Top crypto stories of week 26, 2024
Mon 24 to Sun 30 June 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 24 to Sun 30 June 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 30 comments in total. Most-shared sources: app.t2.world.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Kiwi x t2 x Lens Writing Challenge (app.t2.world)
Kiwi, t2 and Lens are running a writing contest in which crypto writers can win 1,200 USDC by submitting essays on the "future of decentralized social" to the t2 and Kiwi apps. The contest runs from June 25 to July 9, and entrants must add a line linking to the contest announcement and submit their t2 post to Kiwi, which requires a Kiwipass. Four prizes are offered: 600 USDC for first place, 300 USDC for second, 180 USDC for third and 120 USDC for fourth. Winners are determined by upvotes on Kiwi, with final scores calculated on July 15 and winners revealed over the following five days. The organizers reserve the right to change the winner-selection method if they detect attempts to game the vote.
- Enthusiasm is All You Need (app.t2.world)
The author argues that the web3 space should build fandom around shared stories rather than financialized games, and that blockchains could help preserve fan culture. Drawing on their experience managing fan communities such as the Carol Corps for Captain Marvel and several TV show fandoms from 2011 to 2016, they describe fan groups that formed through shared narratives, creative projects and in-person events without tokens. They contrast this with PFP collections and memecoins, which they say relied on speculation, and with quests and seasons, which they call extractive. They also point to the shutdown of the MTV News website without an archive as a reason to preserve culture.
- #307: Solana introduces Actions and Blinks (tpan.substack.com)
The Solana Foundation introduced Actions and Blinks, a feature that lets users transact onchain from links, QR codes, push notifications and messaging apps. Actions were formerly known as Solana Pay transactions, and Blinks (blockchain links) turn Actions into shareable, metadata-rich links. Phantom and Jupiter shared live examples letting users buy Bonk and the Jupiter token with SOL, and the integration was co-developed by Dialect Labs. At launch, extension partners Phantom, Backpack and Dialect will only unfurl registered action URLs on X, and users must opt in to wallet support.
- Polymarket dashboard (dune.com)
- Introducing Solana Actions 🎬 and blockchain links (blinks 👀) (x.com)
- My 7 Best Ideas for Web3 Games (research.auditless.com)
The author shares seven ideas for web3 games they would like to see built, arguing that web3 gaming should not try to replicate mainstream triple-A titles. The ideas draw on Warhammer 40k's collectible hobby model, Dwarf Fortress's procedural generation, geospatial games like Ingress and Pokémon Go powered by DePIN, and Stardew Valley's farming genre as a shared autonomous world. Other proposals include in-game agents interacting with the mempool, block reorgs used as a game mechanic, and a custom VM that players can modify, with the author noting that the industry's contrasting debates are worth keeping rather than resolving.
- Hardly any changes matter (open.substack.com)
- The future of decentralized social (app.t2.world)
MullCrypto argues that decentralized social media remains promising despite the decline of many early projects, pointing to newer products built on Lens and Arweave. The author describes being impressed in 2023 by Lens, where posts appeared across apps like Orb and Phaver, and by earning from posts collected for $WMatic during the bear market. Since then, the author says Teaparty.life, Beatsapp and Amnisiac have shut down and Memester.xyz's meme contests have ended, while Firefly.social, Dumpling.lol, T2.world and Kiwi have emerged.
- Farcaster: Hard to build, easy to break, and the path to resilience (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
Farcaster has faced heavy criticism over the past few months, with Defiant saying it has only 10% of its reported DAUs, Peter Szilagyi saying its users are primarily bots, and Liron saying its valuation is overblown. The author argues the network's problems stem from permissionless growth, memecoin-driven spam, and inflated DAU numbers, and that the team's response has been to create channels that separate the user base so bad actors cannot degrade the experience for everyone. The article says Farcaster went permissionless in October 2023, that a $150M raise drew further scrutiny, and that the team has since expanded its channel system.
- NFT: HAVOC. A token tradeable only when ETH collapses. (havoc.miragenesi.art)
- Epochs and slots all the way down (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that Ethereum's slot-and-epoch architecture is hard to avoid, because reaching approximate agreement takes less time than reaching economic finality. He describes Ethereum L1 transactions as confirming within 5-20 seconds today, while Gasper finality takes 12.8 minutes after two epochs. He proposes exploring based preconfirmations, promoted by Justin Drake, in which proposers sell immediate guarantees of inclusion, and notes that a 1-second slot time would shrink the case for separate L2 committee preconfirmations.
- Accelerating Consumer Crypto with Application-specific Protocols (hackmd.io)
The article argues that EigenLayer lets developers build specialized decentralized networks and verifiable services more easily, which it says makes building and experimenting in consumer crypto faster and cheaper. It compares this to cloud providers, which let apps use hosted services instead of building every component themselves. The article cites Farcaster, which recently raised $150M, and says Dan Romero's "Product-led protocol development" argues that protocols should start with a high-quality app that attracts daily active users, rather than building infrastructure and hoping a developer builds a killer app on it.
- A letter from the core team | The Moxie Protocol (build.moxie.xyz)
- 2077 Collective (eip2077.info)
- Why We Have a Housing Crisis (kyla.substack.com)
Housing inflation has not slowed even as inflation elsewhere in the economy has, according to the latest Fed meeting and CPI report. The Fed held rates steady and said it needs more data, while the CPI report showed inflation slowing in most parts of the economy but not in housing. Part of the gap is a disconnect between metrics and reality: real-time shelter inflation is slowing, but official measures lag because they track rents paid by tenants and owner's equivalent rent (OER).
- Crosspost from The Protocolist (forum.summerofprotocols.com)
- The First Fork in the Road | t2.world (app.t2.world)
Decentralized social should pursue a utopian path that rewards expressive, productive participation over a dystopian model of feed algorithms that maximize time spent hooked for private profit. It points to the network-layer, gossip-layer and hypergraph developers as sources of useful feedback, and suggests some clients keep stratified gating while others lean into ad-driven feeds. By this account, decentralized social will make sense once futarchies are fully fluid, privacy is a first-class feature, and meaningful work is logged with maximal capital efficiency.
- The Programmable Social Feed (paragraph.xyz)
Farcaster is a programmable social protocol rather than an X clone, because third-party developers can build applications on it without platform permission, something Facebook and Twitter would not allow. Examples include the memecoins $POINTS and $DEGEN, which used Farcaster activity for distribution, and $DEGEN's tipping feature. Bountycaster runs a bounty board in a /bounties channel using an AI-parsing bot, Paybot lets users send money from the feed and was later integrated by the Farcaster team, and Farcastles is a bot-driven RPG played through casts.
- Assange freed after pleading guilty (reuters.com)
- The Non Linear Path (blog.teji.io)