Top crypto stories of week 44, 2024
Mon 28 October to Sun 3 November 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 28 October to Sun 3 November 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 46 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, app.t2.world.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Turning Nouns into an infinite culture machine (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The article argues that Nouns, the CC0 NFT project, creates a lot of brand value but captures little of it, and proposes ways to bring more capital back to the project. It contrasts traditional IP licensing, where The Pokemon Company earns over 75% of its revenue from licensing, with Nouns, which lets anyone use its brand for free and captures only the most expensive final step of sales. Suggested routes include voluntary royalties from funded projects, profit-sharing deals with brands, and making Nouns-funded projects more visible. The article cites a treasury of 3,873 ETH (about $10,000,000) as of writing.
- The Left does NOT hate crypto (m.youtube.com)
- Maurizio Cattelan famous duct-taped banana could bring more than $1m at auction (theartnewspaper.com)
Sotheby's is offering one of three editions of Maurizio Cattelan's duct-taped banana artwork, Comedian (2019), at its The Now and Contemporary auction on 20 November, with an estimate of $1m to $1.5m. The edition for sale includes a banana taped to the wall, a certificate of authenticity and display instructions, plus a single banana and one roll of duct tape. The work was priced at $120,000 at the Perrotin gallery stand at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. David Galperin, Sotheby's head of contemporary art in the Americas, said in a statement that putting the work at auction would let the public decide its true value.
- CRYPTO IS USELESS* (cryptoisuseless.com)
- Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub? on Bankless (bankless.com)
Aether, a new AI agent on Farcaster with crypto capabilities and an onchain treasury, is presented as a sign that Farcaster could become a hub for AI agent innovation. The article says Aether began tipping $HIGHER and receiving donations after getting an account on Supercast, and its NFTs on Zora have been collected over 466k times and minted 348k times in a collaboration with Zora founder Jacob. Its Base treasury is near $150,000, and it had issued 59 bounties worth over $1,600 on Bountycaster at the time of writing.
- The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media (washingtonpost.com)
- Into the Nouniverse: Beyond the Tip of the Nouns Iceberg ⌐◨-◨ (app.t2.world)
- VCAOs (warpcast.com)
The author of this short post argues that DAOs need not follow the token-based public company model and could instead adopt a worker or consumer cooperative structure with democratic voting and vetoes, which they say would avoid control by a few large token holders. The post links this to the idea that blockchains can only reach strict global consensus, and it suggests that building a strong protocol to attract users could be a better long-term goal than token speculation.
- Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web (freenet.org)
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for apps that no company controls, and its apps cannot be taken down, do not track users, and need no servers. The article recommends River, a group chat app that the article compares to Signal or WhatsApp but without a central intermediary. The browser version of River uses a peer run by Freenet, while installing your own peer on Windows, macOS or Linux takes a few seconds and keeps data on your own hardware. Freenet is built by a small team funded through grants and donations, and donations can also issue a Ghost Key, an anonymous identity that works across Freenet apps.
- Flippyflop (flippyflop.gg)
- Justin Drake: „I dropped the EigenLayer advisorship“ (x.com)
Justin Drake says he dropped his EigenFoundation advisorship in September and apologized to the Ethereum community and EF colleagues for the drama he caused, calling it a bad move in hindsight. He says he will now turn down all advisorships, angel investments, and security councils, a personal policy that goes beyond the recent EF-wide conflict of interest policy to signal commitment to neutrality. Drake also stepped out of the ultra sound team to simplify and refocus, saying Alex, Niclas, and Christian have taken complete responsibility for its operations and decision making.
- On Ossification (blog.lopp.net)
Jameson Lopp argues that Bitcoin should not proactively ossify its protocol and should instead keep adopting careful, consensus-driven base-layer improvements. He contends that ossification is inevitable as networks grow, but that freezing development now would hamper permissionless second-layer development, citing covenants, vaults, and payment pools as features needing base-layer changes. He notes that Lightning Network required three different soft forks to enable its building blocks. The text also presents an ossifier case, including the claim that Bitcoin has grown from $0 to $1.4 trillion in market cap in 15 years.
- Devcon Side Events (x.com)
- Wait. What?! Wasn’t this supposed to be decentralized social media @ourzora ?! (x.com)
Cibelle (cibelle.eth) says they feel misled that Zora, which was promoted as decentralized social media, now turns users' posts into collectible NFTs, which they describe as cheapening NFTs. They say they believed the platform differed from Web 2 platforms, citing its repeated "Decentralized Social Media" messaging and jabs at Zuckerberg. They also thank Foundation and Rodeo Club for material for their artistic research, say they will keep posting, and invite readers to send money to cibelle.eth or PayPal instead of minting.
- Massive Supply Chain attack (x.com)
A supply chain attack on the popular JavaScript library lottie-player injected code that displayed a Web3 wallet connection pop-up on legitimate websites. The author's timeline says a user reported the issue on GitHub about three hours before the post, and that the attack appeared to target major crypto websites that use the library. The post links the compromise to a maintainer account whose tokens were reportedly compromised, allowing malicious code to be published in versions 2.0.5, 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 on npm, pushed on 30 October 2024. According to the post, the affected versions have been removed from npm and most major CDNs, but sites that directly reference them remain vulnerable and should move to 2.0.4 or update to 2.0.8.
- Myanmar residents struggle to overcome severe internet blackouts with Starlink (restofworld.org)
Myanmar residents are struggling with severe internet blackouts after the junta banned VPNs in late May, with many turning to Starlink despite its lack of a license in the country. Wai Phyo Myint, Myanmar lead at Access Now, said the VPN blocks have severely affected small businesses, students, aid groups, and journalists. The Myanmar Internet Project estimates there may be more than 3,000 Starlink dishes in use, and David Eubank of Free Burma Rangers said the system has greatly improved his group's humanitarian work.
- Gnosis September Treasury Report (reports.karpatkey.com)
- The Great God Nouns Is Dead (app.t2.world)
The author argues that Nouns, the NFT project, must "die" in a mythic sense to become great, meaning it needs a defining catalyzing event that gives its community shared lore, much as Pan's death shaped the later cult of Hermes. The essay says symbols and rituals grow from shared experiences rather than committee decisions, and it cites moments such as last year's fork, projects funded by the community, Superbowl commercials, and the millions of impressions on the Nounish YouTube channel as material worth archiving. It also notes that the chronicle of Nouns' real-world impact is hard to find.
- Kiwi News Search Engine (knsearch.x4901.xyz)
- Into the Nounishverse: What it means to be Nounish ⌐◨-◨ (app.t2.world)
Nounish is presented as an attitude and community culture built around the Nouns DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization focused on creating and promoting NFTs called Nouns. The article describes its core philosophies as inclusivity, creativity, generosity toward the common good, humor, and collective decentralized governance, in which every Noun holder has a vote on DAO proposals. It says funds from minting Nouns are used to finance public-benefit initiatives, with members able to vote for projects such as funding inflatable pants and parade floats. The author, who came to the movement through the Spanish-language writers' community t/amigos, writes that they proudly identify as Nounish.