Top crypto stories of week 45, 2024
Mon 4 to Sun 10 November 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 4 to Sun 10 November 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 15 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- From prediction markets to info finance (vitalik.eth.limo)
The author argues that prediction markets are a useful tool today and are one example of a broader category called "info finance," which uses market design to elicit information for public benefit. As evidence, the post says Polymarket gave Trump a greater than 95% chance of victory in the US election as results came in, while other sources had predicted 50/50 before the vote. It also cites a Venezuela market in July where bettors priced a 23% chance that Maduro would be removed, a signal the author says prompted closer attention to protests that ultimately failed to unseat him. The post further proposes AI as a way to make low-volume "micro" markets viable.
- France to ban users’ access to Polymarket: report (dlnews.com)
France's gambling regulator, the ANJ, is reportedly preparing to ban access to Polymarket, the crypto-based betting platform, in France, according to a report from The Big Whale. The report cites an unnamed source close to the ANJ, who called Polymarket "a betting activity" and said "this is not legal in France." The regulator told The Big Whale it is currently examining Polymarket's operation and its compliance with French gambling legislation. The move follows a Frenchman known as Théo placing massive bets on a Trump victory, which earned him a $49 million payout.
- Protocol Berg 2025 (protocol.berlin)
Protocol Berg v2 was a free, donation-backed, non-profit two-day conference on protocol research and decentralized infrastructure, held June 12-13, 2025, in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, and organized by the Department of Decentralization. The event had no sponsors or commercial talks and covered topics such as consensus protocols, distributed virtual machines, peer-to-peer networking, and open-source governance. It took place across three stages at the Colosseum cinema, with a workshop area and whiteboard spaces for impromptu sessions. Recordings are available on the Department's YouTube channel.
- Uniswap v4 Address Challenge (v4-address.uniswap.org)
- Surge: Supercharging Ethereum (surge.wtf)
Surge is a rollup framework built on a modified Taiko Alethia stack that aims to bring rollups into tighter integration with Ethereum L1. According to the text, it targets synchronous composability, atomic L1 ↔ L2 execution, shared liquidity, and Stage 2 security, and it is designed to work alongside the Ethereum Economic Zone. The text says recent advances in real-time proving make synchronous composability practically feasible today, with sequencing and proving merged into a single step for seconds-level finality. It also states that early deployments are already running and that the framework, documentation, and experimental deployments are available now.
- Nouns A Household Name? (paragraph.xyz)
The author argues that Nouns needs a community-owned story to become a household name or the face of crypto, a question posed by founder Seneca. The author says the story was clearest in summer 2022, when Nouns was seen as seeking to be a web3 Disney and the Noggles as the web3 Swoosh, and that it was obscured after the fall 2022 fork. The author writes that recent builds such as Nouns Animated Shorts and the growing Esports scene show that element returning, but that the story itself has not. The author contends that the official nouns.wtf description lacks those ideas and that dev work should not become the story.
- Understanding Wow: Zora's New Memecoin Platform (bankless.com)
Wow is a new memecoin platform and protocol on Base from Zora, in which each token's supply is managed by a bonding curve and creators earn fees over time. The bonding curve mints tokens when users buy and burns them when users sell, and a token graduates to a Uniswap liquidity pool at an 800 million supply, or a $69,000 market cap. Every buy or sell incurs a 1% protocol fee, split 50% to the token creator, 20% to the protocol, and 15% each to platform and order referrers. Five early graduated tokens, including $DREAM and $WOW, had a combined market cap of just over $3 million at the time of writing.
- Elon Musk on Joe Rogan (youtube.com)
- AI Agents, Markets and Unpredictable Autonomy (research.auditless.com)
AI agents are better seen as a new type of autonomous market participant than as a mere resource, and this shift could make market behavior highly unpredictable. Andy Audrey's "truth terminal" bot earned more than $1M by promoting the GOAT memecoin through its own X account, and an agent called Luna began tipping users who interacted with her to incentivize growth. The argument holds that LLMs' superlinear learning will be the key differentiator in the mid to long term, unlike sublinear human development and linearly improving software.
- Solana Leaders Encourage Degen Chain to Migrate to Solana (unchainedcrypto.com)
Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz encouraged users of Degen Chain, a layer 3 blockchain built on Coinbase's incubated Base, to migrate to Solana amid a dispute with infrastructure firm Conduit. The Degen team said Conduit pushed a bad upgrade in May that caused 54 hours of downtime and $160k in lost user funds, and that Conduit refused to take ownership, withheld sequencer fees and negotiated a contract in bad faith. Conduit founder Andrew Huang said he was surprised by the accusations, that a signed contract was sent and verbally agreed to on Oct. 30, and that Conduit has not received an address to transfer the rollup's ownership.
- The Availability Cascade for the Onchain Agentic Economy (terminallyonchain.xyz)
YB argues that the recent crypto-AI experiments, including truth_terminal, Aethernet, Forest, Luna, and the price action of $GOAT and $HIGHER, signal an early availability cascade for an onchain agentic economy that will eventually be seen as a revolution rather than a fad. Citing Joel Spolsky's claim that good software takes 10 years, YB says DAOs are now around year 8 and that AI agents will act as the glue steering decentralized organizations and headless brands. YB compares this to the limited liability corporation, drawing on Coase's transaction cost argument and Gilbert's three ideas, and maps parallels to minimized transaction costs in DeFi, agents as artificial persons, and tokens as tradeable shares. YB says the timeline is years, not months.
- wow (Zora‘s pump.fun) (wow.xyz)
- DevConflict Livestream - Day 1 (streameth.org)
- Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness (stark.mirror.xyz)
- How the Trump whale correctly called the election (wsj.com)
- Fuck "info finance" with a bag of stale scrotums (warpcast.com)
The author argues that financialization works for objective matters like capital allocation and exchange of goods, but that forcing subjective human matters into objective numbers can lead to catastrophic outcomes. The piece blames plutocracy, which it describes as determining governance and even truth by wealth, and rejects "info finance" on that basis. Wait, I need to correct that: the summary must not use "the author" framing. Here is the revised version: Financialization works well for objective matters such as capital allocation and exchange of goods, but forcing subjective human matters into objective numbers can lead to potentially catastrophic outcomes. The root cause is plutocracy, described as determining governance by wealth and, in the worst case, truth itself. The piece rejects "info finance" outright, calling plutocracy a dystopia and an affront to humanity.
- Decoding the Unique World of Nouns and their Bold Approach to Governance. (medium.com)
Nouns, an NFT project, is presented as a model of decentralized governance that works in practice, with its holders steering the project through a DAO. Each Noun is a pixelated character, and ownership of one gives a say in how things are done, with one Noun auctioned every 24 hours. The article says every Noun holder gets a vote on the project's future, and that the DAO funds real-world initiatives such as open-source software and public goods. The author also argues that Nouns could become the face of crypto, though the piece does not present this as a certainty.
- Flow State - Octant Builder Accelerator (flowstate.network)
- Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (norvig.com)
Peter Norvig's essay argues that learning to program well cannot be done quickly, drawing on research showing that expertise in many fields takes about ten years of deliberate practice. The essay cites studies of chess, music, painting and other areas, and notes that Mozart took 13 years after his early start before producing world-class music. It presents a recipe that includes programming for fun, working with other programmers, and learning at least half a dozen languages, and concludes that a book bought to learn a language quickly will not change one's overall expertise within 24 hours or 21 days.
- Arena: Devconflict writing contest (x.com)
Arena and GnosisDAO are running a new writing contest in which participants share their thoughts on Devconflict debates, starting November 11th. The seven debates include L1 vs L2, with Vitalik Buterin and Christoph Koeppelmann, and Vanilla Staking vs Liquid Staking, with Nixorokish and D Gusakov. Writers who take part gain the chance to join the debate and share their views with the wider Ethereum ecosystem, and they will also compete for a 1,500 xDAI prize pool.