Top 5 weirdest crypto stories of 2023
Crypto can be many things, but it is rarely boring. From hacking to arrests and a billion dollar token burn, here are our five weirdest stories of the year that stand out from the rest.
The KyberSwap hack
In November, decentralized exchange aggregator KyberSwap raised up to $46 million. In crypto, exploits are not common, and although the amount of hacking makes it one of the most important of this year, it is not unusual.
But what happened next put the KyberSwap incident in a category of its own.
On November 30, the KyberSwap hacker sent an on-chain message outlining their demands, including full executive control over the company. The hacker demanded that Cyber CEO hand over all of the company's assets to the hackers. The tyrant promised to buy the current executives “fair value” as well as double the pay of all employees if their terms of service were approved.
A victim of the KyberSwap hack wrote a letter to the hacker. pic.twitter.com/nIjBDhvCQY
— Bstream (@BeOnBstream) November 26, 2023
“This is my best offer,” the hacker concluded. This is my only offer. I ask that my questions be completed by December 10. If not, the agreement will be terminated.
To no one's surprise, KyberSwap did not comply with the hacker's strange wish list.
BitBoy is caught
In September, Ben Armstrong – aka BitBoy Crypto – swung his former employee Carlos Diaz up to the front door and started live streaming, which would soon put the influencer on the wrong side of the law and behind bars.
Standing outside Diaz's front door, Armstrong began firing off a long line of accusations, accusing Diaz of endangering his life. Armstrong then revealed that Diaz had ties to the “Black Mafia” before accusing him of stealing his former employee's Lamborghini.
As he performed himself live on YouTube, the loss of Armstrong's sports car seemed to weigh heavily on his mind.
“Carlos Diaz, the guy with my Lamborghini, the guy who stole my Lamborghini, the guy who killed me, my Lamborghini threatened me,” Armstrong said in a confusing turn of phrase.
Overall, Armstrong appeared confused as to why he was on Diaz's property.
At first, Armstrong said, “I was scared for my life for weeks,” before changing his mind, saying, “If Carlos Diaz walks out of this house and tries to kill me live on YouTube, that's all that's going to happen.” to be what will be”
During the halftime broadcast, Armstrong said he was both afraid of his former employee and wanted people to know he was and wasn't afraid.
The 37-minute diatribe continued until police arrived and immediately arrested the influencer, who had taken a gun and his mistress, Cassandra Wolff, to the scene of the violence. Armstrong was eventually released after posting a $2,600 surety bond.
650 billion dollars burned.
In October, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams burned 99.9% of the HayCoin (HAY) supply, which was valued at an “absurd” $650 billion.
Adams deployed the HAY token for testing five years ago before launching Uniswap. By doing this, he created a liquid pool that was a fraction of the total supply and kept the remaining 99.9% of the tokens for himself.
Over time, traders began to buy and sell 0.1% as meme tokens, driving down the value of HAY. “Crypto can be weird sometimes,” Adams continued.
The fire took the token from $580,005 on October 20th to more than $4 million by October 26th.
Copy NFTs
In October, a US District Court judge ordered Ryder Rips and Jeremy Cahen to pay $1.57 million in damages to Yoga Labs for copying Bored Ups Yacht Club (BAYC) nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
The weirdness comes from Rips and Cahen's behavior in the event. For a while, Rips Bored claimed that NFTs were racist and anti-Semitic, even launching a website to accuse him of having “Nazi dog whistles.”
Rips and Cahen subsequently launched a series of copycat NFTs that infringed BAYC's intellectual property. But while BAYC NFTs were allegedly racist when Yuga Labs created them, Ripps and Cahen argued that they were “satire” when they replicated them en masse and profited from them.
Unsurprisingly, this argument has not found much favor in legal circles.
Documentary of the heart
In July, HEX and PulseChain co-founder Richard Hart prepped for his vanity film project, The Highest of Stakes.
Heart has an impressive track record of profits, and so a certain level of anticipation surrounds its release. Unwittingly, the SEC was preparing to take legal action at the same time as dropping the fraud charges to ruin the party.
While Heart has a loyal following in the crypto world, those outside of it seem less impressed with the influencer and project founder. As one film critic put it, “If someone tells you up front that they're watching you, is it a conman?”
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