Best of theblockchainsocialist.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
33 stories from theblockchainsocialist.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 24 September 2023, with 60 upvotes and 15 comments in total. The latest was shared on 26 February 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Free Market Friends with Naomi Oba
Naomi Oba discusses problems with crypto culture, including its obsession with quantification and financialization, and argues for learning to feel emotions instead. In this podcast episode, the host says Oba's Dappcon presentation, "Crypto Culture and its Discontents," set the stage for his own talk on Solidarity Primitives, which Bread Cooperative has been building. The episode also covers the Sapphire Punk manifesto, which Oba helped write, as a post-cypherpunk politics that rejects the extreme individualism rooted in the original cypherpunk movement.
- Open-Source Funding vs Venture Capital with Scott Moore
This episode of The Blockchain Socialist podcast features Scott Moore, co-founder of Gitcoin and Public Works, discussing public goods funding, quadratic funding and DAOs. The conversation covers the "everything is coordination" meme, advice for starting a DAO, open source development, and the role of venture capital in crypto. The host and Moore have different views on venture capital, and the discussion explores more collective forms of investment as alternatives to the status quo.
- Crypto Leftist Heuristics: What is a DAO?
The author argues that the term DAO is often used loosely, so its meaning should be defined by members rather than by marketing or crypto branding. An organization calling itself a DAO signals affiliation with crypto more than its structure, and some DAOs have only one member. The article notes that the original term was Decentralized Autonomous Corporation, which Vitalik Buterin changed to "organization" in 2013. It also states that decentralized blockchain infrastructure does not make politics or ownership decentralized, and that on-chain and off-chain governance involve different trade-offs.
- Weaponized Design and the Digital Identity Event Horizon with Cade Diehm
Cade Diehm, Head of Research at the World Ethical Data Foundation and founder of New Design Congress, discusses Weaponised Design in a podcast interview with The Blockchain Socialist. Diehm defines it as cases where an interface or system harms its users while performing entirely within its expected behaviour. The conversation also covers his research on the brittleness of digital identity and his experience with early crypto. His career also includes Deloitte Australia, CoinJar and Tactical Tech.
- Slavoj Zizek on Network States
The Blockchain Socialist shares a new piece by Slavoj Zizek on Network States, which is normally behind a paywall on Zizek's Substack. Recent podcast guest Naomi made it freely available on Fileverse. The host wonders who has been discussing crypto with Zizek, since Zizek appears to know what DAOs are. The central argument of the piece is not described here.
- Anoma: Undefininig Money and Scaling Anarchism with Christopher Goes (CER)
Christopher Goes, co-founder of Anoma, discusses the blockchain framework's "intent-centric architecture" in an interview that opens a subseries with Giulio Quarta of the Crypto Commons Association and the Commons Economy Roadmap (CER). Anoma, launched in 2021, describes itself as a "third generation protocol" and a distributed operating system for an ecosystem of blockchain-based protocols. The conversation covers what intents are, their potential socio-political implications, how Anoma aims to rethink money and value, and how intents relate to a C4SS paper titled "The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the case for Cybernetic Communism." The CER is described as a knowledge base highlighting what the hosts consider the 20 most relevant projects in the current economic juncture.
- How to Stake ETH with your friends with Thomas Heremans (Obol)
Thomas Heremans, CEO of the Obol Association, discussed Obol, an ecosystem for trust-minimized Ethereum staking that uses distributed validators (DVs) spread across a cluster of nodes to improve resilience compared with running a validator on a single node. In the interview, Heremans gave a refresher on DVs, shared success stories of communities funding themselves with Obol DVs, and outlined the future of Obol. He also announced the Obol Incentives Program, through which participants can earn OBOL tokens for staking on distributed validators.
- NETWORKED REALISM: Whoever Controls the Infrastructure, Controls Reality
This podcast episode features Nick Houde and Severin Matusek of co-matter, a Berlin research and strategy studio, discussing their 35-page research memo "New World Order: The Return of Hard Power and Soft Beliefs." The memo is described as an analysis of what happens when power, infrastructure and ideology collide, and it includes quotes such as "Yesterday's moral stance is tomorrow's liability" and "Whoever controls the infrastructure controls reality itself." The host says the memo is a manual for making sense of the present and that he has already bought a copy, which can be ordered through Metalabel.
- How to Die a Good Death with Sarah Friend
Sarah Friend, an artist and software developer based in Berlin, discusses her research on protocol death in this podcast recorded at Devcon 2024. In 2023 she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, where she studied the death of protocols and published a paper on "Good Death." The conversation covers how and when protocols are considered dead, how different human cultures view death, and what the host calls the silliness behind the longevity movement.
- EthicHub: La lucha por un café Ético / The struggle for Ethical Coffee (CER)
- Why Socialism Needs Spirituality (Red Enlightenment)
Graham Jones argues that the secular left should develop its own spiritual perspectives rather than dismissing religion, as set out in his book Red Enlightenment, published through Repeater Books. The book proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. In this podcast interview, the two discuss the common view that socialists are anti-religion, how the tech world often overlaps with spiritual communities, and the need to answer people's spiritual needs.
- Screw App Stores, we got a Progressive Web App!
The Blockchain Socialist has released a Progressive Web App that users can install on phones or desktops directly from its website, bypassing app stores. The article argues that app stores control in-app payments and typically take a 30% cut, and it cites Epic Games' lawsuits against Apple and Google over that payments regime. The PWA offers offline browsing, faster loading, and notifications about new posts. The author notes it may not work on European iOS devices, which the article attributes to Apple's opposition to PWAs.
- All my friends hate Google Docs with Andreas Tsamados
- MEV is a time traveling god with Anuj Das Gupta
This podcast episode, recorded at Devcon, features Anuj Das Gupta, co-founder of Smart Transactions with Vlad Zamfir, discussing MEV (maximum extractable value). According to the description, the conversation covers how MEV gives someone the ability to control time for a split second, how control of time has influenced the transition to capitalism, and why designers should be nationalized. The episode also touches on communism, which the description frames as free time, or real freedom.
- The Future of Social Media with Suji Yan (Mask Network)
Suji Yan, CEO and founder of Mask Network, discusses his path from journalist to founder, non-financial uses of crypto, and how Mask allocates capital to support a decentralized web. Mask's main product is an open-sourced browser extension that wraps around several web2 and web3 social media networks. According to the episode description, the extension aims to bring the benefits of both kinds of social media without requiring users to join a new platform.
- Governable Spaces: Designing Democracy for the Internet
Nathan Schneider argues in Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life that the internet suffers from "implicit feudalism," a cultural and technical bias toward building online communities as fiefdoms. According to the article, this arrangement trains people to give up on their communities' democratic potential and makes them more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider argues that online spaces can learn from past governance legacies to become a more democratic medium. The book is freely available in digital format on Schneider's website.
- Delete Coinbase! Use this instead... w/ UnhappyBen (Peer.xyz)
Peer (formerly ZKP2P) is a protocol that lets people trade crypto and fiat peer-to-peer through neobanks such as Revolut, Venmo and Wise, and its head of growth and marketing, UnhappyBen, presents it as a way to fully delete Coinbase and other centralized exchange accounts. According to the article, Peer uses zero knowledge proofs to provide a high degree of privacy. The host says he has used the service to help people send funds to those in Gaza, and the episode discusses the political implications of what Peer has built and what comes next.
- Digital Identity without Scanning your Eyeballs
Shady El Damaty, co-founder and CEO of Holonym Foundation, discusses how people can control their own digital identities online in a podcast interview. Holonym Foundation is building human.tech, a suite of identity solutions that protect user privacy using zero-knowledge proofs. The host contrasts this with Worldcoin, a project led by Sam Altman that scans people's eyeballs into an orb, and says they personally don't trust it. The backdrop is a concern that bots dominate online spaces and that crypto projects are easily Sybil attacked.
- How to Build Community in Crypto with Beth McCarthy
This podcast episode, hosted by the author known as The Blockchain Socialist, features Beth McCarthy, program director of Funding the Commons, recorded at Devcon 2024. The conversation covers her suggestions for building community in crypto when much of it happens online, the importance of in-person events, and her experience across earlier phases of crypto. The host also mentions that they spoke at Funding the Commons in Bangkok about building on-chain post-capitalism with Breadchain Cooperative, and that McCarthy is their co-author on the Katabasis crypto science fiction series.
- How to resilient Global Collaboration on decentralized protocols Jake Hartnell
The Blockchain Socialist podcast interviews Jake Hartnell, co-founder of Layer, a modular tech stack for building decentralized protocols using EigenLayer's shared security, at Funding the Commons in Thailand. Hartnell is also named as a contributor to Juno and DAO DAO in the Cosmos ecosystem. The discussion explains how EigenLayer works, what new affordances it brings, and what it means for collaborating across state lines. The episode's description argues that tools associated with the hyper-financialization of computation can also be used to build the international commons.
- How to play the legal system for post-capitalism with Florian Gatz
Florian Glatz, described in the article as probably the first crypto-focused lawyer in Europe and possibly the world, and co-founder of Common Ground, an on-chain social network, discusses his experiences in the early days of the ICO boom and the unpreparedness of the legal system for crypto. The article says Glatz helped author part of the MiCA legislation in the EU, which lays out the legal framework for cryptocurrencies. It also says Common Ground is leading the way toward fairer ways to run ICOs, and that users who signed up with 100 BREAD in their wallet qualified for an airdrop of the Breadchain token.
- Crimson Echo: On-chain art to support those in Gaza - The Blockchain Socialist
Chainleft, an on-chain artist, has released Crimson Echo (codename: Blood Journey), which the article describes as "A generative film, built by Ethereum Virtual Machine, compressed and stored fully on Ethereum, exploring how stories emerge through permanent acts of individual and collective conscience." The article says that taking part in the mint supports ETH Evacuations and the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. It frames the mint as a way to show opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and it also refers readers to Aaron Bushnell without further detail.
- Imagining Post-Capitalism through World Building
Susanne Aichele of Mothertree Labs discusses how to approach narratives from a post-capitalist perspective, and whether Breadchain is doing a good job at this. Aichele is a filmmaker, researcher, and communication practitioner whose experience includes work with the BBC, National Geographic, the UN, and WHO. The conversation also covers her previous documentary, The Ways of the DAOs (2022).
- Prefiguring post-capitalist work with DAOs
Ori Shimony, co-founder of dOrg, a full-stack Web3 development collective, discusses how running dOrg with cooperative principles as a DAO could offer a glimpse of post-capitalist work. The interview also covers how DAOs should learn from radical historical movements and the process of turning dOrg into the first legally recognized DAO. The article describes dOrg as run similarly to a worker-owned cooperative while functioning as a DAO and building cutting-edge crypto platforms and products.
- K2: Panic! At the Raave (Audio)
- It doesn’t matter if the AI is fake, it’s all magic anyways
Magical thinking accompanies today's AI boom just as it accompanied earlier technologies, according to Nick Susi, Executive Director of Strategy at dotdotdash, in his Substack piece "magic, online!". Susi points to historical examples such as phones that let people talk to the dead and fairies that appeared in some of the first photographs. In a podcast interview, he and the host discuss magical thinking as a coping mechanism for uncertain times, the split between AI doomers and hypemen, and why content creators are described as illusionists.
- Sovereign Nature Initiative: How to ReFi without carbon credits /w Andrea Leiter
Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI) uses blockchain to turn real-world ecological data into dynamic digital assets, such as NFTs, that fund conservation directly through its Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP). The approach is presented as a way to move beyond the donation model and carbon credits. The podcast interview with SNI co-founder Andrea Leiter discusses how DEEP works, how it avoids the pitfalls of the carbon credit market common in ReFi, and its socio-economic and ethical implications.
- How the Commons can succeed where Silicon Valley led digital revolution failed
A Blockchain Socialist podcast episode features Dr. Hannes Gerhardt, a Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia, discussing his new book, FROM CAPITAL TO COMMONS: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. The conversation covers his concept of compeerism as an alternative political economy, the role distributed ledgers could play in it, and how capitalism limits the current technological landscape. Gerhardt's research spans political geography and geoeconomics.
- OTNS: Mutualism, labor unions and cooperatives (not charity)
This episode of the Overthrowing the Network State series, produced with Blockchaingov, features Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union and author of the book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up. The conversation covers the practical realities of building mutualistic organizations, the history of how workers' movements did so, and how crypto can build this through solidarity primitives. The article describes the series as critiquing Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State while pulling out its salvageable concepts. It also says Blockchaingov is a five-year transdisciplinary research effort aimed at restoring trust in institutions.
- Platformization: platform organizational form eating the world we can do better
This is a podcast interview in which Gianmarco Cristofari and the host, the author of Blockchain Radicals, interview each other about platforms, crypto and the left. The conversation covers platforms as markets within markets, Cristofari's book The Politics of Platformization, and the socialist history of cybernetics. Cristofari also read the host's book during his stay and offered thoughts on the relations and differences between platforms and protocols in web3. The episode was produced for the Institute for Network Cultures, and the host's book Blockchain Radicals is published by Repeater Books.
- Obol Network – How DVT helps decentralize Ethereum and incentivize collectivism
Oisín Kyne, co-founder and CTO of Obol Network, discusses Distributed Validator Technology (DVT), which spreads the duties of an Ethereum validator across a cluster of nodes to improve resilience compared with running a validator on a single node. The conversation covers how DVT works, its implications for community funding, and its role in supporting the decentralization of Ethereum. The host calls DVT one of the most exciting technologies for enabling a form of online collectivism that would otherwise be difficult on Ethereum.
- Fund evacuations from Gaza with ETH – ethevacuations.xyz
Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It, a book that examines blockchains through a left political framework, is now officially published. It is released by Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher, whose work the writer says influenced their thinking. A linktree lists where to buy the book by region and country. A Patreon page for The Blockchain Socialist is also promoted for support.
- Transitioning ReFi DAO from a Network State to a Coordi-Nation
ReFi DAO has shifted from declaring itself a network state to using a conceptual framework called coordi-nations, according to a podcast episode with co-founder Monty Merlin Bryant. The episode discusses what that transition has been like and how ReFi DAO hopes to use crypto's affordances to build a non-state force for aligning people and planet. The episode is part of Overthrowing the Network State, a series produced with Blockchaingov that critiques Balaji Srinivasan's book The Network State. Blockchaingov is described as a 5-year transdisciplinary research effort aimed at restoring trust in institutions.