Top crypto stories of week 2, 2025
Mon 6 to Sun 12 January 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 6 to Sun 12 January 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 46 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, youtube.com, warpcast.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- #1: Kiwi Pod (youtube.com)
- 3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down (x.com)
3Blue1Brown reports that its 2017 YouTube video explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down and the channel received a copyright strike, despite the content being entirely the creator's own. The takedown request appears to have been issued by the company chainpatrol on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says it makes use of "advanced LLM scanning" for brand protection. The creator suggests a bot may have convinced YouTube's systems that a re-upload of the video, of which there has been an incessant onslaught, was the original. The creator says it is worrying that such tools could issue fake takedown requests, given that three strikes can delete an entire channel.
- Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here’s How (eff.org)
The article, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that online behavioral advertising, specifically real-time bidding (RTB), fuels surveillance and should be banned. It explains that each bid request broadcasts personal data, such as location and advertising ID, to thousands of companies, and that anyone posing as an ad buyer can access it. It cites the FTC's first action over RTB data abuse against Mobilewalla, which collected data on over a billion people, with an estimated 60% sourced from RTB auctions. It also says data brokers sold bidstream data to government agencies, including the U.S. Defense Department and the FBI.
- Alice Weidel & Elon Musk (youtube.com)
- Anna’s Archive - largest open-source open-data library (annas-archive.org)
- Customer Acquisition in 2025 is Dead (research.auditless.com)
The author argues that customer acquisition is becoming harder for everyone, but that web3 companies have unusual channels such as token incentives, memes and community airdrop dynamics. The piece cites Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, saying newsletters are getting harder, and notes that the newsletter is nearing 1,000 subscribers. It names four shifts affecting both web2 and web3: faster saturation of new channels, cheap video fidelity thanks to AI tools, the need to build products as acquisition channels, and the convergence of product and distribution.
- 🟧 The new rules of media (onethingnewsletter.substack.com)
Kyle Chayka presents a set of tongue-in-cheek "new rules" for digital media, arguing that success now depends on cultivating a personal audience relationship rather than chasing newsiness or traditional prestige. He argues that publications should surf new platforms while they rise, pay for creators directly, and treat the relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes as paramount. He also states that traditional metrics like Pulitzers no longer measure achievement for newsletters or TikTok explainers, and that advertising will persist even in subscription-focused systems.
- Thesis: $PENGU (x.com)
The article argues that $PENGU, the memecoin tied to Pudgy Penguins, is a one-of-a-kind token and the author's largest memecoin position after consolidating holdings into it. It cites a market cap of $3.5BN FDV as of Jan 7, compared with $PEPE at $7.9Bn, $SHIB at $13Bn and $DOGE at $53Bn. It also highlights a day-one circulating supply above 70%, with holders growing from 250,000 to over 600,000, and team and company tokens vested for 4 years.
- Tailscale has landed in Dappnode (warpcast.com)
- More Speech and Fewer Mistakes | Meta (about.fb.com)
Meta announced in January 2025 that it is loosening content enforcement and ending its US third-party fact-checking program in favor of Community Notes, a system modeled on X where contributing users write and rate notes. The company said it had over-enforced its rules, with one to two out of every 10 content removals in December 2024 possibly mistaken, and it plans to restrict automated enforcement to illegal and high-severity violations. A May 29, 2025 update said enforcement mistakes in the US fell roughly 50% from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, while low prevalence of violating content stayed largely unchanged.
- AI Agent Toolkit (aiagenttoolkit.xyz)
- U.S. Government crypto holdings - Arkham (intel.arkm.com)
- AI and Startup Moats (unzip.dev)
- FTX begins the distribution of lost assets (x.com)
- Farcaster in 2024 (paragraph.xyz)
Farcaster grew substantially in 2024, with its user base rising from under 50,000 in January to around 750,000, according to Dune data cited in the article. Daily active users climbed from fewer than 2,000 in January to a peak of about 70,000 in July before stabilizing near 40,000. The article attributes much of the early growth to the $DEGEN token and the Frames feature, while noting that many SocialFi apps faded and several projects shut down or moved to other platforms.
- DEGEN turns 1 year old (warpcast.com)
- Farcaster’s Value Prop: Great Conversations (deepworth.notion.site)
- Reflections (blog.samaltman.com)
Sam Altman reflects on OpenAI's first nine years and the year since his brief firing, arguing that the company's work is still early and that its vision will stay fixed while its tactics keep changing. He says ChatGPT, launched on November 30, 2022, kicked off a growth curve the company had never seen, with weekly active users rising from about 100 million to more than 300 million. He calls his firing a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, including himself, and credits Ron Conway and Brian Chesky with help that he says kept OpenAI from falling apart. He also says the company expects AI agents may join the workforce in 2025 and is beginning to aim at superintelligence.
- The Next Generation Will Never Know a World Without AI - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
Australian futurist Mark McCrindle coined "Generation Beta" for children born from 2025 to 2039, and he says AI and automation will be fully embedded in their everyday lives, from education and workplaces to healthcare and entertainment. The article reports that experts warn about risks to children's development, including that parents may hand the job of educating children to AI. USC psychology professor Jonas Kaplan says critical thinking is an essential skill for this generation, since they must decide what information is good amid abundant information. Dr. Emily Levy warns that over-reliance on AI could diminish soft skills, and she cautions that differences in AI quality could create educational disparities.
- Lens Holiday Hackathon voting (jokerace.io)