Top crypto stories of week 27, 2023
Mon 3 to Sun 9 July 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 3 to Sun 9 July 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: github.com, twitter.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- What really is Kiwi and why I'm working on it (paragraph.xyz)
Kiwi is a web3 protocol for submitting and upvoting links, with KiwiNews at kiwinews.xyz as one client built on it, according to the authors, Mac and Tim. The protocol has no identity component like Farcaster or Lens, and anyone can build an alternative client with their own moderation rules, as freeatnet has done since April. Kiwi NFTs act as tickets to interact with the protocol, and the authors say submissions and upvotes are stored at the protocol level rather than in the kiwinews.xyz database. The team says it chose its own protocol to stay neutral in curating links from across the internet, and it is self-funded without investor money.
- Kiwi News wins a 1ETH retroactive grant from Purple! (warpcast.com)
- drnick: Because decentralization (Twitter.com) (twitter.com)
The author, drnick, argues that blockchain technology matters because it enables decentralisation, which he sees as the historical counterweight to centralised systems that tend to fail through corruption and trust breakdowns. He says current centralised systems show cracks after accruing excessive global power, and that blockchains, which can coordinate arbitrary logic and data beyond simple payments and tokenisation, could build credible alternatives. He expects decentralisation to spread through society, while acknowledging he could be wrong and the whole effort is a scam.
- Kiwi News Protocol v0.3.0 released (github.com)
Kiwi News Protocol v0.3.0 is a release whose changelog covers versions 0.4.0 through 0.15.0 and an unreleased section, and the article is a changelog rather than a single announcement. The most recent described change, in the unreleased section, chunks trie sync so that each frame is at most 1 MiB, with maxDataLength set to 2 MiB, and all nodes must upgrade together because a 15.0.0 node will not sync with a 14.0.0 node. Version 0.14.0 added text-only posts using data:text/plain URLs with a 2048-character limit, and version 0.12.0 removed the Kiwi Pass NFT-based access control in favor of delegation-only access.
- Picture yourself writing 46,399 words in 1 month (tbp.tech)
- Onchain is a New Word (onchain-is-a-word.com)
- Bond Villain (balajis.com)
Balaji argues that the losses hitting banks and insurers, including American Coastal's bond holdings, stem from Federal Reserve policy rather than state mismanagement, and he blames Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen for a 2021 bond devaluation. He says the government sold bonds in 2021 and then the Fed's surprise rate hikes devalued them, producing unrealized losses that become realized in bank runs or hurricane season. He cites Stanford researchers' estimate of trillions in unrealized losses, a 722-bank figure from an internal Fed report, and $100B in unrealized losses at Bank of America. He also argues that hedging was impractical or discouraged in 2021 because the Fed called inflation transitory.
- Preventing restaking centralization risks (twitter.com)
The author argues that restaking creates a new centralization risk for Ethereum validators and proposes a standardized "optimal portfolio" of restaking services, similar to an ETF, to prevent it. Restaking lets validators offer higher yields by tapping into many services, and validators who can better understand those risks would attract more stake and reputation, letting a few validators gain most of the stake. The proposal is that all validators offer the same optimal portfolio, which the author says would restore a level playing field, as Proposer-Builder-Separation did, and would also diversify individual restakers' exposure. Open questions include how the portfolio is chosen, whether it would overconcentrate in certain services, and whether the market would accept it.
- Low rung tech tribalism (continuations.com)
- The economics of manufacturing drugs in space (benmiles.xyz)
An analysis of Varda's plan to recrystallize drug ingredients in microgravity concludes that its economics depend heavily on how much solvent can be launched alongside the active ingredient. Assuming a 120kg manufacturing payload, methanol, and a solubility of 10 mg/mL, the analysis estimates that allotting 25% of the mass to materials would allow about 380g of ritonavir, roughly 950 doses of 400mg. Because each gram of API at that solubility needs about 790g of methanol, it concludes that solvent reuse is the only option for meaningful scale, which would require hundreds of reliable crystallization cycles.
- A Uniswap v4 hook that reverts when markets are closed in New York (github.com)
This is a Uniswap v4 hook that makes swaps revert when New York markets are closed, using NYSE trading hours of 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM ET, weekday checks, and the NYSE holiday calendar. The hook defines errors for holiday, weekend, and after-hours closures, and it reports the market state as HOLIDAY, WEEKEND, AFTER_HOURS, or OPEN. Holidays were precalculated through 2123 using the Python holidays package, and Daylight Savings start and end timestamps were precalculated through 2123 with the calculate_dst.py script. The hook is deployed at the same address on Goerli and Mainnet, and a DingDingDing event rings the opening bell for the first swap of each day.
- Kiwi Chrome Extension (github.com)
A simple Chrome extension with 24 lines of script code lets users submit new posts to Kiwi in one click. It is available for download on the Chrome Web Store and also works in Chrome-like browsers such as Brave. The GitHub listing shows 15 commits, 3 stars, 1 watcher and 2 forks, and provides no description, website, or topics.
- AI-generated fake news sparks rumors of Gary Gensler’s resignation (cointelegraph.com)
A false report that SEC Chair Gary Gensler had resigned after an internal investigation spread on Twitter after appearing on a new website, CryptoAlert, which Cointelegraph found was likely written by AI. The article scored 96.8% on the AI-detector ZeroGPT, and the site had only 17 posts, the first dated June 22, with its domain registered on June 24. Fox Business Network reporter Charles Gasparino said on July 2 that the SEC's public relations office said Gensler is not resigning. The story follows earlier rumors in April and a June 12 bill in the House that would fire Gensler.
- What happened to the creator economy? (every.to)
The author argues that the creator economy startup boom has collapsed because investors misread the risks, treating creator tools as easy vertical SaaS bets in a market where the top 1% of creators earn most of the money. Creator economy funding fell 86% to $123M, and Patreon, Linktree, Cameo and Substack all made layoffs. The author says the startups that scaled, such as OnlyFans, Substack, Cameo and Kajabi, did so by serving needs that large platforms ignored, while companies building general tools faced tough competition from established products like Quickbooks.
- MUD is an engine for Autonomous Worlds (mud.dev)
MUD is an open-source, free framework for building ambitious onchain applications, with a tightly integrated software stack meant to reduce the complexity of Ethereum app development. According to the article, MUD uses a familiar tables-and-fields data model on a standardized storage protocol, which provides an automatic indexer that requires no code and lets client libraries keep frontends in sync with onchain state. The article says Lattice built OPCraft, a fully onchain voxel world, in 1.5 months, and that its players made 3.5 million transactions in 10 days.
- Luxury Media (broadcast.mirror.xyz)
- We Don’t Sell Saddles Here (medium.com)
Tiny Speck's July 31, 2013 internal memo, sent to the team behind Slack about two weeks before the Preview Release launch, argues that the company should sell organizational transformation rather than group chat software. The memo says Slack is a real innovation because it will shift how teams spend time, communicate and use their archives, and that most buyers are not shopping for a group chat system. It compares this to Acme Saddle Company selling horseback riding instead of saddles, and cites Lululemon, which sold yoga to build demand for yoga wear and reported just under $1.4 billion in yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories in its most recent fiscal year.
- How to hangout with the smartest people on the internet, on Farcaster (wysr.xyz)
The author, who goes by @cameron and has spent over a year on Farcaster, argues that new users can integrate quickly into the community by engaging earnestly, giving more than they take, and building rather than complaining. Key advice includes making a profile that clearly explains who you are and what you care about, and casting content a viewer with no context can value. The author recommends roughly five replies for every top-level cast, because new accounts have no distribution in the default Following feed and replies add depth to existing conversations. The author also suggests sharing perspectives others cannot get elsewhere, and notes that spamming low-effort replies or off-topic channel posts quickly erodes trust.
- The End Game for Liquid Staking (open.spotify.com)
- Zuzalu: a first of it's kind IRL pop-up Community (youtube.com)
Janine Leger, a co-creator of Zuzalu, is giving a guest talk in the Summer of Protocols series about Zuzalu and the value of building self-sustaining communities with a positive impact on the world. Zuzalu was a two-month in-person pop-up community in Montenegro with 200 full-time residents and 700 visitors. The community drew people from across the world with interests including Ethereum infrastructure, public goods, ZK tech, longevity and philosophy.