Top crypto stories of week 4, 2024
Mon 22 to Sun 28 January 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 22 to Sun 28 January 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 81 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Dan Romero's latest thinking on Farcaster growth strategy (youtu.be)
Dan Romero and Erik Torenberg discuss a 2023 recap and 2024 predictions in a Moment of Zen video. The conversation covers the potential impact of a Trump win in 2024, the appeal of populism, and the impact of AI on the next generation of startups. It also includes updates on Farcaster and Turpentine, though the listed details do not describe Farcaster's growth strategy or the speakers' specific conclusions.
- Making Sense of Tether on Tron (liamhorne.com)
Tether's USDT on the Tron blockchain has become the most used cryptocurrency for payments, according to the article, which attributes its rise to stablecoin demand in high-inflation countries and to Binance's early support. Stablecoins grew from under $3B to over $125B in circulation over five years, and the article says stablecoin transaction volumes fell only 11% after late 2021 while centralized exchange volumes fell 64%. It states that most consumer stablecoin transactions use USDT on Tron, with the average Ethereum stablecoin transaction 13x the value of a Tron one. Tron's low fees and fast block times, along with Binance making Tron the default network for USDT deposits and withdrawals, are described as key factors in that adoption.
- Minting Is the Native Business Model for Web3 (and maybe AI too) (avc.xyz)
The author argues that minting, the act of collecting a work by paying a small amount for a copy, is a native business model for Web3 and could also help with AI. Zora is cited as an example, where liking a post means minting it, sending the creator a tiny payment and giving the collector an owned copy. The author says that if a creator gets a thousand people to do this, they make a nice amount of money, and that collectors build data sets they own on the blockchain. The author proposes that such collections could later train open-source AI models that people run on their own phones, and says the author's blog already offers a Collect button using the same mechanism.
- Farcaster Frames (warpcast.notion.site)
- Kiwi Retroactive Grants: Round #2 (offchain.prop.house)
- Thoughts on building a Farcaster client (dylansteck.com)
- Is "being active on Farcaster" a viable user acquisition strategy? (telegra.ph)
Kiwi News developer timdaub argues that being active on Farcaster is not an effective user acquisition strategy, and that the team should carefully manage its time on Warpcast and X. Over the last 90 days in Google Analytics, Warpcast and X each brought only 2-4% of new users, about the same number from X as from Warpcast despite much less activity on X. The article suggests a possible echo chamber effect, with the degen tips airdrop as the exception that reached new users, though many who minted the NFT did not use the product. The article also says the Warpcast and X bots did not produce the expected engagement or retention gains.
- The Human Medium is the Human Message (open.substack.com)
Human-made media will increasingly point to its creators as generative AI and algorithmic feeds spread, since "the human medium is the human message" and "you can't automate authenticity." Cassidy Williams says algorithms have made the internet less personal, and Brandon laments that recommender systems have engineered out random encounters. Physical book sales have grown since 2012, and cozy-core content, newsletters and Alexandra Lange's writing on the Coffee Shop Alternate Universe fan-fiction community are cited as signs of a return to communal spaces. LLM-made media is expected to fill a long tail of niche, costly and time-sensitive content.
- Filecoin Foundation Deploys InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) in Space (fil.org)
- Illuminating Ethereum's Order Flow Landscape (writings.flashbots.net)
The article argues that Ethereum's order flow landscape is a nascent, fragile opportunity: a decentralized order flow network built on centralized infrastructure, in which permissionless searchers and liquidity providers can create competitive execution without relying on a few sophisticated market makers as tradfi does. It contrasts this with US equity payment for order flow, where over 90% of retail orders go to six wholesale market makers, and Robinhood's Q3 2023 report shows Citadel filling 29% to 37% of its orders by category. Using November 2023 data, it reports that Uniswap's website app and wallet processed $4.03B in volume, and that three solver auctions (Cowswap, 1inch Fusion and Uniswap X) had 22 solvers accessing over 33 liquidity sources.
- Client Diversity of Ethereum (clientdiversity.org)
Client diversity is presented as critical to Ethereum's resilience, since a single client used by 66% of validators could finalize a buggy fork, leaving validators who exit it open to a full 32 ETH slashing penalty. Clients above 33% share could prevent finality, so the stated goal is under 33% for each client, with danger beginning above 66%. Multinode validator clients such as Vero and Vouch are recommended because they require M-of-N connected clients to agree before voting, reducing correlated failures from client bugs. Supermajority.info reports 59.4% self-reported network coverage, with the remainder assumed to be mostly Geth.
- Product-led protocol development (danromero.org)
Dan Romero argues that a protocol meant to reach internet scale should be built product-first, starting from that end goal and working backwards. He says a protocol is only as strong as its number of independent, thriving clients, applications and businesses, since a protocol with many users but one dominant client is effectively an app with open APIs. He adds that developers care more about addressable quality daily active users than about tech stack, so a builder should first ship a high-quality initial app that attracts enough users to make developers interested in building on the protocol.
- Hardware Wallet Firm Trezor Says 66,000 Users Impacted by ‘Security Incident’ (unchainedcrypto.com)
Hardware wallet firm Trezor is investigating unauthorized access to a third-party support ticketing portal on January 17, 2024, which may have exposed contact details of up to 66,000 users. Potentially exposed data is limited to user emails and names or nicknames of people who contacted its customer support team. Trezor said no user funds were compromised, but affected users could face phishing attacks. The firm said a malicious actor contacted 41 users by email asking for their seed phrases, and that no recovery seed phrases were disclosed.
- Awesome Farcaster (github.com)
This is a community-curated directory of Farcaster-related projects, with entries grouped into clients, specialized apps, tools, bots, community groups, gaming, developer resources, services, analytics and datasets. Clients listed include Warpcast, described as the original Farcaster client by the Merkle Manufactory team, and Super, which offers onchain features such as claiming airdrops and posting anonymously. The list invites contributors to open a pull request, asks them to match the existing format, and says inactive or outdated projects may be removed at any time. It also states that the list is provided as is, with no guarantee of the safety or correctness of the associated code.
- Purple RetroPGF is happening! How can Kiwi win? (prop.house)
- The Open Source Sustainability Crisis (openpath.chadwhitacre.com)
- Client diversity on Ethereum's consensus layer (mirror.xyz)
- Mintellectual Property (zora.co)
- Algorithmic Botany (are.na)
Sean Catangui argues that algorithmic botany, writing code to model and draw plants, is best understood as a form of mythology rather than an attempt to mimic reality. He draws on John Berger's view that art imitates a creation rather than nature, and on Byung-Chul Han's claim that Chinese art operates like nature rather than depicting it realistically. Catangui says the algorithms used in his School for Poetic Computation course are not necessarily the most capable at rendering plant images; instead, they help students connect basic programming ideas to how plants and fungi arrange their parts. He also notes that human authorship is visible in gardens, farms and controlled-burn forests.
- FTX Was Never Really Bankrupt (project-syndicate.org)
FTX had sufficient assets to make its creditors whole all along, a claim that would likely change public perception of founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The prosecution at his trial stressed customer losses above $8 billion but never substantiated that figure. Bankman-Fried was convicted last November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, with prosecutors saying he stole "billions of dollars" from customers "out of sheer greed."
