Best of x.com/macbudkowski on Kiwi News
@macbudkowski on X · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
10 stories by @macbudkowski on X have been shared on Kiwi News since 4 December 2023, with 34 upvotes and 9 comments in total. The latest was shared on 7 May 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Why should you vote on Kiwi in RetroPGF3?
- Mac's Ethereum mobile wallets rant
The author, from the team behind Kiwi, argues that Ethereum will not reach real adoption until mobile wallet connections are fixed, and that Passkeys and Account Abstraction will not solve the problem. Kiwi, a PWA app for reading and discussing Ethereum content, has avoided embedded wallets to stay open and Ethereum-aligned. The author describes watching conference users struggle to connect wallets, including a Berlin user who spent 10 minutes trying three wallets. The post says MetaMask often fails on mobile, while Rainbow and Coinbase Wallet break intermittently, and that embedded wallets are not a full solution because they lock the dapp to a vendor. The author says the root cause is unknown and suggests investigating it.
- Kiwi Community Call today @ 16:00 CET
- Yesterday, I watched “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story” with my non-crypto friends...
The author watched "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" with non-crypto friends and concludes that the film is an interesting portrait of Vitalik for crypto enthusiasts but is not a standalone introduction to Ethereum for general audiences. Friends said they still did not understand what Ethereum is, found the Merge explanation confusing, and were left unclear on why Ethereum was built rather than using Bitcoin. The author suggests a longer format such as a TV series, and praises the production quality and Vitalik's character arc while noting gaps in his backstory.
- So what actually happened during this ByBit-dominated week?
Bybit lost about $1.4B in what is described as the largest crypto hack in history, and the article says the attack was traced to a compromised developer computer at Safe, a wallet provider, with North Korean hackers responsible. The article credits @zachxbt with first reporting suspicious activity on Bybit. @hasufl argued that Safe is at fault but Bybit also failed to follow best security practices, and @cass_on_mars, who is said to have worked at Coinbase, claimed Bybit used its cold wallet like a hot wallet. The article notes that @pcaversaccio promoted a script for checking Safe transaction hashes, and @OpenZeppelin then built a UI for it.
- How Kiwi tried to fix Ethereum mobile UX with MWP
The Kiwi team argues that Ethereum mobile wallet connections are unreliable and that Mobile Wallet Protocol (MWP), built by Coinbase, offers a fix. They say WalletConnect connections work only about 80% of the time on mobile, while MWP works about 99% of the time and lets iOS users be redirected back to the dapp after connecting. Kiwi shipped MWP in its iOS app, though the protocol does not support web apps and currently works only with CB Wallet and Rainbow. The team also calls on the Ethereum ecosystem, including the EF, to give mobile UX more attention.
- What we can learn about promoting privacy from Apple
- Why I decided to share my frustrations on Optimism Onchain Builders program
The author, who says they deployed on OP Mainnet because of Optimism's "Impact = Profit" campaign, argues that Optimism's Onchain Builders program has broken that promise by turning into an onchain cashback program that rewards filling blockspace. They point to the onchain gm app as an example: users click a button that sends about 5 cents to an address whose funds are withdrawn by emirtimur.base.eth, mahmut.base.eth, and another listed address, with a new gm allowed after 24 hours. They say this incentivizes activity at the expense of better-supported projects in the Superchain ecosystem.
- Mac on EF criticism
Mac argues that the Ethereum Foundation should be optimized while still staying credibly neutral and working on important long-term problems that critics overlook. After attending the Ethereum Foundation meetup in Bangkok, Mac reports speaking with about 15 people working on consensus, issuance, archive nodes, compilers, and staking, whom Mac describes as highly technical and aligned with the Ethereum vision. Mac writes that this work matters for reaching NATO-level security and securing trillions of dollars of value, and that critics on Twitter tend to have time horizons of days or weeks rather than years or decades.
- What happened to the 90s America?