Top crypto stories of week 22, 2024
Mon 27 May to Sun 2 June 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 27 May to Sun 2 June 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 23 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Farcaster has 5000 DAU. How could it raise 150 million? (x.com)
- People are much more real in person (bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com)
The author, a crypto writer who describes themselves as a critic online, says people in person are far more candid and real than they appear on Twitter. After being told in person at Dappcon during Berlin Blockchain Week that they were often wrong, they also met people who expressed gratitude and respect for their online persona, which helped them accept that they cannot fundamentally change who they are. They argue that people in the crypto space state their positions candidly offline on controversial topics, such as the Dutch court's sentencing of Pertsev, because they feel safe from having their words used against them on Twitter. They conclude that more people should say online what they say offline, under their real names rather than pseudonyms.
- Asymmetric wealth and my youth (bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com)
The author, who went into startups and crypto nine years ago after university, argues that the asymmetric wealth strategy has not paid off and that their youth is running out to keep trying. Despite working hard at a startup, they say they did not get rich, and they now compare themselves unfavorably with a hypothetical 33-year-old who took a proper industry job and has grown wealth linearly. They are currently bootstrapping Kiwi News, a social network that pays them no salary, and they ask at what point they must abandon the strategy, for example to start a family.
- ENSv2: The Next Generation of ENS | ENS Blog (blog.ens.domains)
ENS Labs is proposing that the Ethereum Name Service expand to Layer 2 networks under the name ENSv2, migrating core functionality off Ethereum mainnet. The announcement says the move would dramatically reduce gas fees for .eth registrations and renewals and make names more interoperable across blockchains through a CCIP-Read Gateway and a compatible resolver. It also says each .eth name would get its own personal registry, building on experience with the Name Wrapper. Technical feedback is directed to the ENS governance forum, and a community Space on ENSv2 was scheduled for May 28 at 11:00 a.m. EST with Nick Johnson and the team.
- Nakamoto Dollar and The Math Behind Ethena (research.auditless.com)
Arthur Hayes' "Nakamoto Dollar" proposes a capital-efficient synthetic dollar that does not rely on the fiat banking system, built from a single short position in a bitcoin inverse perpetual. The margin is posted in BTC worth 1 USD, and the short position tracks 1/p - 1/p0, so the combined value always equals 1 USD in BTC terms. The article notes the position cannot be liquidated because its value never falls below zero, but it warns that if BTC's price drops far enough that longs are liquidated (for example at a liquidation price of 0.25), the position's total value is capped at 4 BTC and its USD value could eventually fall to 0. Hayes recommends putting funding-rate income into a sinking fund to cover shortfalls from liquidations, custody issues, or negative funding rates.
- SDKs are dead; long live capabilities (docs.zerodev.app)
The article argues that building with Account Abstraction is poor today because DApps must embed a vendor-specific AA wallet and use vendor-specific APIs, and that a standardized "capabilities" API will let DApps use any smart wallet. It describes ERC-5792, which adds the wallet_getCapabilities and wallet_sendCalls RPCs, and capabilities such as atomicBatch, paymasterService, auxiliaryFunds and permissions. The author, writing for ZeroDev, says ZeroDev now supports the capabilities API, which can be used with Viem and Wagmi.
- Instagram comments are individualized (x.com)
- Discord’s Next Chapter (discord.com)
Discord CEO and founder Jason Citron says the company is narrowing its focus from a broad community-centric chat app to a place that helps people deepen friendships around games and shared interests, as it looks to the next decade. He says Discord has 200 million monthly users, over 90% of whom play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours each month on the platform. The company says it is prioritizing a faster app, reliable voice, video and streaming, and cross-platform play, which now includes Xbox and PlayStation 5, alongside a new brand identity.
- 5 things wrong with crypto according to normies (blog.teji.io)
- I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business (mtlynch.io)
The author sold TinyPilot, a hardware and software business he founded in 2020, for $598,000 about a month before writing this. The sale came after four years of full-time work that grew the company to a team of seven and $1M in annual revenue, and after the company's earlier broker, FE International, rejected it for having too few products. The author reports a 2.4x multiple on annual earnings, a $490,803 profit after broker and legal fees, and full cash payment at closing with no earnout or seller financing. The deal came through Quiet Light Brokerage, after a strategic buyer, ServerCo, offered only $150k in cash plus employment and profit-share terms.
- Layer 2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin's essay "Layer 2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum" argues that blockchains have distinct cultures that shape their technical direction, participants and legitimacy, and that a layer-2-centric Ethereum allows subcultures to pursue their own approaches while sharing common infrastructure. The article identifies three Ethereum subcultures described by Paul Dylan-Ennis: cypherpunks, who build infrastructure and tools; regens, who run governance and public goods experiments; and degens, who trade memecoins and NFTs. It argues that layer 2s are the strongest playing field for such subcultures because each is both an ecosystem and organized around building something. It cites EOS's delegated proof of stake system as an earlier two-level attempt that produced autonomous sub-communities but proved unstable.
- Semaphore - anonymously prove group membership and send votes (semaphore.pse.dev)
Semaphore is a zero-knowledge protocol that lets users prove group membership and send signals such as votes or endorsements without revealing their original identity. The page presents Semaphore as a free, open source public good that works across Web2 and Web3 and is cross-chain compatible with EVM, L2s, and alt-blockchains. It also lists projects built with Semaphore, including ZkDemocracy, a ready-to-use anonymous voting system, and Bandada, an open-source system for managing privacy-preserving groups. The page's roadmap lists support for more testnets and mainnets, a Semaphore V4 specification, Rust and Noir implementations, and scaling with PIR.
- Dappcon '24 Main Stage talks (docs.google.com)
Kiwi has published a list of the Main Stage talks from Dappcon '24, spread across three days, with timestamped links to recordings that the Gnosis team will later edit and add to the Dappcon YouTube channel. The page also promotes a Kiwi x Dappcon Writing Challenge offering 1,000 xDAI for a recap of the event or an essay inspired by one of the talks. Day 1 includes sessions such as "Build Whatever With Celestia Underneath" by Ismail Khoffi, "How Chain Abstraction Can AI-Proof the World" by Illia Polosukhin, and an "AI Risk Panel." Day 2 features talks on banking and DeFi, including "Introducing Banking 3.0" by Marco Nunes and "Visa and the Blockchain" by Maike Hornung and Breno Maximiano. Day 3 includes a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin and Friederike Ernst and a talk titled "Why ZK Is The Endgame" by Alex Gluchowski.
- f/oogle (ampcast.xyz)
- The way to increase your $degen allowance. (warpcast.com)
- Ethereum reaches 20 million blocks (etherscan.io)
- Google declares the end of the World Wide Web (unherd.com)
Google unveiled a redesigned home page at its I/O developer conference that demotes traditional web search results to a submenu, replacing link lists with pull-out boxes, apps and AI-generated content. The article says the web has become a legacy format, comparable to the DVD. It traces the web's early promise of cheap publishing to the mid-1990s and notes that Chris Anderson declared the web "dead" in 2010. It also cites Meredith Whittaker, Google's former research director, who calls AI summaries "derivative content paste" that can introduce errors and "hallucinations".
- Iyana/llama-fs: A self-organizing file system with llama 3 (github.com)
LlamaFS is a self-organizing file manager that automatically renames and organizes files based on their content and conventions such as time, supporting images through Moondream and audio through Whisper. It runs in a batch mode that suggests a file structure for a submitted directory, and a watch mode, an interactive daemon that learns from the user's recent edits to create and move files proactively. The project uses Llama 3 through Groq for cloud inference, with an incognito toggle that routes requests through Ollama running the same model for local processing. The developers report that most file operations take under 500ms in watch mode, a benchmark by AgentOps.
- Proofivy: internet ledger of truth (proofivy.com)
Proofivy is a service that lets creators prove ownership of their work and earn payments from it, using blockchain-based IP protection and x402 stablecoin monetization. It states that users can commit a fingerprint of their files, plans, or ideas to the blockchain, creating immutable, timestamped proof without uploading any data. The page says content can be monetized through automatic stablecoin payments for each access, whether by an AI agent or a human. A testimonial from a scientist at The Lab for Germinal Center Biology calls the service a means to establish verifiable proof of creation and ownership.
- How web3 is going to unfuck ad tech (youtube.com)