Top crypto stories of week 5, 2025
Mon 27 January to Sun 2 February 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 27 January to Sun 2 February 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 51 comments in total. Most-shared sources: hackmd.io, xcancel.com, paragraph.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Daily discussion thread 2025-01-30 (hackmd.io)
- How Onlyfans Took Over The World (substack.com)
The author, a former camgirl, argues that OnlyFans succeeded by reproducing the live, one-on-one connection of camming while isolating each paying man from the others. They describe agencies that run accounts with chatters and drip video series, which sell content by making it seem filmed live. The author also says men largely don't notice or care whether a connection is real, which they present as what makes that connection scalable. The article also claims the 2021 porn ban was likely a stunt against banks, based on a claim from an unnamed founder of another platform, which the author says they did not verify.
- Daily discussion thread 2025-01-31 (hackmd.io)
- Solar Protocol (solarprotocol.net)
Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted on a network of solar-powered servers around the world, which directs traffic to whichever server is generating the most solar energy at the time of a request. The network is led by Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson and Benedetta Piantella, and it is maintained by volunteer server stewards. The page also lists recent exhibitions, including AI and the Paradox of Agency at Bildmuseet University in Umea, Sweden, opening 13 March 2026, and Prototypes for Alternative Power for the Singapore Art Museum, launching April 23, 2026.
- Still on DeepSeek: Punk 6529's Thesis (xcancel.com)
- How DeepSeek trained its model (xcancel.com)
- Protocol Berg: Call for Participation (cfp.protocol.berlin)
Protocol Berg v2 has opened submissions for talk and workshop proposals, aiming to bring distributed technology ecosystems together to exchange concepts and technology. The event excludes marketing-focused talks, product presentations, token shilling, and consulting or services content, while presenting a particular technology within a technical discussion is welcome. Proposals should fit one of six tracks: Networking, Storage, Consensus, Cryptography, Infrastructure, and Philosophy. Available formats are short presentations (10 min), standard presentations (25 min), standard workshops (40 min), and extended workshops (85 min).
- Ai16z Is Rebranding as ElizaOS After Request From Venture Firm a16z (unchainedcrypto.com)
Ai16z, a Solana-based DAO that uses AI in treasury management and investment, is rebranding as ElizaOS after a request from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), according to a16z crypto managing partner Chris Dixon. Dixon said on the Unchained podcast, "We've asked them to. It just was creating a little bit of confusion." Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs, announced the rebrand in the project's Discord, saying the $ai16z ticker will remain for now, with future changes to be voted on by the community. The rebrand includes no new tokens and no changes to the roadmap, DAO holdings, or governance. The AI16Z token's market cap is $645.6 million, after falling 53% in the last 30 days, per CoinGecko.
- vitalik on beam chain (warpcast.com)
Vitalik Buterin argues that the Beam Chain roadmap, which drew criticism for its "2029" date, is a separate workstream from the near-term work on scaling blobs, and that Ethereum needs a clean, simple protocol that removes large amounts of technical bloat. He says that in 2025 the network needs blobs and L1 cost reductions such as EIP-4444, and in 2026 it needs more blobs. He names Justin Drake, Dankrad Feist and Francesco (fradamt) as contributors who are pushing this research forward. By 2030, he says, Ethereum will also need long-term robust economics and staking decentralization.
- Networks Owned By Their Participants (paragraph.xyz)
The author argues that crypto's most important promise is giving a network's participants ownership of it, and that this matters more than memecoin-style ownership. Ownership is said to be meaningful only with governance, so the text calls for new internet-native forms of coordination, which it says is why DAOs are important. The article contrasts this with centralized ownership of wallets, token launchers and consumer apps, which it says would put the future in trouble, and it names Ethereum, ENS, Uniswap and Aerodrome as examples of the infrastructure it has in mind.
- AL #94: Why You Suck at ChatGPT But Agents Don't (research.auditless.com)
The article argues that people get poor results from ChatGPT because they use one-shot prompts, while crypto AI agents such as aixbt and Luna succeed by using engineered systems. It says aixbt's daily findings are accumulated from following 400 KOL accounts, and that the agents impress in research, content production and interactive entertainment. It lists six concepts agents use, including specialization, layering and transparency in multi-worker systems, plus memory approaches such as RAG, expanded context windows and knowledge graphs.
- How can Farcaster amp up its marketing and growth activities in Africa? (paragraph.xyz)
The author argues that Farcaster should adopt a mobile-first strategy to grow in Africa, since mobile phones are far more accessible there than laptops or desktops. The article proposes seven strategies, including a lightweight app for low-end devices, low-bandwidth optimization, and integration with mobile money platforms such as M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Flutterwave. It also suggests offline features and SMS-based access for users with basic phones, citing Google Maps' offline mode and Ushahidi's SMS platform as examples.
- ETHStrategy - fully onchain Microstrategy for Ethereum (github.com)
EtherStrategy ($ETHXR) is a tokenized, fully onchain vehicle for accumulating ETH, with holders claiming a share of a growing ETH pool managed through transparent strategies. The project describes itself as MicroStrategy for Ethereum. Its growth mechanisms include convertible bonds sold for USDC, with proceeds used to buy ETH, and at-the-money token offerings when $ETHXR trades at a premium to NAV. The deposit pool is capped at 10,000 ETH globally and 100 ETH per address, and holders can vote to redeem ETH when the token trades at a discount to NAV. Governance is held by $ETHXR holders, with a rage quit function included to guard against a 51% attack.
- Daily discussion thread 2025-01-29 (hackmd.io)
- The Fallacy of Vitamins vs. Painkillers in Product (rahulrumalla.substack.com)
The author argues that the "vitamin vs. painkiller" framing for products is misleading, and that the strongest products blend both. The author, who pitched the startup Otterspace to investors, says the framework oversimplifies user needs, ignores emotional triggers, and loses nuance for products with multiple use cases. Using Nir Eyal's Hooked, the article suggests painkillers can create initial habits while vitamins sustain engagement. It cites SoundCloud, which began by solving music distribution and later added analytics and community tools, and Safe Wallet, which began with multi-signature security and later added modular extensions and governance features.
- What if Web3 was as fast and simple as Google Search? (pod.network)
Pod Network is a Layer-1 blockchain built for open, fair, high-performance markets, and its team says current markets are neither open nor fair. The team describes a system where a few institutions control who can trade and what can be listed, and where proximity to exchange servers determines who profits. Pod Network is designed with an EVM-compatible interface, a streaming architecture with no blocks that peaks at 300k TPS, batch-auction order clearing that is described as MEV-free, and transaction confirmation under 150 ms.
- New Launch: Help Secure Gnosis Chain and Earn with Dappnode’s Shutter Package (dappnode.com)
Dappnode has released a Shutter Gnosis package in its DAppStore, letting home operators run a Shutter Keyper node or register validators to build MEV-protected blocks on Gnosis Chain. The article says Gnosis Chain recently became the first EVM chain to "shutterize" its mempool, and that Shutter is an encryption protocol designed to minimize MEV attacks. Keypers are rewarded with additional income for running the encrypted mempool. Listed Keyper system requirements are 1 CPU core, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB disk space, a permanent internet connection without residential DSL or cable, and a monitoring system. Applicants submit a proposal in the Shutter Network's Keyper Application category for periodic votes.
- Venice.ai Privacy Architecture (venice.ai)
Venice.ai states that user privacy is a guiding principle and that its infrastructure is designed so it does not store or log users' prompts or model responses on its servers. Prompts are relayed through a proxy to GPUs run by decentralized providers, and responses are streamed back to the browser without permanent storage. Conversation history is kept in encrypted local browser storage, and communications are protected with SSL encryption. Venice logs event data such as signing in and creating chats, and collects metadata and email addresses depending on account type, with credit card payments handled by Stripe.
- Berlin Blockchain Week 2025 (blockchainweek.berlin)
Berlin Blockchain Week (BBW) is a decentralized, community-organized initiative founded in 2018 with no single owner. It aims to reduce market noise and focus on education, collaboration and knowledge exchange. To be listed on the BBW calendar, an event must take place in Berlin during the BBW dates and relate to blockchain or adjacent fields, and online events are not accepted. For BBW 2026, the Department of Decentralization loosely coordinates efforts, including hosting the website and sharing news via the @berblockweek Twitter account.
- Open Source Privacy Pools for Starknet (x.com)
Ekubo Protocol has open sourced an implementation of Privacy Pools for Starknet, built with Visoft. The article presents Privacy Pools as a way to offer financial privacy while letting users show their funds came from a specific set of deposits, known as the Association Set, without revealing which deposit. The paper introducing the design was published in 2023 by Vitalik Buterin, ameensol, Jacob Illum of Chainalysis, and researchers from the University of Basel. The article says Starknet's Account Abstraction allows the protocol to eliminate relayers, improving user privacy.