Top crypto stories of week 33, 2024
Mon 12 to Sun 18 August 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 12 to Sun 18 August 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 43 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- This DAO is dark and can’t be seen onchain (x.com)
DarkFi announces what it calls the world's first fully anonymous on-chain DAO with token-weighted voting, in which the DAO, its treasury, members, proposals and votes cannot be seen on-chain. The post argues that DAOs should be anonymous so that groups can resist authoritarian regimes, citing secret police and the risk of arrest and torture. It also criticizes the tech industry's reliance on surveillance and advertising, quoting Martin Thomson of Mozilla, and says anonymous tooling for tasks and documents is the next step.
- What is the point of web3 again? (untitled.exchange)
- Scope — block explorer for builders (scope.sh)
Scope UI is a repository for Scope, a block explorer for builders, released under the MIT license. Setup requires a .env.local file with the required configuration, after which dependencies are installed with bun i and the server is started with bun run dev. The page also lists related projects Scope API, Scope Registry, and Indexer, and the codebase is built with Nuxt.
- Silly little test (x.com)
- anytype — the everything app (anytype.io)
- Pump.fun founders DMed 3000+ ppl on Twitter (x.com)
Alon, founder of pump.fun, joins episode 13 of Threadcast to discuss the memecoin market and the platform's growth. Topics include how pump.fun took off, why no one built it first, the memecoin supercycle, and whether the platform ruined crypto. Other segments cover celebrities on pump.fun, gambling as a crypto use case, and whether Solana will dominate. The episode outline does not mention the founders messaging more than 3,000 people on Twitter, which the title references.
- Polymarket investment memo (August 2020) (x.com)
- NFT Storage: Comparing IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave (bankless.com)
The article explains how IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave differ as alternatives to fully onchain NFT storage, with each relying on different trust assumptions. IPFS is a peer-to-peer file system where data stays available only if nodes choose to pin it, often through services like ClubNFT or Pinata. Filecoin adds FIL-based incentives and storage deals that must be renewed over time, and the Museum of Crypto Art is cited as a user. Arweave offers a one-time upfront fee meant to fund permanent storage through an endowment, with projects such as Manifold and Irys building on it.
- Fediverse vs. Farcaster discussion (warpcast.com)
- Wedge is the Founder's Edge (zeeprime.capital)
The article argues that founders should start with a narrow "wedge," a small market segment where they have a specific, unique solution, rather than aiming for a sliver of a huge market. It cites Uniswap, whose early wedge was permissionless liquidity bootstrapping for long-tail tokens, and says it later captured adjacent markets such as ETH trading. It also cites Blur's split between collectors and traders, and Amazon, which started by selling books before expanding into marketplace, logistics and AWS.
- Trump interview highlights (x.com)
- ServerFi: A New Symbiotic Relationship Between Games and Players (osf.io)
- Kiwi News Features Ideas (x.com)
- Coinbase Teases 'cbBTC': a Wrapped Bitcoin Alternative on Base (unchainedcrypto.com)
Coinbase has teased a new wrapped bitcoin token called cbBTC for its layer 2 network Base, which would compete with Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). Base creator Jesse Pollak said on X, "we're going to build a massive bitcoin economy on base," which the article describes as all but confirming the plan. The article says cbBTC could offer lower fees to mint and redeem tokens and draw users who trust the Coinbase brand. The timing follows controversy over WBTC custodian BitGo's plans to move custody to Hong Kong and Singapore, which has prompted MakerDAO and Aave to discuss next steps.
- Net: a free decentralized onchain messaging protocol (github.com)
- The Big DAO Fail Expose (daoleadership.com)
- ZuGarden (zu.garden)
ZuGarden was a three-week immersive pop-up village in Thailand, run by the creators of ZuBerlin, held during and after Devcon 7 from November 10 to 30, 2024. The program began with a week in Bangkok near Devcon, offering five-star accommodation and a shared space for ZuGardeners, then moved to a secluded beach resort on a Thai island for talks, workshops and collaborative sessions. Tracks covered mechanism design, applied cryptography and scalability, data science and AI, governance and public goods funding, and immersive experiences, and the article says the experience was completely sold out.
- The Unraveling of a Crypto Dream (nytimes.com)
- Phantom wallet is closed source (x.com)
- The Bullish Case for Ethereum (ignasdefi.com)
Ethereum (ETH) has underperformed, with a 6.8x shortfall against SOL since the early 2023 market lows and a 47% decline against BTC over the past two years. Several reasons are offered: Bitcoin's "digital gold" narrative is simpler for retail users and institutions to grasp than Ethereum's story, and the "digital oil" analogy is described as neither attractive nor accurate. Solana is also described as catching up to or surpassing Ethereum in active users, transaction volume and mindshare, while Ethereum's modular approach with L2s is said to fracture liquidity and complicate user experience.