Top crypto stories of week 25, 2024
Mon 17 to Sun 23 June 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 17 to Sun 23 June 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 33 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Telegram Is Crypto’s Adoption Machine (coindesk.com)
David Zimmerman, a research analyst at K33 Research, argues that Telegram is onboarding the masses to crypto and ushering in a new era for public blockchains. He contends that Telegram and a handful of independent developers have made more progress in bringing people to crypto than the $100 billion in venture capital invested in the space since 2014. Zimmerman points to Telegram's messaging app, which has 800 million monthly active users, its integration of The Open Network (TON), and its native USDT on TON, launched in April. He also cites Telegram's Mini Apps as a way for businesses to distribute crypto-friendly products, though he says more consumer-facing apps are still needed.
- No chance on Farcaster? (theblockbeats.info)
- The Social App Thesis (davidphelps.substack.com)
The author describes "The Social App Thesis," a sequel to "The Proto-App Thesis," arguing that apps will win by operating as social apps. The piece contends that financial capital and social capital are inversely correlated, so wealth cannot easily buy status, and that financial incentives tend to fail at retention, which the author says explains why many Web3 social apps have failed. It argues that Web2 monetized social behavior while its users did not, whereas blockchains let users monetize directly from other users. The excerpt ends mid-argument, before the author's discussion of zero-sum financial incentives.
- Understanding the Meta-game. (midascapital.substack.com)
The article explains a framework for "meta-games" in crypto trading, a concept it says was popularized by Cobie in his article "Trading the Metagame." It defines a meta-game through an underlying mechanism, a change in behaviour, a best response function and a reflexive loop, and classifies catalysts as self-reinforcing or self-defeating. Its examples include the 2021 ETH killer trade, where Solana and Avalanche were positioned as cheaper, faster alternatives to Ethereum, and the Facebook rebrand to Meta on October 28, 2021, which it treats as a one-off, self-defeating catalyst. The text is cut off before its discussion of the BTC ETF meta-game.
- How a16z evaluates CEOs (a16z.com)
Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs on three questions: whether the CEO knows what to do, whether the CEO can get the company to do it, and whether results were achieved against appropriate objectives. The post argues that the first two questions, which it calls "white box" criteria, predict future performance better than results alone, which it calls a lagging indicator. Under the first question, the author writes that a company's story and strategy are the same thing, and that a CEO's decision quality is shaped by incomplete information and the courage to act on it. The post also cites Jeff Bezos's 1997 shareholder letter as an example of a clear company story, and Netflix's Reed Hastings's culture reference guide as an example of designing a system that makes employees effective.
- Cryptocurrencies as international rights guarantors (bootstrappingkiwi.substack.com)
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are argued to be emerging global guarantors of private property, especially useful where governments fail to protect property rights. The author says Western investors mostly treat these assets as high-risk, high-reward bets similar to Uber or Airbnb stocks, overlooking this use. The argument cites self-custody, which makes holdings hard for governments to seize, stablecoins that can redeem fiat value at acquisition cost, and networks that have run for decades. The text also links the idea to Satoshi Nakamoto's Genesis block, which references a January 3, 2009 Times headline.
- Torrents and EIP-4444 (ethresear.ch)
The article describes a method for distributing pre-merge Ethereum history via torrent as one possible way to meet EIP-4444, which aims to limit the historical data Ethereum nodes must store. The torrent was built from era files exported with geth v1.14.3 for blocks 0 to 15537393, the merge block height, and the export was verified with era verify, which reported 1896 files verified in 5h21m49s. The resulting torrent is 427GB, uses 64MB chunks, and includes a mix of http, https and udp trackers. The article lists tradeoffs, including that peers cannot be incentivized or guaranteed to serve the data and that nodes would need to seed what they download.
- Seeing Like A Network (strangeloopcanon.com)
Denser information networks shape what spreads through them and, in turn, the culture that emerges. Fast-spreading ideas can take over a dense network, while sparse networks let isolated pockets of ideas survive longer. Researchers Se Jung Park, Yon Soo Lim, and Han Woo Park studied the Occupy Wall Street movement and found that Twitter formed a loosely connected hub-and-spoke network, with central users bridging smaller communities, while YouTube formed a dense mesh where similar videos reinforced shared ideas. Their analysis covered 462 videos, examining views, ratings, comments, and geographic data.
- The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy (every.to)
Dan Shipper argues that the knowledge economy is giving way to an "allocation economy," in which the most valuable skill is managing resources, including AI models, to get work done rather than knowing things yourself. He says people will move from doing the work to choosing which work gets done, judging whether it is good enough, and editing it, much as managers do today. Shipper notes that only about 1 million managers in the U.S., roughly 12% of the workforce, currently practice these skills, and that cheap AI could let everyone become a "model manager." He also cites Tyler Cowen's 2013 book Average Is Over, which predicted a split between workers whose skills complement computers and those left behind, and says the shift will be gradual.
- AL #63: Were Rollups Meant to be on Bitcoin All Along? (research.auditless.com)
The article asks whether Vitalik Buterin would have built Ethereum as a separate chain had Bitcoin rollups been possible in 2013, and suggests the answer may be no. It explains that rollups move execution off the main chain while keeping transaction storage and settlement there, and it describes Bitcoin's roadmap of SegWit (2017), Taproot (2021) and OP_Cat (expected review in 2025). It also notes that StarkWare has proposed adapting Starknet to settle on Bitcoin with OP_Cat, and that Bitcoin rollups are likely to converge on a different equilibrium than Ethereum's because of differing values around execution, staking, privacy and trustlessness.
- ENS Large Grants (warpcast.com)
- Devcon 7 Auction & Raffle (raffle.devcon.org)
- SEC closing its investigation into Ethereum (x.com)
- How does TLSNotary work (x.com)
- Reflections on the State of Crypto: Q2 2024 (substack.com)
The author's Q2 2024 crypto reflection argues that a number of crypto projects and trends are working in serious ways, with stablecoins, Bitcoin spot ETFs, Solana and Ethereum cited as examples. Stablecoin supplies saw about $25B in net inflows year to date, and over $80B sat in Bitcoin spot ETFs as of early June. Solana's monthly active addresses rose 3-4x year over year, reaching a new all-time high in May 2024, while Coinbase's Q1 trading fees exceeded $1B. The piece also points to community-created AI models such as Botto, where $BOTTO holders help train the model, as a sign that crypto rails can reward taste and attention.
- AI and the "Why Now" of Data DAOs (lisnewsletter.com)
Data DAOs, collectives that create, organize and govern data, are presented as a potential way to accelerate AI development by generating new datasets and rewarding contributors who have little economic benefit under the current model. The article says AI development is bottlenecked by data quality and quantity, and that companies which aggregate data capture most of the value, while end users see no economic benefit from licensing deals. It cites Reddit's S-1, which expects its data advantage to remain a key element in training future LLMs. Examples include Hivemapper's dashcam-based map data, a Reddit data DAO that lets users upload their exported data to a treasury, and token incentives for expert RLHF feedback. The article also flags challenges such as gaming, valuing data, verifying authenticity, and the limited revenue per user compared with Meta's $13.12 ARPU in 2023.
- TON Stat (tonstat.com)
- The DeFi Revolution Hiding in Plain Sight (blog.reserve.org)
The article argues that DeFi is undergoing a revolution in global finance that receives less attention than its numbers warrant. It cites total value locked of about $160 billion, 70% of the late 2021 high of $229 billion and over triple the late 2022 low of $51 billion. It also says Ethereum layer 2 TVL reached a record $45 billion after the March Dencun upgrade cut gas fees by 90%, and that stablecoin market cap recovered to $168 billion. The author expects growth from dollar stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, restaking and layer 2 expansion.
- ERC-7683 Cross Chain Intents (erc7683.org)
ERC-7683 is presented as a standard for crosschain Intents on Ethereum, designed to standardize how actions such as token swaps, DeFi deposits, and governance votes are expressed across Ethereum mainnet, Layer 2 networks, and sidechains. The article says the standard aims to standardize order and settlement interfaces, allow dApps to access shared filler networks, and reduce failure rates by fostering competition among fillers. It states that 70 protocols support ERC-7683 and that projects can choose settlement processes that fit their needs.
- Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (calculatingempires.net)