Last Week in Review: Drama at OpenAI, and JP Morgan partners with Avalanche

The highlights from last week’s headline grabbers. All the important news, numbers and events from the world of crypto in one place

News from the block

Co-founder Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT

• Sam Altman, the co-founder and face of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was removed from the company after the board of directors said they have lost confidence in his leadership. A few days later, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, announced that Altman and Greg Brockman, Altman’s co-founder at OpenAI, would be joining Microsoft to continue work on AI development.
  
  
• “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” a statement from OpenAI read.
  
  
• Altman and others have since been reinstated at OpenAI with rumours about the reason for his dismissal continuing to do the rounds. 
  

JP Morgan launched a proof-of-concept with Avalanche

• JP Morgan’s Onyx is using one of the customisable blockchains on Avalanche to connect investment portfolios to tokenised assets in a proof-of-concept (POC), reports Decrypt. Onyx is JP Morgan’s blockchain platform.
  
  
• “The POC demonstrates how blockchain technology, smart contracts, and tokenization can potentially help automate portfolio management while including alternatives (“alts”) alongside liquid assets in discretionary portfolios,” Avalanche said on its blog.
  
  
• AVAX, the native crypto of the Avalanche network, was up more than 20% following the news. 
  

Daily transactions on Polygon reached all-time high

• The amount of transactions on Polygon reached an all-time high of 16.4 million, last week, according to data from Polygonscan.
  
  
• The surge was likely due to a new NFT collection on the network, called POLS, noted crypto publication ambcrypto.com.
  
  
• “This unprecedented spike was attributed to the influx of users who flocked to the network to mint the new Polygon-based non-fungible token (NFT) collection POLS, an Ordinals-inspired token standard on the network,” according to the news site.  
  

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TL;DID read

What happens to your crypto when you die?

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Crunching the numbers

$80 billion – OpenAI’s estimated valuation. 

$1 billion – The reported daily transaction amount on Onyx, JP Morgan’s  blockchain. 

23.82% – The percentage of ETH currently staked. 

215,000 – How much bitcoin the US government has confiscated since 2020, according to a dashboard on Dune Analytics tracking the BTC wallets associated with the three largest BTC seizures since 2020.

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Crypto trivia

What kind of crypto investor are you?

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Protect your crypto 

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