Top crypto stories of week 9, 2024
Mon 26 February to Sun 3 March 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 26 February to Sun 3 March 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 40 comments in total. Most-shared sources: nftnow.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- iOS 17.4 is also an attack on crypto (bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com)
Kiwi News's developer argues that Apple's iOS 17.4 update is a strategic attack on crypto apps that rely on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The update downgrades PWA functionality on iOS, which the author links to the EU's Digital Markets Act and browser-neutrality requirements. Under the update, installed Kiwi News PWAs will open as browser tabs rather than standalone apps, users who delegated upvoting power must re-delegate because the stored private key will be deleted, and push notifications will no longer be supported.
- Farcaster Frames transactions spec is ready for feedback (warpcast.com)
- Why I Don't Read Reddit (honest-broker.com)
The author explains why they stopped using Reddit, citing heavy-handed moderation, poor discourse, and an informant's critique that upvoting rewards confident misinformation. They then analyze Reddit's public S-1 filing, which reports an average of over 60,000 daily active moderators in December 2023 against about 2,000 employees, a $717 million accumulated deficit, and 2023 revenue that grew 21% to $804 million. The author also flags the company's AI training data licensing and its dependence on Google for search traffic, and says they would not buy shares or return to the platform.
- How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (openrss.org)
Google's handling of its products has, according to this article, done substantial damage to RSS adoption, which the article says remains heavily used but has suffered. The article describes a pattern it calls Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, in which Google builds products around the open RSS protocol, removes RSS support once users are locked in, and ignores requests to restore it. Cited examples include the removal of the RSS button from Chromium-based Chrome, the 2013 shutdown of Google Reader, the 2013 removal of RSS from Google Alerts (later reinstated), and the end of RSS support in Google News in December 2017. The article also notes that a 2021 announcement of an RSS feature for Chrome had not yet produced a launch.
- Decoding Apple's Desperate Ploy To Scuttle PWAs (infrequently.org)
The article argues that Apple's iOS 17.4 changes in the EU are a deliberate move to cripple Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) ahead of the March 6th deadline for compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). It says the change disables features such as app-like UI, reliable storage, push notifications and icon badging, and it claims Apple is timing the removal to argue that competitors need not be given these features. Apple's February 15th statement is criticized as deflection, and the article quotes Mozilla calling Apple's browser-engine proposals an effort to make competing browsers painful to provide.
- How To Build A Newthing (ystrickler.com)
- Inside shl0ms’ Viral “Sunsetting Gmail” Hoax and Conceptual Art (nftnow.com)
- Communications breakdown (rekt.news)
The GHO Liquidity Committee saga shows that the outcome of Aave governance depends on the people acting within it rather than the process on paper. The GLC was tasked with keeping GHO's peg stable, but the committee sent 1.05 million cvxCRV in two transfers instead of minting and staking sdCRV to the Gnosis Safe, as the governance vote required. Token Brice, who had declared himself "temporary and benevolent leader," resigned just over a week later and criticized the governance process on X and his blog. Gauntlet also ended its relationship with Aave, with co-founder John Morrow citing "inconsistent guidelines and unwritten objectives" set by Aave's largest stakeholders.
- Two years later: is my Web3 website still standing? (dri.es)
The author checked on a simple Web3 website launched two years earlier on IPFS and ENS at dries.eth, and found it still online, with the underlying services still operational. He tried switching the site to IPNS to avoid paying Ethereum fees for each update, but the IPNS record stopped working within a day because it needed republishing. He reverted the ENS record to the original IPFS link after deciding that a $20 monthly service or running his own node was not worth it for a single HTML file.
- Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product (linear.app)
Linear's co-founder argues that today's MVP should not aim to validate a novel idea quickly and cheaply, but to build a version of an existing product idea that is substantially better than what already competes in a crowded market. The article says the classic Lean Startup MVP, which Eric Ries described in 2011, still fits only rare cases of entirely new categories. It describes how Linear narrowed its initial audience to individual contributors at small startups, starting with issue tracking, and drew early users from a waitlist in small invited groups. It also notes that Linear first ran a pay-if-you-want "Friends of Linear" plan during beta and launched publicly only after about a year of testing user sentiment.
- Genie: Generative Interactive Environments (sites.google.com)
Genie, a foundation world model from Google's Genie Team, is trained on publicly available Internet videos, mainly 2D platformer games and robotics, and can generate playable, action-controllable worlds from a single prompt image such as a photograph or sketch. The model learns controls without action labels, inferring latent actions that behave consistently across generated environments. The team says a smaller 2.5B model trained on RT1 robotics videos showed similar consistency, and that the approach could help train generalist AI agents. The article gives no quantitative benchmark results beyond these examples.
- Poison-Depilling Problems (ribbonfarm.com)
Venkatesh Rao (no, the author isn't named in the text; the piece is unsigned in this excerpt) argues that writers should avoid "poison-pilled" terms, meaning useful ideas whose wording is tainted by political baggage, unsound analysis, or distasteful associations. The article cites two examples: "enshittification," coined by Cory Doctorow, and "luxury belief," coined by Rob Henderson. It says that qualifying these terms, challenging their provenance, or appropriating them with inverted valence each fails, so it proposes coining new terms instead. The alternatives it offers are "favela gothic," for enshittification, and "referred chauvinism," for luxury beliefs, with the author noting these are not claimed to be great terms.
- Gitcoin 2.0 Whitepaper (gitcoin.co)
- Rise of the Status Eceonomy (youtu.be)
- Sign-in with ETH is live on HackMD (blog.hackmd.io)
Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) is now live on HackMD, letting users sign into their accounts with an Ethereum account and ENS profile instead of traditional intermediaries. To enable it, users add their wallet in account settings, then choose "Sign in with Wallet" on the sign-in page. The standard, led by SpruceID, ENS, and the Ethereum Foundation, uses EIP-4361 messages and lets wallets warn users about possible domain phishing attempts. Wayne Chang, Co-founder and CEO of Spruce ID, and HackMD CEO and Co-founder Jong-kai Yang both praised the integration.
- Elon Musk sues OpenAI for abandoning original mission for profit (reuters.com)
- 22 Black Artists Bringing Unique Art to Web3 (nftnow.com)
- iOS 17.4 won't remove Home Screen web apps in the EU after all (9to5mac.com)
Apple reversed its earlier decision to remove Home Screen web apps, also called progressive web apps, in the European Union with iOS 17.4, and says it will continue to offer the existing capability there. Last month Apple had said the removal was needed to comply with the Digital Markets Act, citing the complex security and privacy concerns of supporting alternative browser engines for web apps. Apple now says Home Screen web apps will continue to be built directly on WebKit, and that developers and users affected by the removal in the iOS 17.4 beta can expect the functionality to return with iOS 17.4 in early March.
- Scientific approach to VC (nfx.com)
NFX's guide to venture capital argues that VCs judge every early-stage pitch by one question: can this company return the fund? The article says investors test this through three criteria: whether the company can be big enough, whether it has defensible, differentiated "magic," and whether the founders are the right people. It explains that VC returns follow a power law, so seed investments often return 0 to 1x while a few must be large enough to return a fund of, for example, $100 million at 10% ownership, which requires a more-than-$1B outcome. The article also states that a standard fund pays about 2% annual management fees and 20% of profits, and that fund lifetimes run 10 to 15 years.
- Gnosis Chain Hits 200,000 Validators! - Gnosis Chain (gnosis.io)
Gnosis Chain has reached 200,000 validators, which its validator lead Armagan Ercan calls a milestone reflecting the community's commitment to building future applications. The article says the chain needs only a single GNO token to validate, compared with Ethereum's 32 ETH requirement for home staking, and that it is second only to Ethereum in validator count and network decentralization. It also lists a Dencun upgrade scheduled for March 11, 2024, two days ahead of Ethereum, and the planned Shutterized Gnosis Chain encrypted mempool in 2024.