Top crypto stories of week 3, 2025
Mon 13 to Sun 19 January 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 13 to Sun 19 January 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 48 comments in total. Most-shared sources: xcancel.com, paragraph.xyz, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- I moved my entire life to Cyprus to escape Germany's 50% tax rate (xcancel.com)
- List of active Protocol Guild members (protocol-guild.readthedocs.io)
- RedNote: What to know about the Chinese app TikTok users are flocking to (reuters.com)
- Why you should support Kiwi in the Octant round (xcancel.com)
Kiwi, an Ethereum builder community founded in 2023, asks readers to support it in the current Octant round, arguing that Twitter is a poor place to follow important Ethereum developments. The team says Twitter's virality-driven algorithm and constant news stream reward attention-seeking takes and rage bait, so KOLs get more attention than OG builders. Kiwi describes itself as a place where builders find daily curated essays, talks, GitHub repos, Dune dashboards and products, with community discussion and help available. The post notes that the two founders rejected VC funding and run Kiwi on savings, grants and some revenue, so every donation matters.
- Billion Dollar Agents (paragraph.xyz)
The author argues that the current wave of crypto AI agents, launched through tools like Virtuals, hides real progress, and that the larger opportunity is autonomous companies rather than memecoins. Most agents today are described as social bots that earn from attention, while blockchain could give agents built-in payment systems and token economics. The article cites AIXBT, which has a $700M market cap and about 400K followers, and a data terminal that requires 600K tokens (about $500K) for access. It also notes that sentient.market's AI agent index puts the category at $13.6B.
- Ethereum Foundation restructures leadership to support ecosystem growth (x.com)
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is restructuring its leadership, a process that has been ongoing for close to a year, with some changes already made public and others still in progress. The stated goals are to raise technical expertise within EF leadership, improve two-way communication with users, app developers, wallets and L2s, bring in fresh talent, and better support app builders in protecting privacy, open source and censorship resistance. EF explicitly rules out an ideological pivot, aggressive lobbying of regulators and politicians, becoming a vehicle for vested interests, or becoming a highly centralized organization. EF says people seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own organizations.
- EVM Trackooor: Tracking Anything and Everything on EVM Chains (zellic.io)
Zellic has announced the EVM trackooor, a modular command-line framework for tracking and processing arbitrary data on EVM blockchains. It lets users register the event logs, transactions, or mined blocks they want, then define a callback to process them, such as recording results in a database or sending a webhook alert. The article's example monitors an address for native ETH and ERC-20 transfers, with the framework handling retrieval, filtering, and ABI decoding. Zellic says it has already used the tool to monitor for potential exploits funded by Tornado Cash, graph fund flows, and watch ownership transfers and proxy upgrades on high-value contracts.
- Homomorphic Encryption in iOS 18 (boehs.org)
This blog post explains homomorphic encryption for readers without a maths background, using it as a way to understand the search technology Apple uses in Photos on iOS 18 and macOS 15. It describes how a server can compute on encrypted values without reading them: the client encrypts a value, the server applies addition or multiplication to the ciphertext, and the client decrypts the result. The author notes that practical programs must be restructured around these operations, for example a private database lookup using a dot product, and that the approach runs many orders of magnitude slower than plaintext equivalents. The post then begins a high-level overview of Apple's Scalable Private Search with Wally paper, which uses somewhat homomorphic encryption to return encrypted similarity scores instead of full database entries.
- Farcaster 2026 writing contest (paragraph.xyz)
Kiwi Updates announced the "Farcaster 2026" writing contest, run with Purple, which asks writers to explore paths Farcaster can take to reach the next level in 2026 and offers 2 ETH in prizes. Submissions run from January 20 to February 10, and writers must choose one of five prompts, such as how Farcaster clients could serve both OGs and newcomers. Winners are split across a "Popular Vote" track, decided by Kiwi upvotes from Purple owners, Farcaster Power Users and active Kiwi members, and a "Jury Vote" track decided by a jury from the Purple and Kiwi teams. Prizes are 0.5 ETH for first place, 0.3 ETH for second and 0.2 ETH for third, across two tracks.
- Time for Epoch 6 Updates (blog.octant.build)
- Introducing Token Links (warpcast.com)
- On the value of data (xcancel.com)
- GitHub Spotlight: Eliza (reforgevc.substack.com)
Eliza, an open-source MIT-licensed TypeScript agent framework with 11.2k GitHub stars, is judged in this review to suit personality-driven automation but not to be a comprehensive autonomous agent framework yet. The review says Eliza shines at narrative-driven bots and consistent brand voices, with plugins for text-to-speech, image generation and blockchain data retrieval. It identifies gaps including static personas that do not learn from feedback, no sub-tasking or multi-step planning, no inter-agent collaboration or shared memory, basic key-value memory without pruning, and no unified reasoning across text, images and audio.
- Protocol Churn (tbray.org)
The author argues that decentralized social networks such as the Fediverse and Bluesky are the only viable path for online conversation, and that corporately owned platforms have been discredited. The piece covers two January 13, 2025 initiatives: Mastodon and Bluesky's "Free Our Feeds" effort, both seeking donations toward fundraising targets. It argues that Bluesky is not truly decentralized, since its ATProto implementation is currently the only one and would shut down if its operator failed, so the Free Our Feeds plan to fund an alternative ATProto Relay is welcomed. It also argues that ActivityPub servers are cheap to run, making the Fediverse the author's preferred option.
- Economic freedom creates prosperity for all (x.com)
Coinbase's leadership argues that economic freedom drives prosperity and that crypto is the technology that can expand it worldwide. The post credits growing support for free markets in the U.S., Canada, Argentina and elsewhere, and says over three quarters of adults worldwide want more economic freedom, according to the company's survey. It cites stablecoin transaction volume up over 3x year over year to about $27T, and says Georgia is placing land records on the blockchain. The post also urges policymakers to pass onshore crypto laws and establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
- list-colors by agoston nagy (objkt.com)
- The people should own the town square (blog.joinmastodon.org)
Mastodon announced it is transferring ownership of key platform components, including its name and copyrights, to a new European non-profit so that the project is not controlled by a single individual. The transition will take place over the next six months, with founder Eugen Rochko moving from overall management to a focus on product strategy. Day-to-day operations will continue through Mastodon GmbH, which will become wholly owned by the new non-profit, and the team is targeting a €5 million annual operating budget in 2025 to fund trust and safety work and team growth.
- The independent truth service (graymirror.substack.com)
The essay argues that Facebook and Twitter should go beyond crowd-sourced tools like Elon Musk's Community Notes and build an independent truth service that can settle disputed factual questions. It says Community Notes works only at a low level of analytic power, since it can handle simple myths but not questions such as whether Covid was a lab leak. It names Rootclaim as a small attempt at such a service, though the author says he is not fond of its Bayesian approach. The text concludes that a stronger, more authoritative truth signal would produce power, which it says always earns a return over time.
- Henry George: What the Railroad Will Bring Us (1868) (wealthandwant.com)
- Misty: a dynamic distributed actor language from Douglas Crockford (mistysystem.com)
Douglas Crockford presents Misty, a dynamic, general-purpose, transitional, secure, distributed actor language with a gentle syntax intended to benefit students and advanced features such as capability security and lambdas with lexical scoping. The language supports the Actor model of distributed computation and also a more conventional functional-style model with mutation, similar in some ways to JavaScript, which the article says makes it easier for industry to accept than a pure actor language. Misty enforces strict whitespace rules, with indentation in increments of 4 spaces and only one allowed formatting convention. The article states that Misty only allows mutation through the assign statement and that the language strives for, but does not achieve, purity.