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)
- 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)
- 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)
- Product-led protocol development (danromero.org)
- Hardware Wallet Firm Trezor Says 66,000 Users Impacted by ‘Security Incident’ (unchainedcrypto.com)
- Awesome Farcaster (github.com)
- 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."