Top crypto stories of week 47, 2024
Mon 18 to Sun 24 November 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 18 to Sun 24 November 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 28 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Unpopular Opinion on new Ethereum infra (x.com)
The author argues that new Ethereum infrastructure, including account abstraction, chain abstraction, intents, UI layers, developer and indexing services, and wallet security tools, are stopgaps that hide underlying problems rather than fixing them. The post says these solutions move value toward privatised, centralised fee extraction and make the ecosystem worse for users. It also claims that newer blockchains do not need these solutions because the underlying problems do not exist on those chains.
- Apple Confirms Zero-Day Attacks Hitting macOS Systems (securityweek.com)
- Mac's Ethereum mobile wallets rant (x.com)
The author, from the team behind Kiwi, argues that Ethereum will not reach real adoption until mobile wallet connections are fixed, and that Passkeys and Account Abstraction will not solve the problem. Kiwi, a PWA app for reading and discussing Ethereum content, has avoided embedded wallets to stay open and Ethereum-aligned. The author describes watching conference users struggle to connect wallets, including a Berlin user who spent 10 minutes trying three wallets. The post says MetaMask often fails on mobile, while Rainbow and Coinbase Wallet break intermittently, and that embedded wallets are not a full solution because they lock the dapp to a vendor. The author says the root cause is unknown and suggests investigating it.
- Introducing the ethOS App Store (freedomfactory.io)
- A One Way Bridge (geohot.github.io)
- pump.science: The Tokenized Prediction Market for Longevity Regimens (molecule.xyz)
Pump.science is a platform, built on pump.fun, that lets people submit longevity regimen ideas to be tested on C. elegans worms by the Wormbot and turns the experiments into a tokenized prediction market. The Wormbot is a low-cost platform developed by Ora Biomedical, founded by Matt Kaeberlein and Mitchell Lee, and the article says C. elegans have a lifespan of 20 days and about 40% of their proteins are similar to human ones. Users can submit a regimen or buy its tokens, and they can watch camera images and raw movement and growth data as leading indicators, with the stated goal of predicting which regimens will increase human lifespan as measured by Percentage Life Extension (PLE).
- Cycles whitepaper (cycles.money)
- Stability-Transformation; Ossification-Agility; Ethereum's Dilemma (app.t2.world)
This essay, written after Devcon 2024 in Bangkok, frames the Ethereum debate over ossification versus agility as an open question rather than settled. Odysseus of Phylax Systems argues that Bitcoin's conservatism has created a trust foundation through the "Lindy" effect, and that Ethereum should keep similar stability. Uma Roy of Succinct counters that Ethereum should stay flexible, because Bitcoin has struggled to innovate at its base layer and cryptographic needs such as quantum resistance may change. The article notes that DeFi grew from $1 billion in 2020 to $83.72 billion in 2024, and that Ethereum's core upgrades take about three years, compared with six months for Solana's comparable changes.
- is crypto space fragmentation a problem? (bsky.app)
- Local Apps vs. Cloud Services (medium.com)
The author concludes that local apps and cloud services are not a zero-sum choice and that hybrid architectures, which store critical data locally and sync it to the cloud, can combine privacy and offline use with scalability and convenience. At DevCon 2024, Andreas Tsamados of FILVERSE argued for local-first apps on data ownership, offline functionality and decentralization, while Michelle Mosh Lee of Protocol Labs defended cloud services for ease of access, collaboration and scalability. Lefteris Karapetsas of Rotki App moderated the debate.
- Anthony Sassano on "Online vs offline vibes" (youtube.com)
The Daily Gwei Refuel #808, hosted by Anthony Sassano, is a daily recap of the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems over the previous 24 hours. Listed topics include a Devcon7 recap, a new ethismoney website, an ETH ETF discussion, and Brian Armstrong's planned talk with Trump about crypto. The episode also covers Justin Drake's Beam Chain, Josh Stark's Year in Ethereum, and a segment titled "Online vs offline vibes" at 36:49. The description lists only timestamps, so it does not say what that final segment discusses.
- dwr.eth: decentralized social network has been terrible framing for Farcaster (warpcast.com)
- Bitcoin Treasuries (bitcointreasuries.net)
- NYT Resignation Letter — BARI WEISS (bariweiss.com)
Bari Weiss, an Opinion writer and editor at The New York Times, announced her resignation in a letter addressed to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, citing a hostile internal environment and self-censorship at the paper. She says she was hired about three years earlier to bring in voices like Wuilly Arteaga, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Glenn Loury that the paper otherwise would not publish. She describes colleagues calling her a Nazi and a racist, posting ax emojis next to her name on Slack, and smearing her on Twitter, with no appropriate action taken. She also argues that editors now steer writers away from non-progressive op-eds, and that the paper's standards are applied selectively.
- Eth is Money (ethismoney.xyz)
ETH is presented as money within the Ethereum economy, described as digital gold with yield. The text says ETH is exported to L2s and sidechains and used as a high-quality liquid asset for DeFi. It also states that ETH is a store of value that is immutable, scarce and censorship resistant, and that its proof-of-stake issuance with fee burn is more secure than bitcoin and more scarce than gold.
- $ANON (anoncast.org)
- Eliza's World: Autonomous AI Dashboard (elizas.world)
- DoJ ruled Google must sell Chrome (simplifiedprivacy.com)
The US Department of Justice has ruled that Google must sell Chrome as part of its antitrust case, according to the article. Some analysts at Bloomberg, cited via MSN, put a potential price tag of $20 billion on the Chrome division. The DoJ also left the door open to selling Android in the future, and CBS News reports that regulators want Google to share data from people's queries with rivals. Evil Google News reports that the proposals extend to AI, including requirements that Google make its indexes, data and models accessible to competitors.
- Gary Gensler resigns (x.com)
- Bluesky Ethereum Starter Pack (go.bsky.app)
