiple Ethereum layer 2 networks began showing radical drops in transaction costs.

By dramatically reducing transaction costs, developers hope Dencun will usher in a new age for Ethereum—one in which all manner of data can be stored on-chain without concern for cost or limited storage space. Already this week, crypto users began experimenting with that premise.

The same day Dencun successfully finalized, members of the ever-lucrative Dogwifhat (WIF) meme coin community rejoiced upon reaching their own milestone: raising nearly $700,000 to plaster the face of its cuddly, beanie-sporting namesake on the face of Sphere, the massive LED-screen covered arena in Las Vegas.

WIF continued its phenomenal, unceasing bull run on the news, pumping to—by Friday afternoon—a whopping $3 billion market capitalization. Although that’s fallen to $2.2 billion at time of writing, it is solidly the fourth largest meme coin in the world by such metrics, behind only Pepecoin, Shiba Inu, and the original meme token, Dogecoin.

The sheer absurdity of the fact that WIF community members easily raised enough funds—in mere days—to put their favorite meme on the largest screen in the world, signaled to some that the top may be in.

As if the good vibes weren’t already flowing, the week ended on a note that got everyone in crypto cheering together: the conclusive ruling by a UK judge that Craig Wright is definitely not pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakomoto.

For years, Wright, an Australian computer scientist, claimed to have invented Bitcoin despite never being able to produce the private keys to Satoshi’s Bitcoin address.

In 2022, a British court ruled that Wright had submitted “deliberately false evidence” in a defamation case he filed against Peter McCormack, a podcaster who repeatedly called Wright a fraud for claiming to be Satoshi. After Wright was decidedly deemed a Satoshi imitator in court on Thursday, McCormack was there to celebrate.

Any historic moment needs a fitting anthem—and a 2023 tune from musician Jonathan Mann, bluntly titled “Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi,” quickly began making the rounds again on Crypto Twitter.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.