Top crypto stories of week 47, 2023
Mon 20 to Sun 26 November 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 20 to Sun 26 November 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 2 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Ethereum Follow Protocol 🤝 (metaversal.banklesshq.com)
The Ethereum Follow Protocol (EFP), first proposed by Brantly Millegan earlier this year, is a system for letting users follow other accounts natively on Ethereum, and it is still in active development with a demo and test API available. Users will be able to create and manage lists of Ethereum accounts or ENS names, and can store those lists directly on Ethereum or on Layer 2 solutions via the CCIP Read mechanism. The article, a Metaversal newsletter by William M. Peaster, says the protocol is in its "coming soon" phase, with launch partners including ENS Vision, Interface, Llamafolio, and Nifty Island.
- The Wallet Dapp Dilemma (my talk from Istanbul) (app.streameth.org)
- An innovative superfamily of fonts for code (monaspace.githubnext.com)
Monaspace is a superfamily of five monospaced fonts with three variable axes (weight, width and slant), built by GitHub Next and the type foundry Lettermatic. Its headline technique, texture healing, evens out uneven density in monospaced type by swapping letters for variants that give up or extend into whitespace, using the OpenType "contextual alternates" feature while keeping the monospace grid. The weight axis runs from 200 to 800, the width axis from 100 to 125, and the slant axis from 0 to -11 degrees, and the fonts also include code ligatures organized into stylistic sets.
- Binance's CZ pleads guilty to violating anti-money laundering requirements (cointelegraph.com)
Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao has reportedly agreed to step down as CEO as the U.S. Department of Justice prepares to announce a $4.3 billion settlement with the company, according to The Wall Street Journal. CZ is scheduled to appear in federal court in Seattle on Nov. 21 to plead guilty to a criminal charge related to violating Anti-Money Laundering statutes. The deal would let him keep his majority stake in Binance but bar him from holding an executive position. The Journal also reported that the plea deal does not resolve the SEC lawsuit filed against Binance in June, though the settlement covers the CFTC case and outstanding claims from the U.S. Treasury Department. Neither Binance nor the DOJ responded immediately to requests for comment.
- How an LLM‘s fine-tuning data looks like (twitter.com)
The poster explains that ChatGPT-style chat models are instruct models, analogous to instruct-pix2pix in Stable Diffusion, which edits images from text commands like "change the haircolor to red," but applied to text. They describe fine-tuning as much simpler than expected: a JSON file of question-and-answer pairs that teaches a language model to reply to questions with answers. The poster notes this is nearly the same technique used for Dreambooth or LoRA fine-tuning on photos of people, except applied to text rather than images. They link to the Stanford Alpaca repository, which fine-tunes LLaMA, a model they describe as Facebook's leaked GPT model.
- Launched: Seemore Explore Feed (seemore.tv)
- Future of NFTs is Modular - talk with Bruno from RMRK (web3magic.xyz)
- Sama back on the board of OpenAI (twitter.com)
- Superdao post-mortem (superdao.notion.site)
- Are you overpaying for social media? (projectreboot.school)
Project Reboot, a student-led digital wellness initiative that began as a UC Berkeley course, aims to help people reclaim time lost to screens. The page says the average teen is on pace to spend 26 years of their life looking at a screen. The course reportedly helped more than 100 students reduce their screen time by an average of 3.5 hours per day. Its curriculum was developed with Dr. Sahar Yousef, professor of the Mind, Machine, and Meaning course at UC Berkeley and the project's Chief Science Officer, and the group says it has reached over 100,000 students and parents at 80+ schools.
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs are the catalyst for crypto’s evolution (twitter.com)
- Farcaster: An Example of Permissionless Identity (open.substack.com)
Farcaster is presented as an example of permissionless identity, where a user's identity and social data are portable across apps built on the protocol. The author says Farcaster uses Ethereum for its identity layer and a peer-to-peer network of Hubs to store messages, and that Warpcaster is one client built by the Farcaster team. Users can link multiple Ethereum addresses to their Farcaster ID so their NFTs appear on their profile, and the Flink app, built independently, displays Farcaster data in a Reddit-style interface. Dune has also integrated Farcaster data, and Paragraph and Bountycaster, launched by Linda Xie, are named as other integrated apps.
- DAOs are consumer products (seedclub.xyz)
- Black Friday & Cyber Monday Live Dashboard by Stripe (bfcm.stripe.dev)
Stripe reported that its payments platform handled its largest four-day period ever over Black Friday through Cyber Monday, processing more than 300 million transactions worth more than $18.6 billion in total payment volume. Its API maintained uptime above 99.999% and peaked at 27,395 requests per second, and more than 30,000 customers hit all-time daily sales records. Stripe also said more than 5.4 million Stripe Billing subscriptions were created, and it processed over one billion each in GBP, EUR, CAD, and AUD transactions, facilitating purchases in 185 countries. Shopify and Mountain Warehouse cited its uptime, and CTO David Singleton said peak days preview what an average day will look like.
- LSTs: The $100Bn DeFi opportunity (twitter.com)
Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) have grown from a niche started in 2021 into the largest DeFi category by TVL, at about $24 billion, according to the article. Participants lock tokens to validate transactions, and LST protocols turn those locked stakes into freely tradable tokens, with commissions typically ranging from 10% to 25% of staking rewards. The article names Lido, Rocket Pool, Coinbase, Binance and Frax as leading providers, and cites Coinbase's 25% fee, under which Ethereum staking rewards generated $73.7 million in Q1 2023, around 10% of Coinbase's revenue. It also lists risks including centralization around Lido and the layered-leverage concerns of restaking, which it compares to the Global Financial Crisis.
- we have reached rabbit hole rock bottom (maia.crimew.gay)
This first-person investigation traces basedretardgang (BRG), a TikTok-promoted collective, to the Milady NFT project and Remilia, whose founder Charlotte Fang was previously involved in the cult-like Kali Yuga Accelerationism (kaliacc) community, which the article says groomed young people into disordered eating and self-harm. The author describes BRG's Discord, its NFT-linked merchandise, and a planned show that collapsed after artists and the venue withdrew. The author concludes that BRG's "defeatist accelerationism" is an escapist aesthetic that will bring consequences regardless of whether followers care about them.
- From Punks to Art Blocks: Snowfro’s Journey Into a Digital Art Revolution (nftnow.com)
- ZKP2P: Crypto zk on-ramp with Venmo (zkp2p.xyz)
Peer is a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace that lets users buy and sell USDC directly with each other through payment apps such as Venmo, PayPal, Revolut and Cash App, with no middleman holding funds. According to the FAQ, USDC sits in an onchain smart contract until the buyer's payment is verified, and the buyer pays a taker service fee of up to 0.95%. Payment verification shares only the amount, recipient and timestamp, and no additional identity verification is required. Sellers set their own rates and keep the spread they choose.
- The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase (usv.com)
The article argues that the crypto and Web 3.0 community is not in a distinct infrastructure phase, but in another turn of an apps-infrastructure cycle in which breakout apps come first and inspire the infrastructure built afterward. It cites historical examples such as light bulbs preceding the electric grid and planes preceding airports. It also notes that building infrastructure too far ahead of the apps that will use it risks speculative building in a vacuum.
- Effective obfuscation (newsletter.mollywhite.net)
The article argues that effective altruism and effective accelerationism are ideologies that can justify almost any action in the name of doing good or advancing technology, and that both serve the wealth and interests of the powerful people who promote them. It cites William MacAskill's view that people should not boycott sweatshops, and says Sam Bankman-Fried reaped reputational benefits from philanthropy without donating much of his wealth. It also says Marc Andreessen published a manifesto in October that describes those who seek guardrails on technology as no better than murderers, and that Andreessen is fearful of losing his grip on the technology industry.