Top crypto stories of week 32, 2024
Mon 5 to Sun 11 August 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 5 to Sun 11 August 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 32 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, warpcast.com, github.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Kiwi News 🥝 Dune Dashboard Handpicked, noise-free content for crypto builders. (dune.com)
- Once Upon is shutting down (warpcast.com)
- What is a Yen Carry Trade? (x.com)
- Planning for an Uncertain Future (research.auditless.com)
The author argues that rapid improvement in large language models makes long-term career and strategy planning hard, and that the most viable response is to look for scarcity in human attention rather than in software itself. The piece says software has been the main bottleneck in producing value, and that LLMs could remove that bottleneck by both boosting engineer efficiency and replacing purpose-built software with AI front-ends. It notes that software is roughly 10% of US GDP but affects nearly every other sector, and that the emergent capabilities of LLMs make 5-10 year scenario prediction unreliable. The author says they have relied on the scarcity approach since a brief "AI retreat" in 2023.
- Péter Szilágyi : I often wonder if I'm in the wrong industry (x.com)
Péter Szilágyi argues that the crypto industry has produced large value transfers but no genuine value creation, and that it should build something useful or close down. He contrasts crypto with SpaceX, saying that its rocket launches, successes and failures alike, advance humanity, while crypto's price swings mainly enrich some and wreck others. He writes that Bitcoin at least tries, and fails, to be a safe haven asset, and that most other projects are selling shovels with no gold rush in sight.
- Farcaster introducing Explore (warpcast.com)
- An unintuitive explanation for why everything is down (x.com)
- This tweet might as well be the web2 manifesto (x.com)
Startups that rely on Product Hunt for marketing will not reach $1M ARR in 12 months. For B2B companies, the proposed playbook is scraping target customers' emails from Apollo, BuiltWith and Google Maps, validating them with ZeroBounce, and cold emailing through Smartlead or Instantly, alongside a weekly podcast, search and social ads, and indefinite remarketing. For B2C companies, it recommends mass organic content across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, influencer affiliate programs, programmatic SEO, and paid social ads.
- Don't Call It A DAO: Language Lessons for Progress & Adoption (bit.ly)
Anyone trying to spread the idea of DAOs beyond existing crypto circles should drop terminology that makes outsiders cringe. Crypto language should shift from technocratic developer terms to less technical or lore-based ones, because current jargon is an obfuscated string of letters to laypeople. Reddit's renaming of wallets as vaults is cited as a favored example, but the excerpt cuts off before explaining it.
- FC is gifting everyone a year of free storage (github.com)
Farcaster's proposal (FIP) would give existing users one extra year of free storage so their casts, reactions and links are not removed when storage expires, with the first units set to expire on Aug 28, 2024. The authors are @danromero, @horsefacts, @sanjayprabhu and @varunsrin. To offset the load on hubs, storage units rented on or after Aug 28, 2024 would be valid for one year instead of two, with message limits 60% lower and the cost reduced from $3 to $2. The proposal says the impact on new users may be slightly negative because of the smaller limits, and it says hub storage should not change much over the long term.
- These 13 Hidden Open-Source Libraries Will Help You Become an AI Wizard (hackernoon.com)
A curated list of open-source tools for building reliable AI agents, RAG pipelines and vector search is presented, including Composio, Julep, E2B, Camel-ai, CopilotKit, Aider, Haystack and Pgvectorscale. Composio is described as a toolset that gives agents integrations such as GitHub, and Julep as a framework for production-ready stateful agents with built-in context storage. E2B offers a secure cloud sandbox for running AI-generated code, and Haystack offers composable RAG pipelines. The list claims that Pgvectorscale, an extension of PgVector, outperformed Pinecone's storage-optimized index (s1) and costs 75% less.
- Did Sam Altman's Basic Income Experiment Succeed or Fail? (scottsantens.com)
The argument is that employment declines in OpenResearch's basic income pilot are concentrated in specific groups and that the results mostly replicate earlier experiments. Sam Altman's three-year pilot gave $1,000 a month to 1,000 people aged 21 to 40 in Texas and Illinois, compared with a control group of 2,000 who received $50 a month. Recipients were on average 2 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked about 1.3 fewer hours per week, but the significant drops were among single parents (3.9 points less likely, 2.8 fewer hours) and participants under 30 (about 4 points less likely, 1.8 fewer hours).
- Mint Once, Display Everywhere (rightclicksave.com)
- Community is all you need (1) (warpcast.com)
This is an opinion piece arguing that onchain communities are more powerful than online communities, which in turn are more powerful than traditional tribes. The author describes joining a future university's bulletin board over a dial-up modem before college and suddenly connecting with hundreds of people, and argues that people with shared interests connect regardless of physical location. The piece says onchain communities add shared voting, payment and value distribution on top of shared access to online information, and says a fellow Ethereum builder met while traveling has more in common than a next-door neighbor.
- Active Accounts (Gnosis Chain) (metrics.gnosischain.com)
- Zodiac Wiki (updated) (zodiac.wiki)
Zodiac is presented as a policy engine for Safe-based treasuries and workflows, offering operational security and efficiency through scoped roles and coordinated multi-step execution. The page says current simple actions often rely on root-level access, which carries risk of catastrophic losses, and that multi-step workflows can fail halfway and leave an account in an unintended state. Zodiac's listed features include role-based permissions such as Treasurer, Operator and Reviewer, batched transaction bundles with enforced ordering, and simulation before execution. The page reports $583M in total value secured, $13B in total transacted value, and 6.8M transactions processed, and says it starts free with no transaction fees.
- Warpcast will remove power badges from UI permanently (warpcast.com)
- „[Unlonely] is using black culture to promote new features“ (x.com)
- web3 bill of rights (github.com)
The text lists twenty rights it presents for participants in web3 networks, including freedom from censorship and tracking, ownership of one's data, and permissionless app creation. It also calls for strong end-to-end encryption, fair compensation for data and network contributions, and a proportional governance role for those who own part of the network. Further items include knowing whether an account or data source is human or machine, the right to fork the network and exit peacefully, and the right to take part in consensus on the same terms as other validators. Notes in the text question whether ledger immutability is desirable.
- „The narrative that L2s benefit Ethereum is largely wrong“ (x.com)
The author's central claim is that the idea that L2s benefit ETH by settling on it has been largely wrong. Layer 2 networks lowered gas fees and therefore ETH burn, but usage has not grown enough to offset the lower burn, and mainnet gas has stayed below 10 gwei for months. The piece also cites worse wallet UX and fractured liquidity across many networks, plus developers distracted by multi-network support and grant programs, with many simply launching Uniswap or Aave forks. It says L2s were meant to bring in mainstream users but pushed some toward Solana instead.