Top crypto stories of week 18, 2024
Mon 29 April to Sun 5 May 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 29 April to Sun 5 May 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 17 comments in total. Most-shared sources: paragraph.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- a16z probably bought $90M of OP token (unchainedcrypto.com)
Venture capital firm a16z has reportedly bought about $90 million of Optimism's native OP token, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The investment is said to be executed under a two-year vesting period, which typically comes with a discounted purchase price relative to the token's trading price. The article notes that Optimism's OP Stack has recently won users such as the Celo blockchain, and that a16z also counts Coinbase among its portfolio companies. A spokesperson for a16z did not respond to requests for comment, and an Optimism spokesperson did not comment on a16z's involvement specifically.
- Mirror and Paragraph Join Forces to Elevate Onchain Publishing (dev.mirror.xyz)
- The Goldilocks consensus problem (varunsrinivasan.com)
Farcaster has developed a new consensus model called the deltagraph, which combines blockchains with CRDTs to aim for social-network scale while staying decentralized. The authors say existing federated and blockchain models trade off decentralization against cost and speed: federation is simple but tends toward centralization, while blockchains are slow and expensive for social data. Deltagraphs avoid global ordering by letting deltas merge in any order, and they use rent to limit storage, with Farcaster's blockchain handling payments. The article reports over 300,000 paying users and 1,000 nodes serving 5 million deltas every day.
- Ethereum reaches 1M active validators (beaconcha.in)
- The Age of Trans-Local Self-Organized CoordiNations (4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com)
- Rhino Review - Ethereum Staking Journal #25 is out! (rhinoreview.substack.com)
Rhino Review, an Ethereum staking newsletter, has released its 25th edition, which includes a survey on the staking landscape with an emphasis on the quality of life of solo stakers, run with the support of EthStaker. The issue promotes Dappcon Berlin, held 21-23 May, where Rhino Review readers can get 20% off tickets with the code Rhino20. It also lists recent client releases, including Geth v1.14.0 and Nethermind v1.26.0 on the execution layer, and Teku v24.4.0 and Lighthouse v5.1.3 on the consensus layer.
- Genome: GNO Domains (gnosischain.notion.site)
- Friend Tech v2: Opportunity or Bloodbath? (chronicle.castlecapital.vc)
Friend Tech V2 launched on March 3, 2024, with a $FRIEND airdrop, but the article argues the rollout fell short of expectations and questions whether the model is sustainable. Users could initially claim only 10% of their airdrop (if they followed at least 10 people) and needed to join a club to claim the other 90%. The article notes that key utility has not expanded, the social media element appears underwhelming, and the $FRIEND price has been below predictions. It also reports a delay of about 3-4 hours between on-chain actions and the app interface.
- Introducing Gnosis 3.0 (forum.gnosis.io)
Gnosis has announced Gnosis 3.0, a phase focused on payments and open financial infrastructure, with a collective of aligned projects connected by the GNO token. The post says Gnosis 2.0 centered on Ethereum infrastructure, including Gnosis Safe, CoW Swap and Gnosis Chain, and that Gnosis 3.0 shifts toward applications for everyday users. Its four in-house payments and financial ventures are Gnosis Pay, Circles, Gnosis Wallet and Hashi, with Gnosis Wallet described as a planned onchain neobank. The post also cites Autonolas, which it says has 10k-20k weekly payment transactions on Gnosis Chain.
- Public goods funding must be evolutionary! (gov.gitcoin.co)
Public goods funding rounds must evolve over time because Goodhart's Law, which holds that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," erodes their effectiveness across repeated rounds. The post argues that rounds, whether quadratic funding or badgeholder review, will show diminishing returns unless designers continually revise their measures. Suggested tools include randomness in evaluation, diversified and dynamic metrics, caps such as limiting one metric to 20% of allocation, and community feedback. The post also argues for balancing crypto's emphasis on immutability, reserving it for elements like intra-round vote counting, with iterative change between rounds.
- Introducing Farther (paragraph.xyz)
Farther, created by GIGAMΞSH, launched as a community project to grow Farcaster, reward its power users, and help shape its culture. It is described as an incentive design canvas that funds creative music, art, and tech efforts to boost Farcaster, using the FARTHER token deployed on Base. The planned distribution includes an airdrop on May 1, 2024 (GMT) to all Farcaster users with a Warpcast Power Badge, with further monthly rewards for users who earn the badge over the following three years. Power users can also earn FARTHER by posting about Farcaster on Twitter, and an onchain liquidity rewards program is set to run for six months.
- There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (ribbonfarm.com)
Blogger Gwern-style reviewer (the author, unnamed in the text) recommends There Is No Antimemetics Division (2020) by qntm, a novel about agents of a bureaucratic organization called The Foundation who track dangerous "antimemetic" entities, ideas that discourage their own spread. The book grew out of SCP, an online experimental fiction community whose contributors write in dry bureaucratic-reporting language about invented containment-worthy objects. The text describes the novel's style as a mix of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Ballardian banality and near-Douglas-Adams camp, and it credits Simon De La Rouviere's talk on SCP for the Summer of Protocols as a useful way to understand the community.
- A Framework for Good, Great, And Timeless Stories (sceneswithsimon.com)
The author's framework judges story quality by how a story's setting and theme combine, with theme defined as the core question a story poses to the reader. Good stories pair a familiar setting with a clear, established theme, while great stories innovate by pairing a new setting with an established theme or a familiar setting with a new theme. Timeless stories ask an under-explored question through a novel setting; examples given include Frankenstein (1818), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Brave New World (1932), and Neuromancer (1982).
- Vodafone looks to integrate crypto wallets with sim cards (cointelegraph.com)
Vodafone hopes to bring blockchain technology to smartphone users by integrating cryptocurrency wallets with SIM cards. Vodafone Blockchain Lead David Palmer said in a Yahoo Finance Future Focus interview that the company has linked the SIM card to digital identity and blockchains, using the cryptography already in those cards. Palmer predicted some eight billion smartphones in use by 2030 and a rise in crypto wallets to 5.6 billion in the same period. The article notes this comes amid reported debt plans at Vodafone Idea, in which the Vodafone Group holds a 45% stake.
- How I'm Launching a VC Fund With Zero Capital (paragraph.xyz)
- AI Safety Dance (aisafety.dance)
This introductory series on AI and AI Safety, written by its author in a "friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated" style, is split into three parts published from May 2024 to December 2025. Its core framing holds that the main problems in AI come down to two conflicts: logic versus intuition, and problems in the AI versus problems in the humans who use it. The author says the series was made in collaboration with Hack Club, a worldwide community for and by teen hackers. The article also argues that AI Safety is not a fringe concern, citing government AI Safety departments in the US and UK and warnings from researchers including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.
- Dressing for Venice - Outland (outland.art)
- Gil Duran Faked A Quote For the New Republic (balajis.com)
Blogger Balaji Srinivasan (the author's own byline is not given in the text) alleges that writer Gil Duran fabricated a quote attributed to him in a New Republic article, and that the magazine stealth-edited the piece multiple times without a correction. The post says the original video at 3:19:51 shows the speaker called for non-violent political action against Democrats in San Francisco, not "ethnic cleansing." It also claims Duran hid replies pointing out the fake, did not disclose past payments from California Democrats, and was previously fired from the San Francisco Examiner over a fabricated story.
- Samourai Devs Arrested is a Wake Up Call for Crypto (dark.fi)
The article, written by someone associated with the DarkFi project, argues that privacy projects that rely on doxxed teams or centralized infrastructure, and that ask users to "join our Discord," lack commitment to anonymity and should be dismissed. It cites the US state's money laundering charges against Samourai Wallet devs and the earlier case involving Tornado as evidence that the state is targeting anyone who challenges the status quo. The author calls for fully dark, anonymous ecosystems, and says DarkFi, which uses anonymous p2p chat and an anonymous DAO, will continue to thrive even if its developers are jailed.
- The next era of organizations starts with Hats Protocol (blog.hatsprotocol.xyz)
Hats Protocol, a platform for onchain organizational graphs, proposes an interoperable graph that holds data about contributors, roles and permissions and shares it with every tool an organization uses. The article says that changing roles once in this graph propagates them automatically to all connected tools, saving the time spent keeping fragmented data in sync. It describes roles, called "hats," as tokens held by agents such as individuals, DAOs, smart accounts or AI agents, and says RaidGuild is automating contributor permissions and role-based compensation across its 140+ member organization. The article also states that Hats expects organizations to get "100x faster, fairer, and less political" over the next decade.