Top crypto stories of week 43, 2024
Mon 21 to Sun 27 October 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 21 to Sun 27 October 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 41 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Reinventing Nouns (research.auditless.com)
Auditless, a protocol strategy organization, argues that Nouns should build unforkable "poison pill" media assets that can be proliferated, rather than funding one-off brand campaigns. The article says the Nouns treasury, once as high as 30k ETH, is trending toward zero after a fork let arbitrageurs withdraw pro rata shares and drain about half the treasury. It says brand expansion projects succeeded but did not produce ongoing organic demand, and that arbitrageurs still win most daily auctions and keep mounting forks. The author describes the approach as a strategy that straddles both book value and proliferation.
- Into the Nouniverse: Rise of Web3's Dark Knight (app.t2.world)
Nouns DAO could become the face of crypto and a household name if it gives its community room to express itself, according to the essay's argument. The piece traces the project from its mid-2021 launch through a bull market of extravagant spending and a bear market, when the DAO Raiders walked away with around $27 million from the treasury and a fork let dissenting holders rage-quit. It argues that the fork could serve as a governance blueprint for other DAOs, and proposes education programs and experiments with voting systems such as Quadratic Voting and Futarchy.
- Kiwis in Bangkok (lu.ma)
Kiwi Events ran a past meetup in Bangkok, Thailand, for Kiwis and crypto friends, hosted by Mac Budkowski. The event was billed as a cozy but open gathering for people who value crypto OG values over trading memecoins. The listing says 37 people went and that the event was featured in Devcon. The exact address was shared only after registration, and the page links to Kiwi documentation.
- Kiwi YouTube channel (youtube.com)
- Nouns, Delivery At Dawn, and Collectible Media (sceneswithsimon.com)
Simon argues that Delivery At Dawn, a Nouns-funded animation, shows collectible media can work at larger scale, particularly when sales also fund open source development. The Protocol Guild proposed that Nouns fund a short animation celebrating the EIP 4844 Ethereum upgrade and asked for $400,000. Released as an open edition NFT through Zora with proceeds split 80/20, the project drew over 31,000 collectors who raised about 200 ETH, sending $529,000 to open source developers and $130,000 back to Nouns after the platform fee.
- The inevitable rise of brand marketing on Zora (terminallyonchain.xyz)
Terminally Onchain's author YB argues that brand accounts should start marketing through onchain mints on Zora now, even small companies, because the goal is to build an onchain distribution channel and CRM before the rest of the ecosystem catches up. YB cites large examples such as Doodles' weekly animation mints, which have reached 400k mints, and Coinbase publishing quarterly earnings reports as mints. YB reports that after about 6 weeks of roughly 25 mints, the Zora follow count rose from under 100 to 1,600, and recommends starting with raw company content, then targeting collectors with tools such as Hypersub and Boost.
- Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku (anthropic.com)
Anthropic announced an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new model called Claude 3.5 Haiku, and a public beta of "computer use," which lets developers direct Claude to operate computers by viewing screens, moving a cursor, clicking and typing. The upgraded Sonnet raised its SWE-bench Verified score from 33.4% to 49.0% and its TAU-bench retail score from 62.6% to 69.2% at the same price and speed as its predecessor. Claude 3.5 Haiku scores 40.6% on SWE-bench Verified, and the company describes computer use as experimental, still error-prone, and in early stages.
- "degen & ham chains were mistakes and they set the whole FC ecosystem back" (warpcast.com)
- Nouns: Building For Everybody (encrypto.substack.com)
Nouns, an NFT project, is presented as a community-owned brand that uses CC0 licensing to put its art and IP in the public domain, a model the author says helps it build cultural value. The article says Nouns' artwork has spread into streetwear, skateboards, comic books and a Super Bowl ad, and that the community spans over 15 groups across Asia, Latin America and Africa. The author argues that most open-source brands barely capture the value they create, and that capital needs to flow back to Nouns, citing a chart from Nounswap showing a gradual decline of the NounsDAO Treasury.
- Denmark plans to propose taxing unrealized crypto gains in upcoming bill (theblock.co)
- Infiltrating Cosmos (rekt.news)
The article alleges that North Korean-linked developers wrote most of the Liquid Staking Module (LSM) for the Cosmos Hub, which it calls a potential Trojan horse. It says Jun Kai and Sarawut Sanit wrote the majority of the code, made their last merge on December 4, 2022, and left behind unresolved vulnerabilities, including slashing evasion flagged in a July 2022 Oak Security audit. It states that Zaki Manian, leader of Iqlusion, said on October 2, 2024 that he learned of the DPRK links in March 2023, and that the LSM was integrated via Proposal #790 in April 2023 without mention of these issues. Jae Kwon is cited as raising the alarm, warning that the vulnerabilities could put staked ATOM at risk.
- OSI readies controversial Open AI definition (lwn.net)
The Open Source Initiative's board was scheduled to vote on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on October 27, with version 1.0 slated for publication on October 28, and critics say the draft sets the bar too low. The current draft requires model parameters and detailed information about training data, but not the training data itself. Tom Callaway argues that making data optional devalues the meaning of "open source" in all contexts, while OSI executive director Stefano Maffulli says the definition reflects input from a wide range of stakeholders. Stephen O'Grady argues that the open source term should not be extended to AI at all.
- Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week (simonwillison.net)
Simon Willison describes using Claude Artifacts, which generate interactive single-page apps in the Claude interface, to build about 14 small tools in one week, and he calls the feature one of his favourite LLM-based tools. The projects include a URL-to-Markdown converter using the Jina Reader API, a QR code decoder built in a few seconds, and an OpenAI Audio recorder that took 21 minutes across two iterations. He notes that most tools took under five minutes, and that artifacts cannot make API calls, submit forms or link to other pages, which frustrates him. He plans to possibly build his own alternative.
- Building Decentralised Social Media with IPFS (x.com)
- Introducing ‘httpz’: The internet you can trust (x.com)
- Interface's experiment with Zora drops (x.com)
Interface, a social app, launched its Copy Trade token through Zora drops, which reached about 6,000 mints. After primary minting ended and secondary trading opened, the token was trading at around 20 times its initial mint price, which the author attributes to many users copy trading via Interface. The author describes the market as highly illiquid with a very small cap and very volatile, and says they tried to buy from the secondary market to redeploy into LP but the price kept rising.
- Stop tipping artists in valueless memecoins (ericprhodes.blog)
- Crypto’s Incentive Misalignment Problem (sergiogallardo9.substack.com)
Web3 weakly links insiders' returns to long-term project success, so participants can profit from short-term value extraction that misallocates capital and harms the industry. Transparency and community self-regulation are presented as the most practical fix in the short to medium term, since global regulation is hard to enforce. Proposed vesting changes include avoiding low float at TGE, moving away from fixed supply, and using goal-based insider unlocks, such as an illustrative design tying 80% of a team's allocation to valuation, delivery, performance and metric targets.
- Recording: Kiwi Community Call @ 23/10/24 (x.com)
- Introducing Scroll’s First Airdrop: A Celebration of the Global Community (scroll.io)