Top crypto stories of week 51, 2024
Mon 16 to Sun 22 December 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 16 to Sun 22 December 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 44 comments in total. Most-shared sources: warpcast.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Prop 21: Purple Writing Contest (nouns.build)
Kiwi proposes a Purple-funded writing contest asking authors to write about the most exciting things that happened on Farcaster in 2024 and their visions for Farcaster in 2025, with a 2 ETH prize pool out of a 3 ETH total budget. The contest aims to reach users beyond the Farcaster community, using Kiwi's 1,500 monthly readers and its writers' subscribers, which the proposal estimates in the thousands. Winners would be chosen by upvotes, counted only from Purple NFT owners and Kiwi users above a certain karma threshold. Kiwi previously ran similar contests with Gnosis, Lens, and Nouns.
- Lens Closes $31 Million Strategic Raise (lens.xyz)
Lens describes itself as a new social layer for onchain culture and communities, offering apps that work with a Lens Account. The listed apps include Palus, a free open-source client for Lens activity, Mailens for email, Hey for paid posting and social payments, and Lensie, an NFT marketplace. Others are Cantuum for music, Grove Drive for file storage, Soclly, 0xfm for onchain radio on Lens Chain, and Rekt for crypto investigations. The page says Lens is part of MaskDAO but does not mention the $31 million strategic raise named in the title.
- Coop: "Zora OP retro airdrop [... shows:] creators are not valued onchain" (warpcast.com)
Coop argues that the Zora OP retro airdrop reflects a wider problem: creators are not valued onchain by the wider crypto ecosystem. He writes that teams building for creators struggle because it is unclear how to build the artist-to-fan relationship without relying purely on speculation. He also says he believes Zora has made more impact for creators onchain in the last year than any other team in crypto. Despite this, Zora faces public backlash from minters and creators who feel they were wronged by not being paid out more, even though Zora itself did not receive the maximum allocation from the last OP Retro round.
- What You Should Know When Joining Bluesky (eff.org)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says new Bluesky users should know that the network is currently centralized and largely public, despite its promises of openness and user control. Nearly all of the network's infrastructure is run by one company, Bluesky PBLLC, and of about 25 million users, only 10,000 are hosted by non-Bluesky services. Posts, likes and blocks are visible to everyone, and direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted and can be accessed by Bluesky PBLLC. The article also reports that CEO Jay Graber has promised not to sell user content for AI training licenses, and that the company received $8 million and $15 million in funding rounds.
- Outrage as Elon Musk claims ‘only AfD can save Germany‘ (amp.theguardian.com)
Elon Musk posted on X that "Only the AfD can save Germany," drawing outrage in Berlin ahead of the snap election set for 23 February. He also reposted a video by German influencer Naomi Seibt criticising Friedrich Merz, and German health minister Karl Lauterbach called Musk's intervention "undignified and highly problematic" and accused him of election interference. Christian Lindner of the FDP replied that the AfD "stands against freedom, business" and is a far-right extremist party, and AfD leader Alice Weidel welcomed Musk's comment.
- Decentralization is why we fight for crypto (coindesk.com)
Miles Jennings of a16z argues that digital asset laws should enshrine decentralization standards to guard against volatility, scams and casino culture. He says decentralization, meaning the distribution of control and decision-making without a central authority, should be the basis of a new "fit for purpose" regulatory framework for blockchains. Such a framework would reduce regulatory burdens and enable broader market access for projects that spread ownership and control and provide tailored disclosures. Jennings says it would build on the SEC's 2019 Framework for Digital Assets while avoiding that framework's paradox, under which projects were incentivized to obfuscate development efforts.
- Year in POAP: Looking back on 2024 (poap.news)
POAP's 2024 year-end recap reviews the year's product launches and community events, including the release of POAP Home, a new mobile app for collectors. It says the year included new tools such as POAP Dispenser, GPS Minting and POAP Airship, which allows onchain tips to be given as POAPs. The post also highlights events run with POAP, including Sibos, where more than 1,000 collectors minted 4,000 POAPs, and Devcon 7 SEA in Bangkok, where over 4,562 collectors got the official conference POAP.
- How to Make LLMs Shut Up (greptile.com)
Daksh, co-founder of Greptile, describes how the company reduced the nit comments its AI code review tool generated, which had led PR authors to ignore the bot. Prompt engineering, few-shot examples, and an LLM severity-rating filter all failed, so Greptile instead embedded past team comments and blocked new comments similar to at least three unique downvoted ones. The article says that within two weeks of rollout, the address rate rose from 19% to 55+%.
- Vitalik on quantum computing (x.com)
- NFT: Perspectives. Exploring pluralism through on-chain composition (perspectives.miragenesi.art)
- Corporate Profit Margin (After Tax) (gurufocus.com)
- Identified, extracted permaweb data from JPG's culture & curation experiment (xcancel.com)
- ENS Picks Linea for Layer 2 Rollout (blog.ens.domains)
ENS Labs announced a joint engineering partnership with the Linea team to build Namechain, an ENS layer 2 network, after selecting Linea following an internal technical and strategic evaluation. The announcement cites Linea's Type 2 zkEVM design, which provides bytecode compatibility with Ethereum, and its fast state confirmation for reliable name resolution. Linea was also the first L2 team to build a trust-minimized CCIP-Read (ERC-3668) implementation, which enabled decentralized cross-chain name resolution for over 530,000 linea.eth subnames. The partnership will combine Linea's zkEVM with the upcoming ENSv2 protocol.
- Ethereum (ETH) Staking Insights & Analysis: 2024 Annual Report | Everstake (everstake.one)
Everstake's 2024 Ethereum annual report names the Dencun upgrade, the July launch of spot ETH ETFs, and Devcon 7 in Bangkok as the year's top milestones, and it reports that network activity and staking grew steadily. Average daily unique addresses rose by 39.6 million, a 15.76% increase, and the average daily transaction count was 1,164,911, up 11.83% from 2023. After Dencun, average gas prices fell from 98 Gwei to below 10 Gwei most of the time. Staked ETH grew by 6.13 million ETH (+21.71%) year over year as of December 1, 2024, while the network-average APR fell from above 4.30% to 3.13%.
- Welcome to Circles (docs.aboutcircles.com)
Circles is presented as a new currency framework that uses modern cryptography to build trust without centralized gatekeepers, distributing the right to issue money to individuals. Under its rules, each account can mint 1 CRC per hour, and a 7% yearly demurrage applies to every CRC to prevent early adopters from dominating supply. Users can swap CRC 1:1 along their social trust graph, and new members are onboarded by existing users paying 96 CRC, with the invitee receiving 48 CRC as a welcome bonus.
- Warpcast Rewards (warpcast.com)
- today.fun (today.fun)
- The War For Mindshare (wrongalot.substack.com)
Memecoins are presented as attention markets, a mix of prediction markets and attention networks in which the main thing captured is financialized mindshare, the level of attention a token receives. The article says memecoins bundle distribution and product into one, so pumping a token to capture attention is a financial bet, and that value flows where attention goes. It also argues that attention networks have grown asocial, since "capital is what matters as attention follows capital," and that memecoins are the first onchain asocial product-market fit. The article states that few memes have staying power and that rugs are a feature, not a bug.
- Photographs reveal first glimpse of uncontacted Amazon community (theguardian.com)
Automatic cameras in the Brazilian Amazon have captured the first images of the Massaco, an uncontacted community that appears to be growing despite pressure from ranchers, loggers and illegal encroachment. The Brazilian National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai) estimates the Massaco now number 200 to 250 people, at least double their early 1990s population. Funai placed the cameras where it periodically leaves metal tools as gifts to discourage the group from entering farms or logging camps. Antenor Vaz, who implemented no-contact policy in Massaco in 1988, said Brazil has no law specifically protecting isolated peoples.
- The EU Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation Explained (legalnodes.com)
Legal Nodes states that the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) transitional period ended on 1 July 2026, so providers serving EU clients without MiCA authorization or another valid basis are now in breach of EU law. National competent authorities supervise MiCA, and the Polish Financial Supervision Authority has stated that no Polish body has been designated for most crypto-asset activities, so authorization proceedings cannot open there. Maximum fines for legal persons are EUR 5,000,000 plus a share of annual turnover of 3% to 12.5%, depending on the breach.
