Top crypto stories of week 12, 2024
Mon 18 to Sun 24 March 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 18 to Sun 24 March 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 44 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, dune.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Crypto's broken moral compass (polynya.mirror.xyz)
- Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys (arstechnica.com)
Academic researchers have disclosed GoFetch, an unpatchable side-channel vulnerability in Apple's M-series chips that can let attackers extract secret cryptographic keys from Macs. The flaw stems from the chips' data memory-dependent prefetcher, so it can only be mitigated in third-party cryptographic software, which may significantly degrade performance on M1 and M2 chips. According to the researchers, a GoFetch app without root access can extract a 2048-bit RSA key in under an hour when it runs on the same performance cluster as the targeted app.
- EU enacts ban on anonymous crypto transactions via self-custody wallets (cointelegraph.com)
The European Parliament's lead committees have dropped a proposed 1,000 euro ($1,080) limit on cryptocurrency payments from self-hosted wallets from new anti-money laundering rules, the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR). The committees passed the AMLR on March 19, and it is expected to be fully operational around 2027 after approval from the EU Council and the Parliament plenary, which next sits on April 10. Crypto exchanges, called CASPs, must still verify the identity of users making business transactions of at least 1,000 euros. Pirate Party Germany MEP Patrick Breyer called the laws a "war on cash" and said anonymous transactions are a fundamental right.
- Ethereum Foundation Under Investigation by 'State Authority' (coindesk.com)
The Ethereum Foundation, the Swiss non-profit at the center of the Ethereum ecosystem, is facing questions from an unnamed "state authority," according to a February 26, 2024 GitHub commit to its website repository. That commit said the foundation had received a voluntary enquiry that included a confidentiality requirement, and it removed a footer stating the foundation had never been contacted by any agency in a way requiring nondisclosure, along with the site's warrant canary. An attorney familiar with the situation said a Swiss regulator may have served a document request and may be working with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The article also reports, citing Fortune, that the SEC is seeking to classify ETH as a security.
- Threads has entered the fediverse (engineering.fb.com)
Threads has begun federating with the fediverse, letting users aged 18+ with public profiles in a beta available in a few countries, including the US, share their posts to other ActivityPub-compliant servers. People on those servers can follow federated Threads profiles and like, reply to, and repost their posts. The article says federated users cannot yet see who liked their posts or replies from fediverse users on Threads, and posts with restricted replies, polls, or non-federated quotes and reposts are not federated. For quote posts, Threads implements both FEP-e232 and _misskey_quote, because ActivityPub has no official specification for them yet.
- Kairon - A Graveyard of Protocols (kairon.mirror.xyz)
- Investigation into the French dev Jolan Lacroix (Ticker dev) (twitter.com)
- Gnosis Launches uRamp, Bridging On and Off-Chain Worlds (gnosis.io)
Gnosis has launched uRamp, a product on Gnosis Chain that lets users on- and off-ramp any ERC20 token to and from their bank accounts, which it describes as part of its push to make Gnosis the best network for payments. Co-founder Stefan George says uRamp offers an easier, lower-cost and more reliable alternative to existing on- and off-ramping flows, which he describes as clunky and high-fee. The product was launched with Monerium, whose EURe euro stablecoin is swapped 1:1 with EUR, and it was built with BootNode, Gnosis' long-term engineering partner.
- The Queue NFT (feat. FingerprintsDAO) (queue.miragenesi.art)
- Vitalik Says Ethereum Must Achieve Mainstream Adoption Within Five Years (thedefiant.io)
- calldata.pics (calldata.pics)
- Farcaster feed-take-over rights (ethglobal.com)
LEMON JUICE is a hackathon project that creates a market around the right to take over another user's Farcaster feed, so one user can submit a message through another user's account. The project says this could support advertising mechanics not possible on centralised social media and grow into a decentralised advertising ecosystem. It is built with Frog frameworks as a series of Frame pages. Users first check for an "FTR" token, a Zora 1155 on Base, using Airstack middleware for an allowlist, and holders submit cast text that is posted via the Neynar API to the LEMON JUICE Farcaster client.
- Blob fee market (dune.com)
- Warpcast Power Badge Users API (docs.farcaster.xyz)
- Light - a smart wallet to combine multiple EVM chains (light.so)
- $DEGEN realized cap & individual wallet PnL (dune.com)
- Atomic and fair data exchange via blockchain (a16zcrypto.com)
A new paper from a16z crypto outlines the Fair Data Exchange (FDE) protocol, which lets a storage server transfer a data file to a client atomically, so the client receives the file if and only if the server receives an agreed-upon payment. The protocol uses a blockchain to enforce fairness and a new cryptographic primitive, Verifiable Encryption under Committed Key (VECK), to prove that off-chain encrypted data matches a specified commitment before the decryption key is sold on-chain. According to the article, a single FDE run on Ethereum costs about 200,000 gas for the server (under 10 USD) and about 30,000 gas for the client (under 1 USD).
- Neuralink in human demo (twitter.com)
- You Are Here: Independent publishing in 2024 - Daisy Alioto (twitter.com)
- You can’t play on both sides of the Great Firewall (restofworld.org)
The U.S. is close to banning TikTok, with the House having passed a bill and the Senate vote still pending, and the author argues that the logic behind a ban reflects a drift toward digital mercantilism, with private companies used as resources in great-power conflicts. Lawmakers' core concern is that ByteDance runs social networks in both China and the U.S., and there is no guarantee that Chinese censorship and legal access procedures for Douyin won't spill over onto TikTok. The article notes that Google's abandoned Chinese search project, revealed by a whistleblower in 2018, suggests it is difficult for online services to operate on both sides of the Great Firewall.