Top crypto stories of week 28, 2024
Mon 8 to Sun 14 July 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 8 to Sun 14 July 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 37 comments in total. Most-shared sources: app.t2.world, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- On the Decentralized Social Networks—A Useless Box, or an Emergence? (app.t2.world)
The author argues that decentralized social networks have been dominated by founder-centric consumer crypto built on dark-pattern marketing, and that a future social aggregation layer, where users port their social graphs across platforms, will emerge. The essay cites the author's own experience of re-creating the same X and Farcaster connections on Mastodon, Matrix, Discord and Telegram, and says Paul is cited for describing crypto as a subculture. It states that web3 social apps are often more time-wasting than curated X lists, and it calls for agentic tools to help users coexist with bots. The text is loosely structured and largely figurative, and it explicitly says it offers no direct solutions.
- Bridging Onchainomics with Decentralised Social (app.t2.world)
The article argues that on-chain ecosystems such as Base and Farcaster can be analyzed as economies, using a modified GDP framework it calls GDEP (Gross Decentralised Ecosystem Production), which treats a single blockchain as a distinct domestic economy. It classifies gas fees, DeFi service fees, on-chain content payments, utility token payments, NFT purchases and gaming expenditures as consumption, and it notes that these activities are largely elastic, unlike essential goods such as food and healthcare. The author concludes that on-chain economies need greater integration with traditional economic structures and a focus on fundamental human needs to be sustainable. The article cites Bown and Kolb (2022) on the U.S.-China trade dispute after 2018 as an example of deglobalisation, and it presents the Cobb-Douglas production function as background for its discussion of on-chain labour and capital.
- What Can Be Created Based on Decentralized Social Networks (app.t2.world)
Decentralized social networks, such as Farcaster, could support a wide range of products, so the question should be what can be built on such a network rather than what social applications decentralization can bring. The article organizes these possibilities around decentralized data, relationships and identity. It describes three product types on open data: information and media services, profile-based products and product marketing, and content incentivization. It also argues that a network that is not yet large has not reached its network effects, and that products which succeed on it will expand the network to benefit all products built on it.
- Katabasis Chronicles Part 1 (app.t2.world)
In this opening installment of a science-fiction story set in Neo-Brussels in 2140, Tiaa sees a glowing sigil on the old Bourse building that their friends cannot see. The sigil sends a message telling Tiaa to deliver it to an unnamed "him," and after Tiaa confirms a transaction, an encrypted scroll appears in their account that they cannot open. Later, at the Raave party, a disco ball opens to reveal an Eleusis cryogenic pod, and the announcer calls it the world's first live cryogenic unfreezing as the scroll draws Tiaa's attention toward the doors.
- Memes are eating the world (docsend.com)
- dDocs - Peer-to-Peer & Private Alternative to Google Docs (docs.fileverse.io)
- Family Values (benji.org)
Family is a self-custody crypto wallet for iOS that its developers have worked on for about two years, and this post documents the principles behind its design. The team says it established three core principles, simplicity, fluidity, and delight, which it describes as respecting the user's time, intelligence, and experience. To achieve simplicity, Family uses a dynamic tray system, where compact, single-purpose trays appear over the current screen rather than full-screen flows, preserving context. For fluidity, the app uses purposeful motion, such as directional tab transitions and text that morphs when a button label changes from Continue to Confirm.
- Curating and displaying your onchain identity (app.t2.world)
The author argues that the most promising non-speculative web3 social apps are those that let users create, curate and share digital identities using onchain assets such as NFTs and attestations, much as Myspace and Instagram did with photos. Identity and belonging have long driven crypto participation, and the 2021 digital art and PFP cycle was fueled by demand to define identity and status, artists like xCopy and Beeple, and people displaying membership in onchain worlds like Punks and apes. Current tools fall short: Twitter is built for microblogging, and link-in-bio tools like Linktree make browsing scattered profiles tedious. The author suggests future products could let users customize what they show on each app, possibly via Open Graph technologies like Frames and Solana Blinks, and points to Seam's earlier Myspace-style profile builder as an example.
- Shutterized Gnosis Chain is live (gnosischain.com)
Gnosis Chain has gone live as a euro-native, regulation-ready stack for building consumer finance products, according to a promotional page from the team behind Safe and CoW Protocol. The page says Gnosis Chain offers fees in fractions of a cent and five-second blocks, with regulated euro e-money from Monerium and spending on Visa through Gnosis Pay. It states that from Q1 2027, the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) will let Gnosis Chain contracts execute synchronously against Ethereum mainnet DeFi and RWA markets in the same transaction, and that Gnosis Chain upgrades to EEZ in 2027 with no migration needed.
- Mac presents Kiwi News on DevNTell live stream (DeveloperDAO) (x.com)
- Crypto Market Map (cryptomarketmap.org)
A Crypto Market Map groups crypto projects into categories, with a project count and category count for each top-level group. Apps is the largest, with 710 projects across 50 categories, followed by Protocols with 669 projects in 38 categories and Core Infrastructure with 240 projects in 9 categories. Developer Tools & Services has 322 projects in 24 categories, Scaling has 162 projects in 11 categories, and Interoperability has 70 projects in 4 categories. Named examples include exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, and wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom.
- A map of Ethereum (github.com)
This article is a curated reading map of Ethereum research, organized by topic, that aims to place talks, papers, Ethereum Research posts, blogs and EIPs around current protocol work and future directions. It groups the material into sections including MEV, proposer-builder separation (PBS), protocol-enforced proposer commitments (PEPC), execution tickets, inclusion lists, relays, single-slot finality, staking and issuance, timing games, and order flow auctions. Examples include Vitalik Buterin's "A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap" from October 2020, Barnabé Monnot's "Unbundling PBS" from October 2022, and EIP-7732 on enshrined proposer-builder separation from June 2024. The list is a collection of links and titles, with no summary of the views in the individual works.
- Light vampire attack on G**gle D*cs (x.com)
- On Hubs (dwr.email)
The article argues that Hubs on the Farcaster network will run without direct economic incentives, and that no rewards will be paid to operators. It cites more than 10,000 Hubs on the network but says that number is artificially high because many operators may be hoping for a future reward. It states that rewards are impractical because there is no reliable way to prove a Hub was honest and performant over time, and that Bitcoin and Ethereum do not pay node operators, with Coinbase running BTC and ETH nodes for years before staking. The original goal of about 100 independent, good Hubs is said to be achievable through companies with an economic interest in network access and altruistic individuals.
- A path to a breakthrough web3 social app (app.t2.world)
The article argues that web3 social apps need fresh design rather than copies of Twitter, Reddit or Instagram, and it offers a "Social App Canvas" of eight levers for building one: social graph, features, proof of work, activity, intimacy, niche, vibes and culture, and exchange. It says most web3 social apps either overfinancialize social interactions or clone web2 apps, and that the social graph (who is present and who is absent) and the proof of work (the kind of content users must produce) shape what an app becomes. As an example, it describes Kiwi, the author's network, where the proof of work is finding and sharing a valuable crypto-related link, which it says draws users from Twitter, Farcaster and Lens.
- Thoughts from EthCC[7] (x.com)
Chain teams often misjudge why block explorers exist, and a custom explorer whose UI, UX and features differ from the industry standard may keep developers from building on the chain. The text claims that teams who understand their scope and focus are most likely to succeed. It also says infrastructure providers and analytics tools get little media and conference coverage because they pay less than high-growth chains, and that sparse participation at too many conferences leaves talks and panels with low attendance. It adds that Etherscan is getting paid six figures for an explorer, though it claims 99% of people don't know chains pay for explorers.
- Mass Perception: web3 social in the era of Hyperobject-ivity. (app.t2.world)
The author argues that blockchains are hyperobjects, massively distributed in time and space, and that they can only be perceived through their surfaces, such as interfaces and social platforms. Drawing on Timothy Morton's concept, the author describes blockchains as viscous, nonlocal, phased, and interobjective. The author presents web3 social as the most native and human surface yet, combining financial, cultural and social activity in one feed, and cites Galverse's 2022 launch across Discord, Twitter and a website as an example of fragmented channels.
- The fundamental values of the crypto community (jaack.montaigne.io)
The author argues that blockchains fall into three generations, each with a distinct value system, and that all three advance onchain activity. First-generation coins such as Bitcoin, Zcash, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Namecoin carry a "monetary freedom" ethos of a permissionless global payment system. Ethereum, launched in 2015 with a "World Computer" narrative, added smart contracts and DAOs and an ideal of broad social freedom. Third-generation platforms such as Avalanche, Cosmos, Solana and NEAR were built for high throughput and are more pragmatic and enterprise-focused.
- Mark Zuckerberg email to Peter Thiel about his vision for 2030 (x.com)
- More slop for the void (garbageday.email)
Slop, the AI-era term for content that feels worthless, forced on viewers, and optimized to feel that way, is driven by a content void that platforms like Facebook and YouTube created. Netflix's slop era began in 2018, when it canceled Sense8 in June and released Bird Box in December, and Disney's started with the November 2019 launch of Disney+. Citing Patrick Willems, the argument holds that Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds let their brands overwhelm their movies, as in Netflix's 2021 film Red Notice. A fix would require audiences to demand less and more deliberate content, though that seems hard to achieve right now.
