Best of zeeprime.capital on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
8 stories from zeeprime.capital have been shared on Kiwi News since 16 July 2023, with 26 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 26 May 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Why privacy failed
The article asks why privacy has failed to gain adoption and argues that privacy tools conflict with user experience, social norms and perceived need for privacy. It says Signal flatlined at around 40 million users in the last couple of years, Brave's growth has also flatlined, and the VPN market, estimated at around $44 billion in 2022 and growing 17% a year, is driven mainly by commercial uses such as watching Netflix shows from other countries. The author proposes that rules-based, compliant privacy solutions combined with pseudonymity could offer a workable middle ground, though the article ends mid-thought.
- Permissionless Capital, Global Consensus and New Markets
The article argues that crypto's most durable value lies in permissionless capital formation and global consensus over a distributed ledger of financial assets, rather than in consumer apps or non-financial products. It cites $100B of VC capital poured into private crypto markets since 2016 and an estimated $230B in liquid value for VC investors, most of it driven by outliers such as Solana and Coinbase, ICOs and memecoins. It credits pump.fun with earning more in eight months than 99% of crypto projects combined, and says DeFi, Ethena's basis trade and Polymarket's markets show the financial categories working best. It also presents tokenized marketplaces such as Kettle, Baxus and SkyTrade, and DePIN, as areas where crypto creates new markets, though it says DePIN has not yet found product-market fit.
- Wedge is the Founder's Edge
The article argues that founders should start with a narrow "wedge," a small market segment where they have a specific, unique solution, rather than aiming for a sliver of a huge market. It cites Uniswap, whose early wedge was permissionless liquidity bootstrapping for long-tail tokens, and says it later captured adjacent markets such as ETH trading. It also cites Blur's split between collectors and traders, and Amazon, which started by selling books before expanding into marketplace, logistics and AWS.
- Investing In Wackadoos
The article proposes a four-category framework for investing in founders: wackadoos (unproven, weird ideas), thot leaders (polished pitches with big raises and buzz), pastas (low-effort "x of y" imitations), and remixers (mashups of mostly proven ideas). It argues that no category is inherently good or bad, that ideas can move clockwise between them, and that investors should weigh each idea's layer using Stewart Brand's Pace Layers. The author's closing advice is to ask what layer an idea operates on and who is behind it, since independence driven by curiosity separates signal from imitation.
- Hair is money
HairDAO, a crypto-based decentralized autonomous organization, argues that decentralized tech and token incentives could fund and run hair loss research that conventional pharma and the NIH neglect. The article says androgenic alopecia causes 95% of hair loss cases yet receives only $5M in global government grant funding, while alopecia areata, about 3% of cases, attracts far more trial money. HairDAO's roughly 100 core members would self-report treatment data pseudonymously, with the $HAIR token used to reward them, and the article claims this could replace some costs of conventional trials, such as the roughly $8M typical of Phase 2.
- I, Robot
Frodobots is evolving into BitRobot, a crypto-backed network that would crowdsource real-world robotics experiments using token rewards. Robotics lacks the large device fleets that Tesla and Waymo use to gather data, so BitRobot would spread hardware and labor costs across contributors rewarded with its tokens. Frodobots' earlier game had people remotely drive sidewalk robots to collect video data, and Michael of Frodobots said the first team to achieve AGI will be the one with the most physical failures.
- Wedge is the Founder's Edge
The article argues that founders should start with a narrow "wedge," a small market segment with a specific problem, rather than aiming for a slice of a huge market. It cites Uniswap V1, which offered permissionless liquidity bootstrapping for long-tail tokens before expanding into adjacent markets, and Blur, which targeted traders and used a token to reward market-making. It also points to Facebook's Harvard-only launch and Amazon's start with books, which it says later grew into marketplace, logistics and AWS businesses.
- DeSec? Where crypto meets security, surveillance, and defense
The article argues that crypto can act as a check on the state's monopoly on surveillance and enforcement tools, using a category of projects it calls DeSec. It proposes decentralized networks of node runners, such as a DePin-style version of SoundThinking (formerly ShotSpotter) microphone nodes, to detect gunshots and jamming events and alert authorities. It also suggests that governance by protocols could withdraw data from enforcement agencies whose actions diverge from community values. The author closes with a skeptic's remark that expanding surveillance could be a net negative regardless of who controls it.