Best of paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth on Kiwi News
@papajams.eth on Paragraph · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
13 stories by @papajams.eth on Paragraph have been shared on Kiwi News since 8 April 2024, with 65 upvotes and 11 comments in total. The latest was shared on 12 August 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Coding Agents: zed.dev
The author, who writes under the handle papa, argues that AI-integrated tooling, using Zed as the example, lets one developer build full-stack systems in weeks that previously needed a team of five over six months. Two projects are described in detail: MegaVibe, a decentralized tipping platform with Mantle blockchain micropayments and GPS-verified proof-of-presence, which the author says was delivered as an MVP in 1 week for under $500 in infra and tooling costs; and ImperfectCoach, an AI coaching app built on OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, created in under 4 weeks. The article also includes a comparison table claiming Zed starts in under one second and uses about 150MB of RAM, versus 3-5 seconds and about 500MB for VS Code.
- $Degen: funding the future on farcaster and beyond?
This Paragraph article by papajams.eth describes how the $Degen memecoin, launched three months earlier by developer Jacek on the Farcaster social network, has funded awards through the Tip O' The Hat (TOTH) initiative, in which members pool daily tips to reward deserving creators. The author states that over $1m (approximately $1,179,139.59 at a $0.045 average DEGEN price) had been awarded so far to artists, developers, builders, journalists and others. The article also argues that tipping could act as advertising, funding and a more egalitarian way to reward creators, while noting that rug pulls and honeypot attacks have already appeared on the degen L3 chain.
- Nouns.WTF: the DAO upending the Brand Building Playbook
Nouns, a DAO whose brand is built on open-source participation rather than top-down control, is presented as a model that reverses traditional brand-building. The article says Nouns uses a CC0 license, so anyone can use its assets, and it is self-funded mainly through a daily auction that releases one new Noun each day. It reports 1,299 Nouns sold and over 33,150 ETH ($80m+) distributed from its community wallet to hundreds of projects. The article also describes a controversial fork in which arbitrageurs drained about half the treasury, as Peteris Erins reports.
- Farcaster's ZK Anons
This essay argues that pseudonymity and zero-knowledge proofs can support private, verifiable participation on decentralized social platforms, and that a variety of identity models, rather than complete anonymity, offers the most promise. It traces the build-out of anonymous posting on Farcaster, starting with Sealcaster, which Big Whale Labs developed and which Nikita Kolmogorov and Jason Kim created using Circom. Follow-on apps include superanon, which reached 4.3k followers within three weeks of starting, and Anoncast, built by slokh with Noir circuits. The author concludes that pure anonymity cannot sustain social or governance structures.
- Exploring Runes Protocol
Casey Rodarmor launched the Runes protocol in April 2024 at block 840,000, during the latest halving, as a fungible token standard on Bitcoin that the article describes as a streamlined alternative to the BRC-20 standard. The article says Runes are an attempt to clean up the network's surplus UTXOs and that ordinals fees had previously helped sustain miner incentives. It cites the Runestone airdrop, in which pseudonymous developer Leonidas airdropped $DOG coins to holders of Runestone inscriptions. It also notes that Runes can be traded on marketplaces such as Unisat, OKX and Magic Eden, but that no decentralised exchange supports swaps yet.
- Dappcon24: could Web3 be the last stop on the long winding road to open banking?
Papa Kiwi (papajams.eth) argues that crypto-native architectures could finally realize the unfulfilled promise of open banking, which regulators have mandated since 2015 to boost competition, innovation and consumer choice. The article uses Farcaster, an open-source social protocol where users can connect independent services, as an example of decentralized openness. It contrasts this with platforms such as X, which took the @x and @music handles without consulting their owners, and Reddit, which changed API pricing and effectively priced out third-party apps. A 2024 Dappcon Berlin panel on self-custodial current accounts included speakers from Gnosis Pay, Safe and Mastercard.
- Scroll Hackathon - Open Economy
Scroll Open, a six-week hackathon on the Scroll Layer 2 network for Ethereum, began with 586 builders from 75 countries competing for $100K in prizes. A random selection of submitted projects was reviewed, though it is not representative of all entries. Examples include 4V4, a 3D avatar platform minting avatars on Scroll zkEVM; Desync, a zero-interest lending platform still in development; and Transakt, which offers cGHS, a digital currency backed 1:1 by the Ghanaian Cedi. Since its October 2023 mainnet launch, Scroll has reached over $770 million in total value locked across more than 85 DeFi projects.
- The Creator Economy Gets a Ticker Symbol
Onchain creator platforms such as Zora, Farcaster-based apps, Base App, Retake and Paragraph are launching "creator coins" that let supporters trade tokens tied to creators and their posts, which the article presents as a challenge to traditional platform economics. The article says Zora's ecosystem recorded 72K creator coins, 75K+ posts and $56M+ in trading volume in its first weekend, with one profile reaching a $15M market cap. It contrasts this with YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch, where creators depend on platform terms, and it cautions that crypto is risky. The author's post also notes that Paragraph coins generated $1.3M in trading volume in their first week.
- Reverse engineering the top 3 preseason strategies ahead of SCOUT GAME S1
The author's top three preseason scouts in Scout Game, a fantasy-style platform built around blockchain developers, won by trading rather than by picking developers alone. MIKOSURIHAYAI took first place, with a GitHub last touched six months earlier and little activity on Farcaster or Twitter, and is described as a trading master who reinvests when opportunities appear. Tatiansa took third place by using publicly available information from weekly updates and Scout Game Shorts on YouTube, and by buying cards on the secondary market launched April 4th alongside Match Up. Season one starts April 28th, 2025, after the $dev token launches on April 21st.
- ScoutGame: The Builder Behind the Dev Card
Scout Game is a fantasy-sports-style league for open source developers, and this profile of its top preseason builder, Gabe (Gabriel Temtsen, @gabedev.eth), presents his rise as a model of consistent, deliberate open source work. The article says Gabe has made over 2,077 contributions since 2019, won hackathons, and built projects across StarkNet, Avalanche and Celo. It also describes his personal project Memora-AI, an AI meant to create a virtual version of a person from their conversations, which he paused due to its complexity. Scout Game's preseason closes on April 21st.
- Farcaster's AI Bot Token Launchers
Papa's essay traces how token launches on Farcaster, a crypto-based social network, went from early experiments like $POINTS and HIGHER to a wave of AI-assisted launches, and argues that the way these launches are structured matters more than the tools themselves. The essay says tokenbot has facilitated more than 10,000 token launches, with $1bn in cumulative volume and over $7m in fee revenue. It describes sniper bots buying at launch and dumping tokens, and points to larrybot's 15-minute fixed-price window and Launcher's fixed-price liquidity pool and vesting features as attempts to address this.
- Telegram x TON
This essay by Papa is an overview of TON (The Open Network), the blockchain integrated with Telegram, which it presents as a significant step toward mainstream blockchain adoption. It notes that Telegram has over 900 million monthly active users, and that TON offers non-custodial and self-custodial wallets. The article says Telegram's 2018 TON project raised $1.7B through an ICO, was halted after a 2019 SEC lawsuit, and was continued by the community, with the token renamed Toncoin. It also cites NOTcoin reaching 40 million activated users as of May 2024.
- Tip O The Hat S2 - Creator Incentives For Dapp Guides
Tip O' The Hat (TOTH) Season Two is a six-week campaign, running daily from July 11th, that rewards users for leaving reviews and creating guides to decentralised applications built on Farcaster, Base, and/or the $degen token. The article describes it as an experiment in using aggregated tips and a decentralised governance structure to reward dapp usage and onboarding. Leovido.eth and papa built the TOTH tool for Degen Week and Base Onchain Summer, and a soft launch runs from July 4th to July 11th. Each week features a different category of dapps, and an end-of-season awards event is planned.