Top crypto stories of week 5, 2024
Mon 29 January to Sun 4 February 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 29 January to Sun 4 February 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 36 comments in total. Most-shared sources: vitalik.eth.limo, github.com, a16zcrypto.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Kiwi Pass #1000 was just minted (optimistic.etherscan.io)
- The end of my childhood (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin reflects on how his role in the crypto and Ethereum community has changed over the past decade. He describes meeting younger organizers and developers at hackathons, hacker houses and Zuzalu in Montenegro, and notes that he is now one of the older people in the room. He also discusses how his thinking has shifted from mathematical governance design toward less economics-focused arguments, how the 2022 FTX collapse and his 2017 meeting with Vladimir Putin shaped his sense of responsibility, and how finite experiences give life meaning.
- Why Farcaster Frames are important (Spindl) (blog.spindl.xyz)
Spindl argues that Farcaster Frames are a significant Web 3 development: a way to run one app inside another with little coordination, backed by the shared state of the blockchain. Frames builds on the Open Graph Protocol, which Facebook launched in 2011 with Open Graph but which the article says has been largely forgotten until now. The article states that since Frames launched on a Friday, Spindl counted 313 apps launching 526 Frames, and that a Doom game was also run inside Farcaster.
- Uniswap Has Lost The Plot (listed.to)
The author, who says they built an uncensored fork of the Uniswap interface, argues that Uniswap Labs has moved away from its original censorship-resistant ethos, and urges users to switch to alternative hosted versions. They say the Uniswap interface censors some users and that Uniswap Labs' lawyers pressured mirrors such as eth.limo, which eventually took the fork down, after 14 takedown requests over a year. They note that Uniswap Labs did not respond to their attempts to talk, and that a Uniswap Labs co-founder, Hayden, later apologized for a takedown aimed at a GitHub pull request. The author's new fork, Horswap, is available via IPFS and eth.limo without interface fees, though Ethereum transaction and spread fees still apply.
- Frames.js Starter Kit (github.com)
- The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications (vitalik.eth.limo)
Crypto and AI intersect in several promising ways, and the most viable is AI acting as a player in on-chain mechanisms. Its main example is prediction markets, where AIs that work for under $1 per hour could make small markets function, even with a $50 liquidity subsidy that would not attract humans. Using AI as a user interface, such as explaining transactions before signing, is described as high potential but risky, because an open-source AI assistant gives attackers the same access to tune scams against it.
- a16z State of Crypto Index (a16zcrypto.com)
a16z's 2025 State of Crypto report argues that crypto has matured into a meaningful part of the modern economy, describing 2025 as the year the world came onchain. The total crypto market cap crossed $4 trillion for the first time in 2025, and an estimated 716 million people own crypto. Stablecoins processed $46 trillion in transaction volume over the past year, or $9 trillion on an adjusted basis that filters out bots, while Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products held over $175 billion.
- The "What's at Stake Storybook": A Call to Action for the Blockchain Community (advocacychannel.substack.com)
The /advocacy channel on Warpcast, in partnership with Stand With Crypto, is inviting blockchain and web3 founders, particularly Doxxed founders and members of the Farcaster community, to submit their stories for a project called the "What's at Stake Storybook." The storybook is intended as an advocacy and education tool to be shared with community leaders and elected officials at local, state, and federal levels, and used in online campaigns, hill visits, and townhalls. To contribute, people are asked to post a cast in the /advocacy channel on Warpcast, after which the team will connect with them.
- Etherscan is awesome but is also a critical point of failure for Ethereum (medium.com)
Etherscan's dominance as the main Ethereum transaction explorer is a single point of failure, the author argues, because its source code is closed and cannot be reproduced by others. The article says Etherscan is widely used and convenient, and that it acquired Solscan, which concentrates its influence across chains. It urges users to try open-source explorers such as Beaconchain, Blockscout and Otterscan, and says better incentives are needed to fund them. Otterscan creator Willian Mitsuda says the project is sponsored by Erigon, uses Sourcify for contract verification, and is funded without VC money.
- McLuhan lecture on enshittification (pluralistic.net)
Cory Doctorow's Marshall McLuhan lecture at Transmediale in Berlin argues that platforms decay through a three-stage process he calls enshittification, which he describes as his theory of how the internet was colonized by platforms. He illustrates the stages with Facebook: first serving users well, then abusing users to benefit business customers, and finally extracting value for shareholders. He says the current wave of decline is driven by changes in the environment rather than by new leaders or interest-rate policy, since Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google began enshittifying before the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy. The excerpt ends with four constraints he names on enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help, and the fear that users will install ad-blockers.
- Why I Moved My Blog from IPFS to a Server (neimanslab.org)
Neiman, an early adopter of IPFS and ENS websites, moved his personal blog from IPFS back to a server, which he says is a simple, classic working solution for now. He says IPFS's peer-to-peer model did not work in practice because most users rely on gateways rather than running nodes or pinning content. He also describes problems with dynamic content, since IPNS and ENS updates require pinners to follow changes, and with browser access, where Helia reached his content only through the cid.contact routing service. He says the blog now runs on Jekyll on a $10 server, and he still calls himself an IPFS fan.
- Awesome Frames (github.com)
This is a curated resource list for Farcaster Frames, a standard for turning websites into interactive units that other apps can display to users for experiences such as polls, live feeds and galleries. The list covers developer resources, including the Frames.js and Frog frameworks, Onchainkit, and an Open Frames standard that works across ecosystems such as XMTP and Lens. It also groups no-code creation tools, such as Frame Town, Neynar Frames and Frametrain, along with data and API providers like Neynar and Airstack, and lists over 60 open-source projects tagged with farcaster-frames.
- Proto-Danksharding Ahoy! Ethereum Upgrade Clears Another Hurdle (decrypt.co)
Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, which introduces proto-danksharding, became active on the Sepolia testnet on Tuesday, following its earlier activation on the Goerli testnet. The upgrade is designed to reduce transaction costs for layer-2 blockchains by making data availability cheaper and addressing scalability issues. The article says that after full danksharding, Ethereum could handle more than 100,000 transactions per second more cheaply. The last testnet deployment, Holesky, is scheduled to implement Dencun on February 7, after which a date for mainnet activation will be set.
- How to Think About Frames (medium.com)
Frames are interactive embeds for the Farcaster protocol: images with buttons underneath, rather than embedded webpages, and the buttons send signed requests that let servers identify users. The author notes that Frames launched two days before the article's publication, contributed to Warpcast reaching over 10k daily active users in one day, and do not rely on blockchains or wallets. The article gives examples including a Polls Frame, a Paragraph newsletter subscription Frame, and a Nethria text adventure Frame. It also describes possible uses such as OpenSea users favoriting NFTs without leaving the feed, and sponsored NFT mints where the developer's wallet pays for the transaction.
- Estimated number of mobile wallet users (a16zcrypto.com)
- MKBHD Apple Vision Pro Unboxing - It’s here! (youtu.be)
- Electric Capital: 2023 Crypto Developer Report (developerreport.com)
Electric Capital's 2023 Developer Report analyzed 485 million code commits across 818K repositories. It found that overall crypto developers fell 24%, while the most valuable segment, developers with 2+ years of tenure who contribute the most code, grew steadily at 52% annualized over the past five years. The report also found that crypto had become clearly multi-chain, with 30% of developers supporting more than one chain. Electric Capital published these annual reports from 2018 to 2024, and they remain available now that Open Dev Data is public.
- Who's Changing: Me, My Culture, or the World? (sceneswithsimon.com)
This is a newsletter-style roundup, and its central theme is whether personal change in one's 30s comes from getting older, from the broader culture, or from society at large, with the author concluding it may be both. The author describes wanting to slow down and spend time on walking, writing and existing relationships, and cites Vitalik Buterin's reflections on turning 30 and on finite beautiful things. The rest of the post covers a Matthew Ball report on declining gaming revenue, UMG pulling its music from TikTok, the Palworld copyright question, and Noah Smith's critique of the Dark Forest idea in Three Body Problem.
- Worldcoin to launch new Orb to make eyeball scanning device look more ‘friendly’ (techcrunch.com)
Alex Blania, CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity, told TechCrunch that Worldcoin's Orb device will get a redesign with alternative colors and form factors meant to look "much more friendly." Blania said the next Orb will roll out in the first half of the year and look "way [more] tuned down" and similar to "an Apple product." The article reports that Worldcoin has about 3.13 million total sign-ups, with more than 190,000 new accounts created over the past seven days, according to its website.
- Some numbers about the Etherscan lock-in for block explorers (jaack.montaigne.io)
Routescan, which previously operated as Avascan, estimates from benchmarks and client conversations that Etherscan earns roughly 25 million dollars a year from its block explorer business, with at least a 50% profit margin. The estimate rests on per-chain fees that it infers: about 1 million dollars a year for an average chain, and around 4 million for BNB Chain, which it calculates from indexing and storage costs. Adding an estimated 1 million dollars from advertising on Ethereum and about 1 million from APIs brings the total to that figure. The post presents these numbers as rough calculations rather than confirmed figures.