Top crypto stories of week 2, 2024
Mon 8 to Sun 14 January 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 8 to Sun 14 January 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, files.catbox.moe.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- A "Thank You" from Kiwi (bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com)
Kiwi News founders Tim and Mac thank the Optimism (OP) community after the project received an OP RetroPGF grant, which they describe as a turnaround for their finances. They say the project had set a goal of 42,000 EUR in total income by June 2024 and was struggling to reach it through NFT sales alone. The grant of 28,495 OP, at 3.50 EUR a token, is described as double what they had aimed for in a year, and it extends their runway by a few months. They plan to distribute the funds to themselves and to contributors to Kiwi News until the RetroPGF voting stopped.
- $DEGEN airdrop claims are live (degen.tips)
DEGEN's promotional page presents the token as the social coin of Base, a culture layer for memes, markets and communities. Its FAQ says jacek started DEGEN by rallying the early Farcaster crowd, and that the team is building an app and ecosystem with contributors. The page lists Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, Revolut and OpenSea as places to obtain $DEGEN, which it calls the native token for Degen chain and the new app. The text does not mention an airdrop, despite the title.
- RetroPGF3 results spreadsheet (docs.google.com)
RetroPGF3 results list 75 projects with their ballot counts, median amounts, quorum status and OP received. Protocol Guild ranks first with 95 ballots, a median amount of 668,000.00 and 663,853.62 OP received, followed by go-ethereum with 101 ballots, a median of 500,000.00 and 496,896.42 OP received. Every listed project is marked WAHR, the German word for TRUE, in the quorum-reached column, and many lower-ranked projects received 99,379.28 OP.
- Stablecoin firm Circle confidentially files for US IPO - RTRS (twitter.com)
- On Crypto (Arnaud) (gestalt.cafe)
Arnaud argues that crypto has lost the substance and promise that drew early believers, and that the standard advice to become "product focused" has not fixed this. He says crypto's ideological commitments to transparency, democracy and trustlessness conflict with startup-style growth, and that the field would do better by taking on some of the coordinated, less public action that earlier technology projects relied on. He cites the early personal computer industry, VisiCalc's manual retail work by Dan Fylstra and VisiCorp, and Dee Hock's individual calls to banks while building NBI.
- Farcaster Hub Feeds (feeds.fcstr.xyz)
- We ❤️ The Art Dashboard (dune.com)
- Hivemind-as-a-service & the Farcaster Cloud: a letter to Neynar (onchainletters.xyz)
- /r/ethereum: Why are you here and not on Farcaster? (reddit.com)
- zkSync transactions are now available on Etherscan (twitter.com)
- On Speculation and Optimism's Recent $100m Retroactive Public Goods Grants (sceneswithsimon.com)
Optimism's third Retroactive Public Goods Funding Round (RetroPGF) funded 501 projects with over ~$100m (30m $OP), according to the article, which presents retroactive funding as a way to reward past useful work rather than predict future success. The round was far larger than the previous two, which rewarded 10m OP and $1m. The author, Simon, argues that the bicameral governance structure, split between the Citizens' House and the Token House, and the focus on retroactive funding are what the experiment gets right. He also lists open risks, including failure to bootstrap revenue before the 20% allocation is distributed and possible capture of the governance house.
- A call for friction in digital culture (designingfriction.com)
Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters propose that designers should embrace friction rather than eliminate it, arguing that digital technology has pursued seamlessness at the cost of physical resistance, human connection and autonomy. They say removing friction means standing still, and that a completely predictable future is no future at all. Their suggestions include embracing discomfort, allowing slower pace and boredom, engaging the body through physical interaction, and cherishing the non-positive. The text, co-authored with Alexandra Barancová, is part of the Hato Press zine series titled Designing Friction.
- NFT: Unglish by depatchedmode.eth (unglish.co.uk)
unglish is an NFT art project by depatchedmode.eth that generates an endless, self-replicating English-like gibberish language, built as a playful take on English's own irregular, co-constructed nature. The project's releases include the initial dialects zorglish a, arbiglish a, baglish a and optiglish a, currently minting on highlight.xyz, and Unglish 0, released 2023-06-11 as an edition of 20 on teia.art. The FAQ describes a roadmap running from words to definitions to grammar to writing, with the author projecting the work will take about 50 years.
- Burn the surplus RetroPGF (gov.optimism.io)
A temp check proposes burning the roughly 500 million OP overallocated to RetroPGF, keeping distributions at the 140 million OP currently projected through year 5, per an erratum correcting an earlier 700 million figure. Genesis projections intended all RetroPGF and Ecosystem Fund OP to be distributed by the end of Year 4, but only about 40 million OP, or ~4.7%, had been distributed after nearly two years. Without burning, RPGF would make up over ~75% of pending unlocks at year 5, so continuing it afterward would instead rely on protocol revenue shares and a 1% to 2% inflation share.
- god fucking damn it (files.catbox.moe)
- Where have all the websites gone? (fromjason.xyz)
The author argues that the web has not lost its websites but has lost the habit of curating them, and proposes that people rebuild discovery by sharing links to independent sites. The article notes there are currently one billion websites on the World Wide Web and lists examples from the author's bookmarks, including Yesterweb.org, Low-Tech Magazine and Every Noise. It contends that people have outsourced discovery to corporate algorithms in exchange for endless content feeds, and that creator funds pull from a fixed pot chosen by executives. The author suggests that users add links to favorite blogs, artist sites or aggregators to a link-in-bio page such as Linktree.
- Twitter/X has dropped support of NFT pfps (twitter.com)
- SEC APPROVES FIRST SPOT BITCOIN ETF Source: DB (twitter.com)
- Sapiens: How Shared Myths Change the World (risingentropy.com)
Shared myths are presented as the human force that lets people escape game-theoretic traps like the prisoner's dilemma and build large cooperative societies. The author uses a prisoner's dilemma example to show that a shared belief in a God who punishes defectors can make cooperation a stable equilibrium, even for people who do not share the belief, once the myth is enforced through social norms. The article attributes the broader view that money, law, human rights and nations are shared myths to Yuval Noah Harari, citing his book Sapiens, and quotes his point that Sapiens changed social structures within a decade or two while its DNA stayed the same.
- the SEC tonight (files.catbox.moe)