Top crypto stories of week 29, 2024
Mon 15 to Sun 21 July 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 15 to Sun 21 July 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 15 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, paragraph.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that crypto supporters should not choose political allegiances based on whether a politician is "pro-crypto," but on the deeper goals that drew people to crypto, such as freedom, decentralization, privacy and internationalism. He says that current pro-crypto initiatives, including the bills tracked by StandWithCrypto, judge politicians only on cryptocurrency and not on these wider freedoms. He also notes that a politician's crypto-friendly stance today may not predict their views five years from now, and suggests checking their earlier positions on topics like encrypted messaging and copyright.
- Revoke infinite approvals for li.fi! (x.com)
- Devcon tickets discount for Kiwi users (x.com)
- Zora announces retro funding (x.com)
- EVM Actions | ETHGlobal (ethglobal.com)
EVM Actions is a standard for APIs that return signing requests, such as messages or transactions, directly to a user through publicly accessible URLs, with each action following a predefined JSON specification. Actions come in four types: transaction, signature, link, and 1-click login, the last of which can use providers such as Dynamic or Privy. The project includes a standard with documentation built with Vocs, a Chrome extension built with Plasmo that detects actions on pages such as Twitter and Discord, and Next.js starter kits. The extension connects to wallets via WalletConnect through Dynamic, because injected providers such as Metamask were difficult to interact with.
- hot take re "too much investment in infra" (warpcast.com)
- The Worldcoin Cash Grab Part 2: Price Control, Misdirection & Unexpected Victims (x.com)
The author's central claim is that Worldcoin's team controls WLD's price while publicly denying it, and that the token's roughly $30 billion fully diluted valuation depends on a very low circulating float heading into insider unlocks. The article says the float is about 2.7% of supply, with unlocks due in 7 days. It cites Worldcoin's December 16 decision not to renew a market maker contract and remove a call option, after which the price reportedly rose 100% within hours. It also says nearly 25% of circulating WLD is held on Bithumb, largely by Korean retail investors, and the author states an intention to short WLD after unlocks begin.
- A Zero-Knowledge Proof Is Verified on Bitcoin For The First Time in History (bitcoinmagazine.com)
Weikeng Chen, with sponsorship from Starkware, has produced the first implementation of a zero-knowledge verifier using Bitcoin script, which was confirmed on Bitcoin's Signet testnet on July 12, 2024. The project, called the "Bitcoin Wildlife Sanctuary," builds a STARK verifier using the OP_CAT opcode, with the STARK proof based on Starkware's open-source Stwo implementation and split into chained transactions. Chen says the proof of concept is not production-ready and that validity proofs take a lot of block space, which could become expensive.
- Results of the t2 x Kiwi x Lens writing challenge (paragraph.xyz)
The t2 x Kiwi x Lens writing contest on decentralized social has ended, and the Lens team, which sponsored it, agreed to reward all winners after two posts tied at each of the 2nd and 3rd places. The prize pool was topped up from 1,200 USDC to 1,680 USDC, giving one 1st place, two 2nd places, two 3rd places and one 4th place. Gokhan.eth won 1st place with 21 upvotes for "On the Decentralized Social Networks—A Useless Box, or an Emergence?" (600 USDC). The 2nd place winners, 183aaros.eth and ameliehua.eth, receive 300 USDC each, and the 3rd place winners, zinkk.eth and theblockchainsocialist.eth, receive 180 USDC each.
- The importance of online communities and attempts to monetize them (app.t2.world)
The author, writing a personal story after winning a prize for the second time in a Kiwi News writing challenge, argues that online communities like Kiwi News add substantial value by amplifying modest voices and filtering out low-quality content, and that finding a viable way to monetize this value remains an open question. The piece says paywalls and sign-up forms reduce reach, ads yield inconsistent results, and Kiwi News, described as an NFT-gated platform, relies on an initial user cost that may not sustain long-term growth. It considers revenue-sharing and tokenized rewards but warns that tokens invite exploitation and sell pressure, and it suggests founders and investors could fund contests to reward high-quality submissions. The piece also notes that community size affects how well members agree on what quality means, and it ends with cautious optimism.
- Origin story of the Kiwi News logo (youtube.com)
- Are Music NFTs Dead? (bankless.com)
Cooper Turley, creator of the onchain record label Coop Records, argued that the original paradigm of music NFTs had failed, though he framed this as an early vision failing rather than the format failing for good. He said collecting music should be free and accessible, like streaming on Spotify or YouTube, warned against roadmap-itis and expensive mints, and suggested open edition drops had replaced the old model. The article's author, who is a fan of Zora's free-mint model, says Zora's 0.000777 ETH fee lets artists earn more than they would from streaming. Coop Records has also paid collectors token rewards through the Boost platform, which has brought minting costs to about $1 per mint after more than $100,000 in rewards.
- A Degen user loses 90% of funds from L3 to L2 (x.com)
- Three competing blockchain narratives (wamougayar.xyz)
Blockchain coverage is dominated by negative narratives, and the Real narrative of decentralized, peer-to-peer technology needs more mindshare. The writer's rough estimate splits coverage into 40% Bad Actors, 40% Counter, and 20% Real, while an ideal balance would be about 80% Real with 10% each for the others. The Counter narrative is described as driven by the SEC and the US White House's stance on crypto, while Bad Actors include white-collar criminals and Ponzi schemes. Real-narrative entrepreneurs are urged to market their use cases more loudly and become better storytellers.
- Web3 Summit 2024: Leading the Charge in Blockchain Evolution (web3summit.com)
Web3 Summit 2024 is presented as a Berlin gathering for exploring whether digital systems can serve people rather than extract from them. It describes trust in internet governance as collapsing, as platforms centralize control over attention, identity and communication, and says AI is accelerating this. The summit lists developers, designers, founders, researchers, activists and curious outsiders as intended attendees and places it at the center of Berlin Blockchain Week. It also cites Germany's privacy sensitivity and Berlin's hacker and open-source culture as reasons for the location.
- You Should Document More: A Manifesto (paragraph.xyz)
This manifesto urges readers to document their lives, arguing that documentation drives civilization's progress and lets a person's experiences outlast them. It claims that written, photographed and journaled records act as a personal time machine and a legacy for descendants, and it encourages people to record their failures as well as their successes. The text also says that sharing one's own documentation, rather than only absorbing others' content, is a way to contribute to shared knowledge. It is signed by "GRITCULT."
- The changes in vibes - why did they happen? (marginalrevolution.com)
- Week in Ethereum News, July 20, 2024 (weekinethereum.substack.com)
Week in Ethereum News for July 20, 2024 reports on the Pectra upgrade, security incidents, and market data, and announces that the newsletter itself is being discontinued. Core developers kept EOF in Pectra for now, pending extensive testing and fuzzing across clients, though Geth strongly opposed it. The newsletter reports a $230M WazirX exploit via multisig compromise and a $11.6M LiFi exploit, and says Virgil Griffith's sentence was reduced by 7 months. Spot ETH ETFs are set to launch in the US on July 23, and ETH was trading at $3,488 at the time of writing.
- Retro Funding 4: Voting Rationale Thread (gov.optimism.io)
- Lens targets Q4 for mainnet on ZKsync, with end goal of AI monetization (theblock.co)
