Top crypto stories of week 29, 2023
Mon 17 to Sun 23 July 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 17 to Sun 23 July 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Show Kiwi: An NFT Wallet Tracker on Dune (dune.com)
- Gnosis launches Visa card that lets you spend self-custody crypto in Europe (techcrunch.com)
Gnosis has launched Gnosis Card, a Visa card that lets users spend funds held in self-custodial crypto wallets wherever Visa is accepted, initially in the U.K. and EU. Gnosis Pay is launching at the EthCC conference in Paris, and co-founder Dr. Friederike Ernst said the goal is to reach a wider audience beyond the crypto community. The card is priced at €30 against a €10 cost to produce and distribute it, with the surplus going toward engineering and compliance. Monerium, which issues the euro-denominated stablecoin EURe, is a key partner, and Gnosis plans to expand to Brazil, Mexico, Singapore and Hong Kong and to launch in the U.S. by the end of Q3.
- Make Something Developers Want (leerob.io)
Lee Robinson argues that developer-facing products win developer adoption by following five practices: embracing open source, offering a free tier, providing excellent documentation, offering support from developers, and taking part in existing communities. Experienced developers favor open source because they have been burned by closed "black box" tools or by previously open tools that changed licenses or closed their source code, while newer developers value the transferable skills it builds. On free tiers, the article says developers want to try products with minimal friction and would rather start self-serve than go through months of sales negotiations, even when buying enterprise software. The article also says good documentation should teach beginners progressively while staying useful to experts, and that community engagement should be a long-term, non-transactional effort in spaces developers already use.
- Wall Street warms up to a new paradigm of liquidity: RWAs (coindesk.com)
Tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), such as buildings, gold, treasury bills and royalty streams, is gaining traction on Wall Street, according to this report. Lucas Vogelsang, CEO of Centrifuge, says the approach creates liquidity for things that aren't liquid today, and Centrifuge has tokenized over $400 million of RWAs. Allan Pedersen of Monetalis says the group has tokenized $1.2 billion in treasury bills used by MakerDAO as collateral. The article cites a Boston Consulting Group projection that the tokenized RWA market could reach $16 trillion by 2030.
- The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram (documentjournal.com)
- vitalik.eth - The Three Transitions (bafybeifa3ulg3ryjtjksz73il6oaw5fu534wiyuknsrmh7r3jn4oo7ln34.ipfs.dweb.link)
- Opensea Deals: offer your NFTs for theirs. (twitter.com)
- A novel framework for reputation-based systems (a16zcrypto.com)
The article proposes a reputation system built on two tokens: a non-transferable "points" token that signals reputation, and a transferable "coin" token paid as dividends to point holders. It argues that combining reputation and liquidity in one token creates a paradox, since transferability lets people without reputation buy signals and erodes their value. Points should be tied to verifiable contributions, such as content creation, moderation or gameplay, and the article says coin supply, dividend frequency and distribution are key design choices. It cites Discord moderator roles and Forefront's $FF token as examples.
- Martin Köppelmann presenting Gnosis Pay (youtube.com)
- Manifest Confusion: Attacking Your Open Source Dependencies (listen.dev)
- Nouns framework update - DAO fork (twitter.com)
- Experts from a world that no longer exists (collabfund.com)
Morgan Housel argues that the biggest risk to an evolving system is being held back by experts whose knowledge comes from a world that no longer exists, and that expertise has a shelf life. He points to Henry Ford's factory practice of not recording failed experiments, which kept workers from being deterred by lists of what had already failed. Housel also cites Marc Andreessen's view that 1990s internet ideas were correct but early, with Chewy now a $30 billion business after Pets.com was mocked. He adds that Treasury Secretaries Andrew Mellon in 1930 and Steve Mnuchin in 2020 held opposite views on stimulus.
- The future of virtual and physical third spaces (wellnesswisdom.substack.com)
- Tokenomics of a Ponzi scheme (tokenomicsdao.xyz)
- Money Mistakes are Temporary (chrisguillebeau.com)
Money mistakes are temporary and rarely have permanent consequences, so worrying about them is usually a poor use of attention. The author, who paid too much for an item and felt bothered for a day or two, ties this to loss aversion, which the article describes as the psychological principle that people are irrationally afraid of losing. After talking with a friend, Amanda, who said "you can always get more money," the author concluded that the mistake would not matter years from now. The article also notes that rich people worry about money as much as poor people do, and it suggests asking "What's the worst that can happen?" when money stress arises.
- Vitalik Buterin - a history of account abstraction (youtube.com)
- Trophy Jobs (anuatluru.com)
- The birth of id Software (theverge.com)
John Romero recounts how, in September 1990 while working at Softdisk, he saw a demo by John Carmack that showed smooth horizontal side-scrolling on a PC, which he considered a turning point for PC gaming. The demo, a Super Mario Bros. 3-style program with Romero's character Dangerous Dave, was made by Carmack and Tom, a colleague. Romero says Jay Wilbur suggested pitching it to Nintendo, which turned down the request three weeks later. Romero then describes how fan letters from Scott Miller, who was using multiple names, led to contact with Miller and his company Apogee.
- ChatGPT's Behaviour is Changing Over Time (arxiv.org)
Researchers Lingjiao Chen, Matei Zaharia and James Zou report that the behavior of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 changed substantially between their March 2023 and June 2023 versions, which they say highlights the need for continuous monitoring of LLMs. GPT-4 identified prime versus composite numbers with 84% accuracy in March but 51% in June, which the article partly attributes to a drop in its adherence to chain-of-thought prompting. GPT-4 became less willing to answer sensitive and opinion survey questions in June, while its multi-hop question performance improved and GPT-3.5's declined. The authors also provide evidence that GPT-4's ability to follow user instructions decreased over time.
- Github Security report - malicious packages, accounts, domains (github.blog)
GitHub reports a low-volume social engineering campaign, which it assesses with high confidence to be run by a North Korean-linked group known as Jade Sleet by Microsoft and TraderTraitor by CISA. The campaign targets personal accounts of tech employees, mostly in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and online gambling, using fake personas on LinkedIn, Slack, and Telegram to send repository invitations containing malicious npm dependencies. The malicious packages act as first-stage malware that downloads second-stage malware, and GitHub states that no GitHub or npm systems were compromised. GitHub has suspended the associated accounts and filed abuse reports with domain hosts, and it published indicators including domains and package names.