Crypto Twitter should stop tweeting weird and terrible things

Another week, another incredibly cringy tweet on Crypto Twitter.

Ryan Salame, the former FTX executive who was recently sentenced to 7.5 years in prison, decided to celebrate his upcoming near-decade in prison this week by hopping online to tweet for the first time since FTX collapsed.

His timeline reads like a weird time capsule — his most recent tweets are from November 2022, including several retweets of Sam Bankman-Fried reassuring customers, one particularly painful retweet of Caroline Ellison promising to buy FTT from CZ at $22, and then a personal tweet from Salame about how much he loves his friends. 

More than two years later, following the FTX collapse and 25-year sentence of Bankman-Fried, Salame returned to Twitter to tell the crypto world: “hot damn, this is going to get interesting quickly.”

There’s a clear pattern in the crypto industry of tweeting things that really are better left untweeted. 

Read more: The best Crypto Twitter moments of 2023

Some tweets go down in history — like the failed Terra creator Do Kwon’s “Deploying more capital – steady lads” before the collapse of his algorithmic stablecoin took down the whole market. 

More recent examples all come back to the FTX case, most notably when the government actually used some of Bankman-Fried’s tweets during the November ruckus in their legal case against him. Then there are the tweets from crypto leaders (and former leaders now about to serve jail time) that haven’t aged badly — yet. But there’s still time.

The idea of posting recklessly on social media in spite of any potential future harm to your reputation or freedom definitely didn’t begin on Crypto Twitter, but it has been a hallmark of online financial forums for some time. 

We all remember the infamous WallStreetBets subreddit, where groups of novice traders bragged about how much money they lost for years before banding together in 2021 to inspire short squeezes that briefly shook the foundations of the financial system. But on a platform like Reddit, volunteer moderators at the time spent a fair amount of energy making sure that /r/WallStreetBets posts didn’t actually break any securities laws, so as to protect their users from inadvertently putting themselves at risk with their sh*itposts. 

Crypto Twitter doesn’t have that kind of fallback. 

Instead, aimlessly scrolling Crypto Twitter can lead you to question the logic of what people choose to share online. It could be something as egregious as the now-convicted Mango Markets exploiter trying to explain why his hack wasn’t really a hack, but it could be something more innocuous as well, like tweeting support for a crypto-friendly politician who was convicted in a hush money trial. 

We can’t always predict what will and what won’t age well on social media. It’s also not realistic to only ever post things that you know you will never change your mind about. 

But in a world where your online presence takes on more and more importance, I think that Crypto Twitter — especially the many young people that the crypto industry attracts — needs to think harder about its digital footprint.

Back to Salame as this week’s example. Even though Salame did plead guilty and therefore is unlikely to appeal his sentencing, tweeting in this attention-seeking way can’t be good for anyone involved. For example, he followed up his first tweet with a series that included his assertion that he had “no idea” about that $55 million personal loan he received from FTX:

“Not a dollar ever touched my account and the receiver had no clue I didn’t know about it. Fun thing to learn while my whole world was imploding.”

There are still three other FTX executives working with the government — Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — and who knows what Salame could tweet that could theoretically affect their sentences. He has until the end of August to surrender himself for his prison sentence — that’s an entire summer of potentially destructive tweets.

So I ask all of Crypto Twitter, especially those who have been or possibly could be the subject of legal action in the future (which seems ever more likely for crypto associates in the US) — don’t tweet that weird thing. Just don’t do it. The short-term dopamine rush of getting likes and retweets can’t possibly be worth whatever hypothetical legal or social repercussions could come your (or your compatriots) way down the line.

It’s like the old adage: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But in this case: If you don’t have something not-insane to tweet, don’t tweet anything at all.

I don’t care much about tech, I don’t care a whole lot about finance, either. I care about writing stories and watching weird things unfold. And that’s why I’ve ended up in crypto.

But because I’m missing that passion for what crypto and blockchain are all about — finance, tech, privacy, yadda yadda — I’m going to write instead about what I am actually interested in. Everything about crypto that has very little to do with crypto.

That’s what this column will be about. All the tangential stories that come out of the blockchain and crypto space, what I think about them, and how I navigate it all as a skeptical former Russian literature major.

It’s precisely my perch as an outsider that lets me do what I do: Opine on all sides of any crypto issue, no strings attached, no skin in the game.

If you want to talk crypto with me, let’s go off topic.