Top crypto stories of week 1, 2025
Mon 30 December 2024 to Sun 5 January 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 30 December 2024 to Sun 5 January 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 43 comments in total. Most-shared sources: xcancel.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Week in Ethereum has ended. Here is why... (x.com)
- Confession: I Barely Use Web3 (research.auditless.com)
- How to Claim Your $20 From Apple's $95 Million Siri Privacy Settlement (decrypt.co)
Apple has agreed to a $95 million settlement over claims that Siri recorded conversations without the "Hey Siri" wake word and shared that data with advertisers, which Apple has denied. U.S. users who owned a qualifying device between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024 can claim up to $20 per device, capped at $100 per household for up to five devices, through a website available in English and Spanish. Claims must be submitted by July 2, 2025. The lawsuit follows a 2019 Guardian report that Apple contractors accessed private Siri recordings, and the settlement also requires Apple to confirm deletion of Siri audio recordings collected before October 2019.
- Why I'm quitting the Washington Post (anntelnaes.substack.com)
Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist who has worked for the Washington Post since 2008, says she is quitting after her editor killed a cartoon for the first time in her career. The cartoon criticized billionaire tech and media chief executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Walt Disney Company and Jeff Bezos, for seeking favor with incoming President-elect Trump. Telnaes argues that owners of news organizations have a duty to safeguard a free press, and that courting an autocrat-in-waiting undermines it.
- A free and open source alternative Twitter front-end (xcancel.com)
- Burner Pro (burner.pro)
Burner Pro is presented as a reimagined hardware wallet that compares favorably with conventional ones. Its BurnerOS runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, so no apps need to be downloaded, updated or trusted, and the device is described as giftable without an instruction manual. It is also said to have no batteries, never expose seed phrases, and offer full-spectrum colors, with modifiable firmware for web developers using the open source tools BurnerOS and libHaLo. Conventional wallets are described as requiring app downloads and giving full access to seed phrases.
- The Intelligence Curse — LessWrong (lesswrong.com)
- Time Off vs Creative Relaxing (sceneswithsimon.com)
Simon asks whether the pull to create during holidays and time off is a real tension with being present, and he is hoping to do more of both in 2025. He describes feeling anxious on holidays about not writing, and he questions whether this is healthy, noting he has gotten better at balance with age. The post also covers his novel draft 2, with a goal of finishing it soon and sharing draft 3 with friends and potential agents around mid-year, and a reading, watching and gaming roundup.
- "I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life" (eriktorenberg.substack.com)
Vinay Hiremath, cofounder and CTO of Loom, writes about feeling lost after selling his company, despite having no need to work again. He describes a $60m pay package he gave up by leaving the acquiring company, followed by two weeks of meetings with robotics investors and founders that left him deciding not to start a robotics company. He then climbed a 6800m Himalayan peak with no prior mountaineering experience, worked on DOGE for four weeks before declining to move to DC, and is now in Hawaii learning physics, which he says he enjoys for its own sake.
- Age Verification in the US (pornhub.com)
Pornhub says it has blocked access for users in 25 US states that have passed age verification laws, and it argues that such laws are ineffective and put privacy at risk. The company states that Louisiana's 2023 law led to an approximately 80% drop in traffic there, which it says displaced viewers to pirate and non-compliant sites without Trust and Safety measures. Pornhub instead advocates device-based age verification, in which users verify their age once through their operating system rather than on each adult site.
- Are user interfaces shrinking? (midaskwant.substack.com)
The author hypothesizes that user interfaces for predictable, service-driven tasks will shrink or disappear as AI improves at anticipating human input, while interfaces for unpredictable creative tools will persist as collaborative canvases with AI. The article contrasts YouTube's 2005 flow of search, results and opt-in click with TikTok, which auto-plays a video on opening the app, and cites Uber ordering via Siri and grocery reordering via APIs as examples of service apps. For creative tools, it points to Captions, Cursor and Replit, where AI shows its actions within the same interface so users can steer the process.
- The Fat App Thesis (davidphelps.substack.com)
Writer argues that for the first time in crypto history apps, not protocols, will capture the most value, reversing the "Fat Protocol Thesis" that Joel Monegro published in 2016. The author cites 2024 as the year apps such as Polymarket, Pump.fun, Hyperliquid, Virtuals and ai16z were the winners, and says many protocols have gained hype mainly from the ways they support apps. The argument rests on three reasons: historical cycles, the fact that apps now have user moats while chains are largely interchangeable, and users gathering where other users spend time through apps.
- The Product Feature Strategy Matrix (rahulrumalla.substack.com)
The article presents the Product Feature Strategy Matrix, a framework that sorts product features into four quadrants by strategic impact: Game Changers, Foundational Defenses, Growth Enablers and Retention Boosters. It argues that a feature strategy should balance offensive features, which drive acquisition, retention or monetization, with defensive features, which protect existing users and reduce churn. The article suggests the quadrant to prioritize depends on company stage: early-stage companies focus on Sharp Edges and Brilliant Basics, growth-stage companies invest in both Growth Enablers and Retention Boosters, and mature companies prioritize Foundational Defenses. It also states that most users abandon a product after two or three frustrating experiences.
- What Will Happen In 2025 (avc.xyz)
The author makes 13 predictions for 2025, which the article presents as playful forecasts rather than analysis. They include Apple and Google surpassing OpenAI/ChatGPT in consumer AI prompts, Waymo surpassing Uber in rides in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and bank-to-bank payments surpassing credit card interchange payments in a few US categories. Other predictions cover Dyson launching a housekeeper robot named Judy, NFT art making a comeback with MOMA buying The 6529 Museum Of Art, and Arizona's ESA program enrolling over 25% of K12 students.
- A simple explanation of how @ai16zdao's eliza framework works (xcancel.com)
- d/acc: one year later (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that d/acc, or decentralized and democratic differential defensive acceleration, should guide technology so that it favors defense over offense and distributes power rather than concentrating it. He says the philosophy has matured over the past year, citing progress in open-source vaccines, Community Notes, prediction markets, ZK-SNARKs in government ID and social media, and open-source medical and brain-computer interface imaging tools. The first d/acc event, "d/acc Discovery Day" at Devcon, featured a full day of speakers across bio, physical, cyber, info defense and neurotech. He presents the approach as an alternative to e/acc-style acceleration without defense, centralized control, and deceleration.
- Union deploys "collateral-free" USDC credit on Base. (union.mirror.xyz)
- Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (citationneeded.news)
Elon Musk and other prominent right-wing figures have launched a campaign against Wikipedia, urging followers to stop donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. Musk's December 24 tweet, "Stop donating to Wokepedia," was followed by posts from Chaya Raichik, Mario Nawfal, and others that criticized the Foundation's $50 million spending on "diversity, equity, and inclusion." The article argues these budget categories directly support Wikipedia's reliability, and it says Musk's claim about Bill Clinton's Epstein connections was a misrepresentation, since the text was moved to separate articles rather than deleted.
- Aave Migrate (github.com)
Aave Migrate is a tool that moves a user's entire lending and borrowing positions on Aave, including debts, from one wallet to another the user owns with a single click, without needing funds to repay the debt upfront. The smart contract uses an Aave flashloan to repay existing debts in the original wallet, transfers the aTokens to the destination wallet, reborrows the debts there, and then repays the flashloan with its fee. The project is described as deployed on Goerli, with Aave V2 and V3 contract addresses, a frontend repository, and a video demo. The article presents it as a way to avoid the liquidation risk and time pressure of manual transfers, especially when a wallet has been hacked.
- How Agentfi accelerates ‘The Weirdening’ (warpcast.com)
Technological acceleration will make the world far weirder than anyone can imagine, a process called "The Weirdening." As creations stop being driven by necessity, dreams drive them, and sci-fi may increasingly be written partly by "sentient" agents. Autonomous agents are presented as an early sign of this shift: small LLMs deployed in their own TEEs are given objectives and capital to pursue them. Software is described as gaining more autonomy and the ability to stand alone.