Top crypto stories of week 48, 2024
Mon 25 November to Sun 1 December 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 25 November to Sun 1 December 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 65 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, youtube.com, warpcast.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- $kiwimas is on wow.xyz (not official, still fun) (wow.xyz)
- An interesting read: Why Everyone Is Wrong About Stablecoins (forbes.com)
- US court of appeals says Tornado Cash contracts were not property (x.com)
A federal appeals court ruled that Treasury overstepped its authority when it sanctioned the immutable smart contracts deployed by the Tornado Cash developers, holding that the contracts are not property of a foreign person or entity. The court reasoned that the contracts are not capable of being owned because more than one thousand volunteers took part in a "trusted setup ceremony" that irrevocably removed anyone's ability to update, remove, or control the code. The post also argues that OFAC's practice of treating "contracts" and "services" as property does not apply, since the contracts are lines of code and no human effort is expended by them. The author notes the ruling covers only the admin-key-free smart contracts, not the rest of Tornado Cash, and credits Coinbase and Paul Grewal as a major driver of the case.
- Köppelmann: Ethereum needs native L2s (youtube.com)
- Ethereum Magicians Infinite Endgames: Ethconomics (youtu.be)
- Pump.fun livestreams plunge into chaos (cryptopolitan.com)
- Kiwi Warpcast starter pack (warpcast.com)
- How bots snipe Clanker (x.com)
- Auth by Watchen - Preview of a free Privy alternative without vendor lock-in (github.com)
- Glitter Nihilism in crypto (blockleaders.io)
- Why $kiwimas? (open.substack.com)
- Reflections from DevCon (gatnash.com)
The author, who attended Funding the Commons and DevCon in Bangkok, argues that the Ethereum community offers hope after what they describe as the mostly dead idealism of crypto online. Funding the Commons, an organisation bridging builders and researchers to create new mechanisms for digital public goods funding, impressed them as an introduction to the ecosystem. DevCon, the Ethereum Foundation's bi-annual conference, showcased projects such as Nym, GrapheneOS and Tor, and the author says almost all its power was soft power. The author also spoke on institutional failure in MENA governance and says over 50% of the 12,000 attendees came from South East Asia.
- Gav Wood on why ETH is going nowhere (youtube.com)
- Peter Szilagyi on Bluesky data drama (x.com)
- Meme Tokens and Consent (blog.danfinlay.com)
The author, who describes himself as a former artist and a MetaMask developer, writes about creating two meme tokens on Farcaster's Clanker bot and on Pump.fun as an experiment on consent and meme coin mechanics. He argues that the meme coin platforms expose only buy and sell functions, that Clanker's per-trade fees to the founder act as a continuous rug against buyers, and that the Pump.fun community's "rugging" culture reflects the worst of crypto. He describes his Solana token rising from about 2 SOL (roughly $500) to over $100,000 in value within an hour, after which he sold about 25% for roughly $16,000 after slippage.
- New on Warpcast: Starter Packs (warpcast.com)
- Introducing the Model Context Protocol (anthropic.com)
Anthropic has open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources such as content repositories, business tools, and development environments. The article says MCP replaces fragmented, custom integrations with a single protocol, so developers can build against one standard instead of maintaining separate connectors for each data source. MCP was created at Anthropic by David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers, and early adopters named include Block and Apollo. Pre-built MCP servers are available for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer, and Claude Desktop apps support local MCP servers.
- Jackie Chain Adventure (jackiechain.fun)
- The End of The Twitter Era (sandofsky.com)
- The Faux Founder‘s Dilemma (open.substack.com)