Top crypto stories of week 37, 2023
Mon 11 to Sun 17 September 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 11 to Sun 17 September 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: medium.com, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Meditations on Moloch (slatestarcodex.com)
Moloch, the demon in Allen Ginsberg's poem, serves as a metaphor for "multipolar traps," systems where everyone hates the outcome but no individual can coordinate a change. The demon is powerful less because it literally causes these problems than because it shows how the system behaves like an agent even though no one controls it. Bostrom's hypothetical dictatorless dystopia, in which citizens shock themselves for eight hours daily out of fear of being killed by others, illustrates the trap. A fish farm example, with a thousand farms on one lake, shows how a shared pollution filter collapses as farmers individually stop paying for it.
- Nouns Fork: Disgruntled NFT Holders Exit With $27 Million From Treasury (decrypt.co)
Holders of more than half of the Nouns NFTs left the project in a fork completed on a Friday in September 2023, withdrawing about 16,757 ETH, worth roughly $27.3 million at the time. The 472 NFTs that joined the fork represent almost 56% of the 846-NFT collection, and each departing holder received about 35.5 ETH, or about $57,850. The move follows a sharp fall in market value since late 2021 and early 2022, when the cheapest listed NFT peaked at $267,000 worth of ETH; per NFT Price Floor, that floor was about $57,740 at the time of writing. The Nouns DAO retains 13,310 ETH, or almost $21.7 million.
- This Telegram bot is crypto's silver lining (axios.com)
- The Moloch DAO: Collapsing The Firm. (medium.com)
Moloch DAO is a proposed organisation design, developed by Ameen Soleimani, Arjun Bhuptani, James Young, Layne Haber and Rahul Sethuram, that aims to coordinate resources for issuing Ethereum development grants. Under its rules, stock holders can vote only on issuing new stock, and capital is accessed by destroying stock, which also forfeits the voting right. The author argues that collapsing traditional firm functions into this process reduces coordination costs, at the price of less flexible control over resources. Members can join by giving any ERC20 token as tribute, even zero, in exchange for voting shares approved by existing holders.
- Capitalism on chained (notboring.co)
Crypto's ideal state is to make capitalism more effective, and the author argues that crypto is one of the dreams that can't die despite recent declines in prices and activity. The argument rests on two premises: that capitalism is good and that capitalism evolves, as shown by improved working conditions and venture capital funding. The article points to digital property rights, guaranteed by blockchains, and to decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, which let anyone list an asset and create a market without an intermediary, as ways crypto could improve capitalism. It also acknowledges that governance remains unsolved, with anemic voter turnout and whale domination.
- web3privacy now - 400+ privacy projects empowering Web3 (github.com)
This page is a community-maintained directory from Web3Privacy Now (W3PN) that lists privacy protocols, projects and products in web3, organized into categories such as DeFi, Currency, Infrastructure, Wallet and Mixing Protocols. W3PN states that it does not endorse or validate the listed projects, some of which are still in development or lack third-party security audits, and it invites contributions via GitHub. Entries include details such as launch status, supported chains and audits; for example, RAILGUN is listed as live since July 2021 on Ethereum, BNB and Polygon with five audits. The page's title refers to 400-plus projects, while its header states 750-plus.
- Farcaster x Kiwi News meetup in Berlin today (lu.ma)
- Dashboard: Transactions per second of Ethereum + L2s (l2beat.com)
A dashboard tracking user operations per second (UOPS) across Ethereum and its layer 2 networks reports a daily average of 840.09 past-day UOPS for rollups over 2025 Oct 12 to 2026 Oct 12. Lighter leads with 711.56 past-day UOPS, followed by RISE at 226.19 and Base Chain at 77.18. Ethereum itself recorded 18.98 past-day UOPS, while Validiums and Optimiums recorded 10.08 and other projects 466.79.
- Predicting Provenance (jacob.energy)
The author argues that prediction markets are zero-sum, which makes niche bets hard to place, and proposes NFTs as a positive-sum alternative in which artworks capture forward-facing provenance. In the illustrative example, an artist paints a 2025 alien-visit prediction over the Eiffel Tower, sells editions for $100, and the paintings could gain value if the prediction comes true. The piece also suggests standardized prediction NFTs could let people trade on predictions without finding a counterparty.
- Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles (youtube.com)
- SEC Charges Creator of Stoner Cats Web Series for Unregistered Offering of NFTs (sec.gov)
The SEC charged Stoner Cats 2 LLC (SC2) with conducting an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities in the form of NFTs that raised about $8 million to finance the animated web series Stoner Cats. According to the SEC order, SC2 sold more than 10,000 NFTs for about $800 each on July 27, 2021, selling out in 35 minutes, and it configured them to pay SC2 a 2.5 percent royalty on secondary market transactions. SC2 agreed to a cease-and-desist order and a $1 million civil penalty, without admitting or denying the findings. The order also establishes a Fair Fund to return money to injured investors.
- A summary on consumer blockchains (ethresear.ch)
The author proposes describing blockchains to the public through four consumer-facing properties: fast, cheap, easy and safe, rather than abstract technical specifications. Faster chains are described as those with confirmation times of about 2 or 3 seconds, compared with 15 seconds or more for other systems, while BFT-like chains with timeouts offer instant finality but halt when enough nodes fail to respond. The text states that blockchains with more nodes suffer less from transaction censorship, and that Layer 2s can make transactions cheaper but have fewer nodes. It also says meta-transactions could enable seed-less wallets and gas-less transactions, making blockchains easier to use.
- Erik Voorhees speech at permissionless (Ode to crypto ideals) (youtube.com)
- The Worst Programmer I Know (dannorth.net)
- The Definitive Guide to Sequencing (prestwich.substack.com)
Shared Sequencing is explained here through the role of the Sequencer in optimistic rollups, which the author argues exists to reduce user transaction costs while concentrating ordering control in one semi-trusted party. The Sequencer batches many user transactions off-chain and commits them to the host chain in a single transaction, so per-transaction costs are amortized, whereas self-ordered transactions on Ethereum carry a 21,000 gas fee each. The text states that the Sequencer can exclude or reorder transactions and extract MEV, and that Proposers, who are separate from Sequencers, compute and attest to the resulting rollup state.
- Fighting Deepfakes with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (medium.com)
Researchers Daniel Kang, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Ion Stoica and Yi Sun present zk-img, a library that lets image edits be verified with zero-knowledge proofs while keeping the original and intermediate images private. The article says prior ZK-SNARK approaches for images required revealing original images, were limited to images smaller than 128x128, or relied on custom cryptographic arguments or trusted third parties. zk-img is built on the halo2 library and is described as the first library able to privately and securely verify arbitrary transformations on HD images. Benchmarks reported verification times as low as 4.59 ms, and at most 9.32 ms when the output image is also hidden.
- F2P, a much needed new business model for music (danfowler.substack.com)
JUICE, together with DNS and Block Science, is starting work on a free-to-play (F2P) business model for music, which the article presents as a needed alternative to current music business models. The author argues that royalties may not be a dependable model for the next 15 years, citing that music royalties are a zero sum game, that the model is stagnating, and that AI-assisted content abundance is an incoming shock. The article notes that F2P is the dominant model in games, with mobile expected to reach $84bn and desktop $25bn in 2023, compared with $9bn for subscriptions. It proposes designing a creator as if they were a game, using game loop, content cadence and progression design to convert engagement into higher-value exchanges.
- Picture yourself building the first webcam to see if there's any coffee left (tbp.tech)
- Why We Like Pirates: On the Depth and Breadth of Boat Stories (sceneswithsimon.com)
The author argues that boat stories, which combine the Carrier Bag and Hero's Journey narratives, offer the best of both depth and breadth. Drawing on Venkatesh Rao's definition, the piece describes depth as tending, relationships and staying, and breadth as exploring, risk and adventure. It cites examples such as the Rocinante in The Expanse, the Going Merry in One Piece, and the Enterprise in Star Trek. The author concludes that a boat story is both, reflecting what people want from life.
- Co-Founder Of Multibillion-Dollar Crypto Scheme “OneCoin” Sentenced To 20 Years (justice.gov)