Top crypto stories of week 18, 2023
Mon 1 to Sun 7 May 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 1 to Sun 7 May 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: github.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- News Minimalist (newsminimalist.com)
- The Web3 Creator Playbook (rafathebuilder.notion.site)
- Own a piece of Substack (on.substack.com)
Substack is launching a community investment round that lets writers, and non-writers if there is room, buy a stake in the company through Wefunder, with investments starting at $100. The company says it wants writers to own part of the platform because the platform's dynamics change when the people building businesses on it are also owners. The post stresses that the investment is risky and should only be made by people who can afford to lose the entire amount. It also reports that more than 40% of all subscriptions and 15% of paid subscriptions come from the Substack network, and that the platform has more than 35 million active subscriptions, including 2 million paid. The round closes to new investors on April 20th.
- The Opportunities and Limitations of Nounish DAOs (forefront.market)
- How Women on Boards Navigate the “Warmth-Competence” Line (hbr.org)
Gender parity on corporate boards is showing signs of improvement, but having a board seat is only the first step, and exerting influence over high-stakes decisions is also vital. In 2022, 45% of new Fortune 500 board appointees were women, and women held almost 30% of seats on these boards. The subject is how women on boards navigate the warmth-competence line, though the available text breaks off before reaching that discussion.
- Naming risky situations by Vaughn Tan (not-knowing) (uncertaintymindset.substack.com)
Vaughn Tan argues that the word "risk" is misapplied to situations of not-knowing that are not formally risky, and that the mismatch causes decision methods built for formal risk to fail. Formal risk, defined as a situation where the precise outcome is unknown but all actions, outcomes, and their probabilities are known, is rare, while the word is widely used in looser, informal senses. The article notes that conventional risk methods such as expected value and cost-benefit analysis depend on precise and accurate probabilities, which non-risk situations rarely provide. It lists eight informal meanings of "risk" that participants in an April Interintellect discussion identified, and cites the Silicon Valley Bank controversy as one example of the consequences.
- Why Startups Don’t Grow Exponentially (Not Even Facebook And Slack) (longform.asmartbear.com)
Growth at fast-growing startups is better described as quadratic than exponential, according to the article, which argues that high-growth companies add roughly linear increments over time. It cites Facebook, where monthly active users were essentially linear for nearly twenty years, and Dropbox, which reached 100 million registered users five years after its 2007 founding with growth of nearly exactly 100 million per year. For HubSpot, the article notes that annual revenue gains rose from $17M to $23M, $28M and $34M, a pattern it describes as quadratic rather than the 41% CAGR the company's slide implied.
- Bitwise: Crypto Use Cases Report (s3.amazonaws.com)
- neume x kiwi news collaboration thread (github.com)
Tim asks whether people at neume are interested in collaborating with kiwi news on curation-related topics, proposing that kiwi news integrate the v1 neume crawler as "@attestate/crawler." He also says he once considered the p2p infrastructure for maintaining decentralized playlists and believes that could still be possible. A reply says the team has been thinking about a simple neume explorer, where kiwi-style features such as upvotes and filtering could be an interesting direction. Another commenter suggests forking the kiwinews-webapp, adding all crawled song links, and filtering for sources such as sound and musicos. That commenter also notes that all submitters have valid ETH addresses, so top upvoted curators could be paid ETH at the end of each month.
- What I've Learned from HackerNews (paulgraham.com)
Paul Graham, writing in February 2009 two years after Hacker News launched, argues that a community site can keep its character by preventing bad behavior and attracting the right people rather than relying on technology. He says weekday traffic grew from about 1,600 daily uniques at the February 2007 launch to around 22,000, and he cites the broken windows theory and the Reddit experience to argue that tolerated bad behavior spreads. He also describes the Fluff Principle, that the easiest-to-judge links take over a user-voted site unless specific measures are taken.
- Blend: Perpetual Lending with NFT Collateral (paradigm.xyz)
Blend is a peer-to-peer perpetual lending protocol that supports arbitrary collateral, including NFTs, with no oracle dependencies and no expiries, and with interest rates set by the market. Loans stay open until repaid or liquidated, and a lender who wants out triggers a Dutch auction to find a new lender at a new rate. If no new lender accepts at any rate up to a defined maximum, such as 1000%, the borrower is liquidated and the lender takes the collateral. Blur Core Contributors implemented the protocol, and after a 180-day waiting period, BLUR governance can manage parameters such as fees, the maximum interest rate and the auction formula.
- Expose multiple injected providers: EIP-6963 (github.com)
EIP-6963 proposes a window-event-based pattern for discovering multiple injected EIP-1193 wallet providers, replacing the earlier EIP-5749. Unlike EIP-5749, it exposes providers in parallel rather than extending EIP-1193 with extra info, and each provider gets both a local and a global unique identifier. It omits provider descriptions to stay agnostic to localization but supports any URI-encoded icon format, such as data, IPFS, or HTTP. Reviewers raised concerns that prototype pollution remains unaddressed and that the design assumes wallets behave benevolently, and suggested a future move to PostMessage channels and externally_connectable.
- The digital flip (why digital-first connections are just what our physical lives (flyingpenguins.io)
Digital-first connections could make people's networks dramatically better than they were in the physical-first past, rather than thinner as "digital doomers" predict. Past networks were already weak, digital tools excel at discovery, and physical networks are strong once discovery happens. Current platforms still assume physical-first ties, so digital tools must get better at connection and relationship strengthening. Group chats and open social graphs are cited as promising areas, and Ben Thompson reports that his group chats have produced richer online social lives and real-world friendships.
- How U.S. Regulators Are Choking Crypto [by Katie Haun] (wsj.com)
- Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity (nadia.xyz)
The article argues that companies benefit from different talent distributions (normal, Pareto, or bimodal) depending on the problems they solve, and that the common "top talent" framing assumes a Pareto model. It contrasts McKinsey's 1998 "war for talent" report, which sought the top percentile of "high-IQ generalists" (A-players), with software's "10x developer" idea, where a few singular specialists are seen as irreplaceable. Bimodal companies, the article says, compete for "linchpins," who are rare, highly specialized people and are more common in creative industries and some software infrastructure work.
- ENS Anniversary POAP (anniversary.ens.domains)
- The beginning of the end of the password (blog.google)
Google has begun rolling out passkeys across Google Accounts on all major platforms, as a simpler and more secure alternative to passwords, according to Sriram Karra, Group Product Manager for Google Identity and Engagement. Passkeys let users sign in with a fingerprint, face scan or screen lock PIN, and they are resistant to online attacks such as phishing, which the article presents as making them more secure than SMS one-time codes. Docusign, Kayak, PayPal, Shopify and Yahoo! Japan have already deployed passkey sign-in, and Google Workspace administrators will soon be able to enable passkeys for their end users. Passwords and 2-Step Verification will continue to work alongside passkeys.
- Kiwi News Feature Update 2023-05-03 (loom.com)
- How SBTs can make Gitcoin Grants more pluralistic (gov.gitcoin.co)
The author proposes using soulbound token journals, personal records of attestations such as grant rounds, projects, and GitHub organizations, to measure cooperation between contributors and make Gitcoin Grants' quadratic funding more pluralistic. Under the proposed method, pairs of contributors who share more attestations would receive lower matching weights, while pairs with no shared attestations could receive a weight of 100%. The text gives a worked example in which two shared attestations out of five relevant ones yield a cooperative multiplier of 2/5 and a matching weight of 3/5. It presents this simple division as a first step, not a finished model, and suggests the FDD workstream or a dedicated Plurality working group could lead the work.
- pg on how Hacker News ranking algorithm works (news.ycombinator.com)