Top crypto stories of week 11, 2025
Mon 10 to Sun 16 March 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 10 to Sun 16 March 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 62 comments in total. Most-shared sources: hackmd.io, x.com, xcancel.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Welcome To Disillusionment (wrongalot.substack.com)
The essay argues that crypto is entering a disillusionment phase comparable to the Dotcom bubble, with the 2020-2025 period forming one extended cycle propped up by excess capital and ETF and Microstrategy inflows rather than real cash flows or innovation. It says VC-style private-to-public arbitrage has shrunk as everyone has adopted the same playbook, and that crypto has relied on "degen" speculative liquidity and tradfi adoption, neither of which it describes as durable user growth. It lists DeFi's resilience under volatility, stablecoin activity that has decoupled from crypto cycles, and Stripe's acquisition of Bridge as positives to build on.
- Introducing Ether Guild (paragraph.xyz)
Ether Guild is a newly introduced nonprofit collective that aims to fund initiatives supporting ETH, the money, in service of Ethereum, the computer. It pursues this through fine-grained funding efforts called Quests, and its first Quest was a dashboard explaining why ETH is money, built with data from the growthepie team. As a US-based nonprofit applying for 501(c)(3) status, it relies on donations and grants, and its treasury is managed by a cross section of community members including Ryan Sean Adams, Anthony Sassano, Tobias Schreier, Grant Hummer and Everdred.
- Ethereum ERC20 Tokens Are Now More Valuable than ETH (thedefiant.io)
- What is Milady? The Edgy Ethereum NFT Community With Vitalik Buterin’s Support (decrypt.co)
Milady is an edgy NFT community and ecosystem that has become one of the most culturally significant groups in Ethereum and crypto, with figures including Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin interacting with it. The Milady NFT collection was created by the Remilia Corporation in August 2021, and the ecosystem spans NFT collections, the CULT meme coin launched on Ethereum in December 2024, a Minecraft server, and a quarterly magazine. The article says much of the community's ethos comes from writings by Charlotte Fang, the pseudonymous founder of Remilia, whose ties to the 2022 Miya controversy, involving alt-right extremist content, have made Fang one of the most polarizing founders in crypto.
- The Next Big L2 Runs on Bitcoin (research.auditless.com)
The article argues that the existing Bitcoin network can serve as a base layer on which new L2 rollups and smart contract systems are built without changing Bitcoin's core protocol. It says Bitcoin was closer to hosting smart contracts than originally thought, and that recent Bitcoin protocol updates plus lessons from Ethereum's scaling work are now converging to make rollups possible on it. The author notes that Bitcoin's permissionless nature may give it an unexpected advantage in becoming a smart contract platform, despite the community's resistance to other smart contract networks. The piece is disclosed as supported by a grant from StarkWare.
- Daily discussion thread 2025-03-10 (hackmd.io)
- Daily discussion thread 2025-03-12 (hackmd.io)
- Daily discussion thread 2025-03-11 (hackmd.io)
- Jacob Airdropped ~50% of the $horse supply to the original collectors of the NFT (x.com)
- How stablecoins impact Ethereum credible neutrality (xcancel.com)
Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether could effectively decide which Ethereum chain is valid, undermining its credible neutrality. In a hypothetical compromise of USDC's admin key that mints about $3B, Circle, which has $60B of USDC on EVM chains, could pause USDC and propose a hard fork. Protocols like Maker, with at least $3.7B in bad debt in that scenario, would then have to back the fork or absorb losses. Circle publicly stated in 2022, during the Merge, that "USDC as an Ethereum asset can only exist as a single valid version." Staking and governance attacks are possible but more complex, whereas Circle and Tether remain within regulators' reach.
- Daily discussion thread 2025-03-14 (hackmd.io)
- @dankrad and @CamiRusso debate Ethereum's fee model and L2 ecosystem challenges (x.com)
Ethereum DA's weak competitive moat means it is unlikely to charge significant fees over the long term, according to the discussion's author, who is not named in the text. The text says Ethereum currently makes almost zero fees from L1 and L2 transactions because it deliberately charges very close to zero when there is no congestion, unlike a company that would price transactions and raise them during congestion. It argues Ethereum DA offers little UX benefit and only abstract security benefits that alternative DA providers will likely closely replicate. Proposed next steps are scaling L1 to keep integration attractive, scaling DA to reduce incentives for alt-DA, and pursuing shorter block times and single-slot L2 interop.
- Take me back to 2021 (xcancel.com)
The post is a nostalgic take on crypto speculation, contrasting a past cycle with the present. It says the author bought a rock JPEG that reached seven figures and minted free text files called LOOT that hit 20 ETH each, when everyone seemed rich. In the current cycle, the author says AI-themed coins went to zero and that they were repeatedly "rugged" on a site called Pump fun, and it closes by asking to be taken back to 2021.
- Gaussian Timepieces (takenstheorem.medium.com)
Gaussian Timepieces is a small NFT project whose creator presents on-chain timers that cycle based on Ethereum's average block time, with each timepiece reflecting its owner's on-chain NFT holdings. The timepieces come in five durations, from 2 to 32 blocks (about 26 seconds to 7 minutes), and their dials and colors update with each cycle. A maximum of 100 timepieces will be pre-minted and listed on OpenSea, offered to collectors and supporters of prior work who hold an NFT from Ethstory or the_coin, at a low reserve price covering minting and transfer gas.
- Bluesky CEO at SXSW (youtube.com)
- The Battle for Self-Custody: Defending Web3 from Cyber Warfare (open.substack.com)
- @dwr.eth: why passkeys fall short of universal authentication (warpcast.com)
- Multi-Sim: Stop Signing Blindly (engineering.gnosisguild.org)
- Cryo-MCP (x.com)
- The path to secure and efficient zkVMs (a16zcrypto.com)
zkVMs, which promise to let non-experts prove correct program execution, are still too buggy and too slow for most real-world deployment, and years away from meeting basic secure and performant goals, so staged milestones are proposed to track progress. The proposed security stages require formally verified proofs, starting with protocol soundness, then verifier and prover implementations, and no zkVM is likely to reach the final security stage in fewer than four years. Current zkVM provers incur overhead approaching one million times native execution, and the proposed performance baseline is no worse than 100,000 times, with mainstream adoption probably requiring about 10,000 times or lower.