gm,

wrote a long post about the German election but decided not to post it here as this is about Ethereum, not how I feel about politics

Instead of talking about the German election, let me talk about a conversation I had with a friend last week. We were discussing what we are excited for as application builders and we both unanimously agreed that crypto has become incredibly unexciting compared to AI.

As an application builder, you always look out for the most promising technology that is most likely to fix issues for your users. I used to be excited about quadratic voting, Harberger taxes and about the opportunity of swapping funds. This is also why I built Kiwi News, because I thought the timing was good to build such applications in the crypto space. But at the same time that we launched Kiwi, ChatGPT was released.

Today I am much more excited about the potential of AI and how it can solve my users' issues.

I have spent one to two years in trying to build systems that make it easy for users to send transactions and to store their signatures. But a lot of these features that we've built seem pointless in the face of AI today. In fact, they introduce unnecessary friction in a process that has sped up even more through AI.

AI is a compelling tool for application builders because it allows us to build features that would otherwise not be possible to build. That is true for cryptocurrency features as well, yet in my view cryptocurrency users aren't exactly excited about new on-chain features. They can only get excited for very high value transactions, but not if it is about tipping users, about running ads or about buying a membership pass. So where does this leave us?

At the moment our roadmap looks as follows:

1. We want to improve the usability of the application and we also want to build bridges to other ecosystem participants.

2. I'm still very excited about the idea of contributing anonymously to this platform, especially with the political situation in Europe.

3. I'm also excited about our iOS app.

4. I would like to be excited about the on-chain ad and about the writers contests, but I think they are very tricky to develop and the numbers would suggest to us that it's really not worth developing further.

I've been at this point before already: Maybe it makes sense to swap out the Ethereum wallets for signing in with Passkeys.

At the same time I do believe in the structure that we have created to decentralize identity with ENS, FC, Lens and so on. I also do believe in the funding pipeline we have created with grants, retroactive funding, tokens etc.. I also think that Ethereum wallets are far superior than Passkeys and other methods of storing private keys.

Maybe it isn't necessarily about dissenting on this technology stack, but it is more about moving it so far in the background that it doesn't bother consumers anymore. Many people still don't onboard to Kiwi because they don't have 5 cents of ETH on OP Mainnet.

At the same time I feel very tired of building solutions to create comfort for consumers when this is technically the job of those who build wallets. If my application was closed source, at least the benefit would accrue to us, because it would mean that it was harder to build an application like this to onboard many users. Yet we are open source and so any trick that we pull is also a commodification of that knowledge in the age of AI agents. We are giving this away for free and it upsets me because I feel like I deserve a greater share of the pie for the work that we are doing.

Tim your work is very much appreciated! If think you have done great things with Kiwi. What Kiwi surely did last two years is supply reading and discussion pleasure for quite a number of people including me! Thank you for all your work and efforts.

Even if it doesn't translate into financial gains for you and the Kiwi team directly, I think up till now it has certainly been worthwhile for participants, that has also value. Who knows how Kiwi could develop into the future. The Kiwi protocol as I understand it is open and in a way stand alone.

What if you make people pay to post? So to participate in Kiwi you have to buy $KIWI and you have to stake a set amount. Every time you post a link it is deducted from your stake. You should get staking rewards of course. Then if someone upvotes after three upvotes you earn back what you paid to post. Upvotes are paying this amount. So an upvote cost 1/3 of a post. After three upvotes you will start to earn from the upvotes. The post / upvotes fees and from all transactions an % goes to Kiwi development. Also an % from the staking rewards go to Kiwi dev. Thinking $KIWI might be a stable, maybe modelled after $BREAD on Gnosis. (So actually a wrapper for xDAI earning sDAI.) As more people participate in Kiwi, more money will go to Kiwi dev, to you!

The Kiwi NFT could like an OG badge with which you can earn perks or discounts and to identify you in the community.

If people use another Kiwi client like kiwinews.lol - the Kiwi dev rewards should be collected by that client. So you will get competition between clients and Kiwi itself should ideally be a standalone protocol that in itself doesn’t need development. Also content could be free and open. It would be determined on the client level that could act as a filter for the protocol.

Just an idea, I know of course this might need again resources to built, which might not be available right now.

Any which way many thanks for building Kiwi for us.

Something completely different. I can't get the crazy Cirles out of my mind. I'm going to do a small family try out :) Wrote up some thoughts on Circles in the comments of the Litepaper post from a few days ago.