Top crypto stories of week 20, 2024
Mon 13 to Sun 19 May 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 13 to Sun 19 May 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 36 comments in total. Most-shared sources: coindesk.com, app.t2.world, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Introducing Roam: The Social Onchain Browser. Download the app at roam.xyz. (warpcast.com)
- Alex Pertsev sentenced to 5 years of prison (coindesk.com)
Dutch judge Alexey Pertsev, a Tornado Cash developer, was sentenced to 64 months in prison for money laundering by a court in s-Hertogenbosch on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. The court found that between July 9, 2019 and Aug. 10, 2022, Pertsev made "a habit of committing money laundering" and should have at least suspected the criminal origins of illicit transactions on the Tornado Cash platform. Pertsev can appeal, and it does not appear that his time in custody since his August 2022 arrest will count against the sentence. The verdict could affect future trials of other Tornado Cash developers, including Roman Storm, whose U.S. trial is set for September.
- Mid-term future of improving Ethereum’s permissionlessness and decentralization (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that Ethereum's permissionlessness and decentralization can be improved through protocol changes already in progress and realistic roadmap tweaks, responding to concerns raised by Geth core developer Peter Szilagyi. On MEV, he favors minimizing MEV alongside "MEV quarantining" via proposer/builder separation, and he supports inclusion lists that let proposers force transactions into blocks, with the view that the builder's role should shrink further. On staking, he says most non-solo stakers cite the 32 ETH minimum, and that verkle trees with EIP-4444 and a larger validator set could address the barriers to solo staking.
- Degen Chain Stops Producing Blocks (bankless.com)
Degen Chain, an L3 network on Base developed by Syndicate for the DEGEN memecoin, has stopped producing blocks for over 19 hours as of 4:15 p.m. ET the previous day. The chain stopped validating new transactions, which affects all of its services, including Relay Bridge, DegenSwap, Mint Club, and Frogswap. The Degen Chain team is working with Conduit, the rollup infrastructure provider, to restore functionality. DEGEN continues to trade on Base, though it was down about 8% over the prior 24 hours.
- Meditations on onchain media (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The author's central point is that onchain media has not yet found its own format, and that current efforts still resemble putting existing media online as-is. The essay compares this to 1997, when online media's value came from new formats like longer articles, images, video and hyperlinks, plus new distribution that let anyone reach large audiences, not just from storing content online. It lists obvious onchain paths, including token-gated access, onchain edit history, seamless payments, and support for citizen journalism, but calls these an early "put this PDF online" stage. It encourages experimentation, such as using tokens to incentivize journalistic objectivity and ledgers to track the provenance of ideas.
- group chats rule the world (sriramk.com)
Private group chats on platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and invite-only Discord servers now host many of tech's most interesting conversations, and the author argues that the best ones share recognizable patterns. Ideas tested in these groups often move to X/Twitter and then mainstream discourse, with the article citing the 2020 culture wars and COVID as reasons for the shift. The author compares a strong leader to a gardener who sets tone and removes bad actors, a moderator to a nuclear reactor's cooling rods, and a healthy group to one that stays small and prunes inactive members. The article closes by quoting Elsa Maxwell's 1930 Vogue essay: "A new idea, plus a sense of humor, makes a party – and the bores break it."
- Introducing Lens Network on Ethereum (app.t2.world)
Lens announced Lens Network, an infrastructure for decentralized social spaces built on zkSync's ZK Stack that will launch as an EVM-compatible Validium chain secured by Ethereum. The network will convert to a Volition network over a three-phase rollout, with Phase 1 called Seed, Phase 2 called Grow, and Phase 3 called Bloom. A new version of Lens Protocol will run on Lens Network as a cross-chain hub, and the article says users can expect gasless, signless transactions with subsecond completion times.
- OpenGlass: Turn any glasses into AI-powered smart glasses (github.com)
OpenGlass is an open-source project for turning existing glasses into hackable smart glasses using less than $25 of off-the-shelf components. The build uses a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 S3 Sense board, a 3.7V 250mAH EEMB LP502030 battery, and a 3D-printed glasses mount. The software is an Expo project that uses API keys for Groq and OpenAI, or a self-hosted Ollama REST API running the moondream:1.8b-v2-fp16 model. The page notes that the project has moved to the Omi repository and that the current repo is no longer supported.
- The most important lesson that I learned in my 20s (cerv.one)
Carl Cervone argues that when you strongly disagree with an organization you do not control, you should walk away and build your own thing rather than escalate with public campaigns or boardroom power plays. He describes how, at 24, he was fired from a Tanzanian microloan project after sending its founder, "Pepe", a letter requesting a raise from $500 to $2000 per month, signatory control of a foreign foundation, and a seat at strategic planning. Cervone says he drafted a "mean letter" and considered fighting back, but his mother talked him down, and he later found new work in Tanzania and went on to start organizations.
- Existing L2s on both Bitcoin and Ethereum are money service businesses (MSBs) (x.com)
Existing Layer 2 networks on Bitcoin and Ethereum are described as money service businesses that are likely to face regulatory pressure, with the author suggesting they could fail after privacy services. The argument rests on the claim that all L2s are custodial, since customer funds sit in a multisig controlled by a federation (Liquid Network) or under an emergency council (Arbitrum One, Optimism). It also holds that L2s are centralized, for-profit companies whose fee revenue goes to token holders, and that none hold banking licences. The piece adds that many privacy services (Samourai, Wasabi, Tornado) and Lightning providers (Phoenix, WoS, IBEX, Mash) are already shut down in some jurisdictions.
- Dankrad and Peter Szilagyi discussing MEV (x.com)
Dankrad Feinstein rejects the claim that Ethereum researchers design protocol changes to serve monetary interests rather than to build a fair system. He says many researchers take heavy criticism for opposing large ecosystem players, including liquid staking protocols, and for supporting proposals such as taking the issuance curve. He also calls it absurd to say Verkle trees exist to protect stakers' income, noting that staking pools do not care about avoiding the need for an SSD to run the protocol. According to him, the main goal of Verkle is to make running full nodes easier and cheaper, which would allow gas to be increased.
- New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing (cobie.substack.com)
The author argues that most new token launches are now effectively uninvestable at market, because price discovery has shifted to private rounds before a token trades. Using figures from the article, Ethereum's 2014 ICO at about $26m valuation ($0.31 per ETH) returned roughly 10,000x in USD, and Solana's 2018 seed round at about $20m returned roughly 4,000x, while the cheapest open-market buys returned about 7,500x for Ethereum and 300x for Solana. For more recent projects, Optimism's seed round at about $60m FDV returned 183x against 6x from market, and Starknet's seed at about $80m FDV returned 138x, with market buyers at its lowest ever valuation, $11 billion FDV, seeing no return yet.
- Farcaster decentralized channels docs (warpcast.notion.site)
- Why should I care about Lens Network as a writer/creator? (app.t2.world)
Lens Protocol has announced the Lens Network, an infrastructure plan that the article presents as a way to break the "walled garden" of current social media and give creators more control over their content, audiences and monetisation. The article argues that data would follow creators across platforms rather than being stored on one company's servers, reducing the need to repost work everywhere and lowering the risk of content being removed or hidden. It names creators already active on Lens, including Eduard, Benoit.Tokyo, Cristina Spinei, Pan Winyl and Refraction, and says t2.world, the publishing home within Lens, will integrate with the network. Writers who connect their Lens handles to t2 can already distribute work across the Lens ecosystem.
- Decision Brownouts (ribbonfarm.com)
The essay argues that today's hardest decisions often trigger a "decision brownout," a state where people freeze because a slow, chronic stress response gives them no clear threat to fight or flee and no energy to choose a new direction. Its author describes the symptoms as procrastination, clutter, and conserving energy by taking the path of least resistance. The author argues that getting out of a brownout requires energy more than direction, since making non-default choices is what unlocks energy. The essay also suggests that many people in such states are wrongly pathologized, and it applies the idea to the 2024 presidential choice, which it describes as de-energizing.
- How to onboard your NFT data to IPFS (nft.storage)
NFT.Storage presents five ways for creators to onboard NFT data to IPFS so it stays highly available on marketplaces and other platforms, ranging from easiest to most complex. The options are minting services such as Zora, OpenSea and Foundation; pinning services such as Pinata, Lighthouse, Filebase and web3.storage; the IPFS desktop application, which suits lightweight use; IPFS developer services; and hosting your own node with Kubo, which requires a development background. The article recommends Pinata or Lighthouse and says that signing up through its referral links supports NFT.Storage.
- New experiments in publishing (ystrickler.com)
- Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Vitalik Buterin Back $45M Investment in Polymarket (coindesk.com)
Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market platform, raised $45 million in a series B round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, according to founder Shayne Coplan, who spoke to CoinDesk. Other participants include Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, 1confirmation, ParaFi and Dragonfly Capital, and the company has raised well over $70 million in total, including a previously undisclosed $25 million series A led by General Catalyst. The article reports that traders have wagered $202 million on Polymarket this year, per the company, and that the platform is barred from doing business with U.S. residents under a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
- Onchain impact metrics for Optimism Retro Funding 4 (docs.opensource.observer)
Open Source Observer is working with the Optimism Collective and its badgeholder community on a suite of impact metrics for projects applying to Retro Funding 4, the Collective's first Metrics-based Evaluation experiment. Badgeholders will vote by selecting and weighting metrics rather than voting on individual projects, with the goal of arriving at up to 20 credible metrics. The metrics rely on public datasets covering six Superchain networks (OP Mainnet, Base, Frax, Metal, Mode, and Zora), and include gas fees, total transactions, and interactions from trusted users, where trusted users must meet at least two reputation criteria. The RF4 scope period runs from October 2023 to June 2024.
- co-create (visas.ethberlin.org)