Top crypto stories of week 13, 2025
Mon 24 to Sun 30 March 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 24 to Sun 30 March 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 42 comments in total. Most-shared sources: paragraph.xyz, xcancel.com, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Ameen Soleimani I Ethereum Cultural Victory (youtube.com)
- Polymarket Analytics (polymarketanalytics.com)
- We've Turned A Generation Of Bitcoiners Into Digital Goldbugs (bitcoinmagazine.com)
Shinobi argues that Bitcoin is a human-designed technology, not a natural force, and that treating it as "digital gold" leads people to ignore the risks that come with running it as software. He contrasts gold, which needs no patches and faces no denial-of-service attacks, with a decentralized network that must be maintained and can fail or be co-opted. He argues that Bitcoin's value as censorship-resistant money depends entirely on its decentralization, which must be actively defended, and that the current generation of Bitcoiners does not understand this.
- Agents as NFTs (blog.variant.fund)
The author argues that NFTs are valuable because they can give digital property features of physical property: possession, improvements, and provenance. Agents as NFTs are presented as a promising use case, where holding an NFT would grant exclusive read/write access to an agent's memory in a trustless memory layer, the kind of layer Plastic Labs is working on. The article says each use would add experience specific to its holder, and a record of past holders would work like a resume, with the example of a fantasy novelist acquiring an agent once used by J. R. R. Tolkien. The article concedes most agents will likely be offered as collective SaaS-style APIs, while agents as NFTs would resemble a racehorse.
- Close-up: ccarella.eth (paragraph.xyz)
Chris Carella, known as ccarella.eth, is the second guest in the Kiwi Close-Up series, which features active Kiwi curators. The article introduces him as a longtime Kiwi member who runs Scout Game, works on Charmverse, and is active in the Nouns and Optimism communities. It notes his crypto background, including minting the first NFT on Tezos Mainnet, his interest in CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, and losing millions in Bitcoin after upgrading his laptop. The accompanying video covers what drew him to crypto, what Scout Game is, and what excites him about Ethereum.
- Rainbow token launcher (xcancel.com)
- We should talk less about public goods funding & more about open source funding (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that the term "public goods" has become too easily stretched, with commercial projects describing themselves as "building a public good", and that "open source" is a clearer alternative. He notes that central examples of digital public goods, such as academic blockchain and cryptographic research, documentation and tutorials, and open source software like Ethereum clients, are all open source. He adds that open-sourcing is itself a public good with diffuse benefits, and that open source has a well-agreed definition from the FSF and OSI. He also suggests that for physical goods, such as clean air and defense technology, open source is the most efficient route to global scale.
- WCT WalletConnect transferability unlocks in April (xcancel.com)
- Why Bitcoin Has No Rollups (research.auditless.com)
Bitcoin's lack of smart contracts and its UTXO model make it technically hard to build rollups on the network, according to this article, so the author argues that none of the current Bitcoin rollup projects can yet be called rollups. The article notes that Galaxy counts 40 Bitcoin rollups existing or in development and estimates that over $47B of BTC could be bridged into Bitcoin L2s by 2030. It defines a rollup by three criteria: Bitcoin as data availability and settlement layer, trustless L1 verification, and a unilateral exit guarantee. It argues that Bitcoin Script is not Turing complete and that UTXOs barely compose, which makes verifying state transitions and building bridges difficult.
- @nikitabier joins Solana as advisor to boost mobile app ecosystem (x.com)
Nikita Bier is joining Solana as an advisor to help select companies launch and grow their apps. He says Solana has the fundamental building blocks to break out on mobile and that many apps are already making headway. Bier writes that he has discussed ways to get more involved with Raj Gokal and Toly for a couple of years, and that the ecosystem has matured to the point where Solana apps can top the charts. More details are to come.
- AI agents on ethereum (ethereum.org)
This Ethereum.org overview presents AI agents as software that can analyze onchain data, execute transactions, and pay for resources, and says Ethereum's features make them more autonomous and verifiable. It describes zkML and TEE attestations for verifying model execution, and the x402 protocol for agent payments using stablecoins. It also cites ERC-8004, co-authored by contributors from MetaMask, Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase, which is deployed on 16 networks. The article notes that AI agents remain early-stage and experimental.
- Tim is back on FC (warpcast.com)
- Unlocking Decentralized Storage: Which Solution Holds the Key? (x.com)
The article compares the cost of decentralized storage with centralized options and argues that price should not be the only factor in choosing a provider. It cites a Coingecko research paper claiming decentralized storage is cheaper than centralized storage by around 78.6% on average, while other figures in the piece argue that Arweave can cost more than some centralized options. The article compares Arweave at about $7/GB one-time, Filecoin with Lighthouse at about $4-5/GB one-time, and Walrus at $0.25/GB per month, currently subsidized to $0.05/month. It recommends first weighing dynamic storage, data permanency, read needs and replica count, and it ends by promoting KYVE as a solution for verifying stored data.
- A simple L2 security and finalization roadmap (ethereum-magicians.org)
The author proposes a 2-of-3 proof architecture combining optimistic, ZK and TEE provers as a pragmatic route for EVM rollups to reach Stage 2 with faster finality. In this design, a state root approved by both a ZK prover and a TEE prover is finalized immediately, while a root approved by only one is finalized after 7 days only if the optimistic proof game also unambiguously favors it. The author argues the architecture is arguably the only way to satisfy these constraints, since ZK and OP bugs are far less likely to coincide than two ZK bugs. The piece also calls for standardized Ethereum-wide proof aggregation layers so that N applications can pay the roughly 500,000 gas proving cost once instead of N times.
- Scroll Hackathon - Open Economy (paragraph.xyz)
Scroll Open, a six-week hackathon on the Scroll Layer 2 network for Ethereum, began with 586 builders from 75 countries competing for $100K in prizes. A random selection of submitted projects was reviewed, though it is not representative of all entries. Examples include 4V4, a 3D avatar platform minting avatars on Scroll zkEVM; Desync, a zero-interest lending platform still in development; and Transakt, which offers cGHS, a digital currency backed 1:1 by the Ghanaian Cedi. Since its October 2023 mainnet launch, Scroll has reached over $770 million in total value locked across more than 85 DeFi projects.
- ETH Supply tracker (dune.com)
- The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (theatlantic.com)
- What does the Ethereum logo symbolise? (reddit.com)
- Vitalik‘s last cast was 25d ago (warpcast.com)
- Ethereum Core Dev Update: Pectra Fork, Testnets, Fusaka Development - March 2025 (blog.ethereum.org)
Ethereum core developers are preparing the Pectra mainnet fork after configuration issues on the Holešky and Sepolia testnets, and they plan to pick a mainnet activation epoch within the next two to three All Core Developer meetings if no unexpected problems arise. Holešky recovered after a majority of the network forked to a non-canonical chain, which led to so many validator exits that the exit queue is a year long, so a new testnet, Hoodi, was launched and will undergo the Pectra fork on March 26th. Development of the following fork, Fusaka, continues in parallel, with PeerDAS and EOF as the two major scheduled features and the Fusaka scope set to freeze on April 10.
