Top crypto stories of week 36, 2024
Mon 2 to Sun 8 September 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 2 to Sun 8 September 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 19 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, app.t2.world.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Straight Outta Ethereum: the Pluralistic Future of L2s (app.t2.world)
The author argues that Ethereum's L2 competition should give way to a "Based and Boosted" architecture, where L1 validators handle data posting and dApps deploy on L1 for access across all Booster Rollups. The post credits the Taiko team with the Based Rollup concept, noting that Taiko launched as the first Based Rollup three months ago, with Aztec, Rise, Spire, and Puffer following suit. It describes Gwyneth, under development at Taiko Labs, as the first Booster Rollup, which would run L1 contracts unmodified and let transactions be bundled across L2s. The author says this would let users choose chains by values such as speed, yield, or public goods funding.
- vitalik not investing in L2s in foreseeable future (x.com)
Vitalik Buterin is not investing in L2 projects in the foreseeable future, saying that a clear public stance currently seems worth more than the financial gains of such investments. He notes that money given to a company could instead be exchanged for commitments to be positive-sum toward Ethereum or humanity, and that such a commitment can easily be worth more than 0.14% of a company. He says a clear stance sets an example and increases confidence that he is not part of a plot to twist the Ethereum protocol toward benefiting L2 and infrastructure tokens he holds.
- “Pluralistic Future of L2s” writing contest (app.t2.world)
The Kiwi, t2 and Lens teams are running a second writing contest, "Pluralistic Future of L2s," offering 1,200 USDC in prizes to four winners chosen by upvotes on Kiwi. The contest is inspired by Vitalik's essay "Layer 2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum" and asks writers to explore prompts such as whether L2s are part of Ethereum and what governance experiments they could perform. Entries must be submitted to Kiwi, which requires a Kiwipass, and the deadline was extended to 22 September; prizes are 600, 300, 180 and 120 USDC for first through fourth place.
- Web3 Social Myth (followin.io)
- The Crypto Trap (x.com)
The author argues that crypto, as currently structured, is a trap built on the game-theoretic logic Adam Curtis described in his documentary "The Trap", in which self-interested players chasing Nash equilibria produce adversarial outcomes. Bitcoin is presented as the purest realization of this logic, and the text says the resulting "F**k you buddy" dynamic has concentrated capital formation in centralised parties, leaving many token economies broken and causing retail harm. The text also says the trap extends across society, with examples including rage-bait social media and supplement-selling nutritionists, and that the only way out is collective alliance-building.
- What is Consumer Crypto? (abs.xyz)
- Ppl build more Infra than Apps because it's easier (youtube.com)
- Vitalik deposits 1,900 ETH into Aave (etherscan.io)
- Rewards program for Gnosis Pay is live (x.com)
- YubiKeys 5 are permanently vulnerable to cloning attacks (arstechnica.com)
Researchers at NinjaLab reported that the YubiKey 5, the most widely used FIDO hardware token, contains a side-channel flaw that lets an attacker with temporary physical access clone the device. The flaw lies in Infineon's implementation of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm used for modular inversion in ECDSA, which is not constant time, so electromagnetic measurements can reveal the secret key. Yubico issued an advisory, and because firmware updates cannot fix affected keys, all YubiKeys running firmware before version 5.7 remain permanently vulnerable. NinjaLab estimated the attack costs about $11,000 in equipment and would likely be limited to highly targeted scenarios by well-resourced attackers.
- ZK Email (blog.aayushg.com)
ZK Email is a project that uses zero-knowledge proofs to let people prove facts from their email, such as receiving a message from a given domain or owning a Twitter account, without revealing the rest of the email. The article explains that DKIM signatures already attached to most emails since 2017 can serve as a verifiable source of data, and that zero-knowledge circuits address three problems of posting this on-chain: calldata cost, controllable privacy, and verification cost. Its technical contributions include an arbitrary-length SHA256 circuit, a method that hashes most of the message outside the proof, and regex matching via deterministic finite automata compiled into Circom. The team says its MIT-licensed repositories have been used by applications such as zkp2p, emailwallet, and nozee.
- DEGEN meets REGEN (degenmeetsregen.com)
- alphaXiv - shadow discussion board for arxiv (alphaxiv.org)
This page lists several recent arXiv papers surfaced through alphaXiv, a discussion board for arXiv preprints, though the text itself does not state how the papers were selected. Three are described: a semantically steerable image tokenization method that can prioritize semantic fidelity alongside pixel accuracy when compressing images, a large flow language model that drafts several tokens in parallel and verifies them autoregressively to generate text faster without sacrificing comparable quality, and an evolving agent interfaces approach in which computer-use agents improve their own tools from unlabeled task experience. The listing notes that no more papers match the current filters.
- Life After Lifestyle (subpixel.space)
Lifestyle, the model in which technology tied brands, culture and supply chains together in the 2010s, is giving way to new models of commerce and culture, along with new critical questions and greater moral challenges. Direct-to-consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Bonobos and Birchbox launched during the post-2008 recovery, and many were founded on venture-funded "X for Y" messaging like "Uber for razors." Social media meanwhile broke mass culture into countless subcultures, so class now shows up mainly as price points within consumer subcultural categories.
- A Few Thoughts About L2s (app.t2.world)
The author argues that L2s fragment liquidity but drive progress rather than harm the ecosystem, and that the space should pursue collaboration over toxic rivalry. The post notes that a recent debate on L2s versus network extensions turned toxic and led to a backlash against Solana and the term "network extensions." It proposes a shared messaging protocol among L2s, collaborative developer education such as joint hackathons, and joint research efforts, comparing blockchains to competing banks that still talk to each other. It also cites Vitalik's essay on the value of cultural differences within the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Retrofitting the Web (summerofprotocols.com)
Dorian Taylor argues that the World Wide Web is a mediocre form of hypermedia because its links are brittle, one-way and untyped. He says this produces big, clumsy documents with few links, no backlinks, ambiguous data semantics and poor content reuse, which means readers must read more per unit of information, authors maintain separate documents for different audiences, developers keep reinventing basic functionality, and information goes stale and misleads people. Taylor writes that dense hypermedia would require a protocol for keeping the addresses (URLs) of very small objects stable and continuous.
- Celo now ranked 2nd for stablecoin transacting DAUs (x.com)
- Will AI Survive in the Crypto World? (chaow.xyz)
- Cryptocurrencies have become the main source of income for Telegram. (bitcoinblog.de)
Telegram's integrated crypto wallet has become its largest revenue source, according to a Financial Times review of a previously private balance sheet for 2022 and 2023. The document shows a total loss of $108 million on revenues of $342.5 million, with crypto making up more than 40% of revenues. The integrated wallet brought in $130 million, while collectibles (NFTs) earned $17.8 million and the revaluation of digital assets $500,000. The article notes that digital assets now exceed the company's cash reserves, and that Telegram's planned IPO is likely on hold after founder Pavel Durov's arrest in France.
- DappCon 2025 (x.com)