The Crypto World Is Losing Its Mind Over the SEC’s X Debacle

The belonging to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, allowing a fake announcement to be posted to the web concerning a . The announcement claimed the ETFs had been approved but, as it turns out, that’s not true. When it became apparent that the announcement was, indeed, fake, all hell broke loose in the web3 community.

On X, the tenor of the conversation among crypto denizens was equal parts shock, disbelief, and wrath, with just a hint of paranoia. Many Bitcoin acolytes expressed skepticism that the agency’s account had actually been hacked and presumed that some sort of government plot was afoot. Others simply railed against the agency for perceived incompetence.

Frankly, the outrage here is sorta understandable, since the Bitcoin ETF launch has been a much hyped event and is perceived to be a for an industry that’s been put through the ringer lately. “It’s most likely one of the guys at the SEC jumped the gun on the announcement and now they are backpedaling hard. That message was too perfectly written to be some hacker.

It was likely a saved draft,” speculated crypto account on X. “I am no cybersecurity expert, but it seems almost impossible to notice a bad tweet from org account, tweet from the chair’s account to correct it, then recover a hacked social media account, then tweet about incident and response to it from hacked account, all in a few minutes,” one crypto user. Edward Snowden, who is , called out Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, : “jesus christ gary get your shit together.

” Many upset crypto stans looked to Elon Musk for help, asking the billionaire owner of the platform of the poster to validate whether the SEC’s account had actually been hacked or not. “I CANNOT wait for to post a tweet proving the account was NOT hacked but was indeed making an oopsies but still suffering no repercussions,” . As far as can be discerned, Musk hasn’t commented on the incident.

Frankly, the question of what happened to the SEC’s account is still anything but clear. In shared with journalists, the agency has said only the following: So, that’s about as clear as mud. The SEC’s account getting hacked wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary since .

Sure, Twitter is technically X now, but just the other day the account belonging to Mandiant, a top cybersecurity company, was compromised by a hacker, who . All of that said, the timing of the SEC’s incident—right before a major ruling—does make the whole thing seem a little weirder than usual. How, exactly, the SEC’s account was accessed is the part we don’t know—and it’s sorta the critical part.

For weeks, folks in the financial sector and the crypto community the SEC to approve the Bitcoin ETFs. Those ETFs (short for an ), would allow average “normies” to invest in Bitcoin much more easily. Users would be able to invest in the assets using their normal brokerage accounts—like Fidelity—instead of having to do so via the more arcane process of crypto exchanges and cold storage.

In short: It would make Bitcoin much more like a normal stock. A number of brokerage and crypto firms, including financial giants , have submitted applications to launch funds, and large parts of the finance industry have been expecting the SEC to go through with their approvals. Notably, the SEC all previous pleas for a Bitcoin ETF.

It’s unclear whether this time will prove the exception. This is pretty much the last thing crypto needed right now. Things have been quite dour in the decentralized web and it’s not hard to see why.

After a lagging , , an ever escalating , and the embarassing , digital assets and their patrons really, really needed a win. For a brief moment on Tuesday, it really looked like Gensler was going to give it to them. Then, appropriately, like some sort of perverse it turned out to be just another false promise in an industry littered with them.

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