Top crypto stories of week 16, 2025
Mon 14 to Sun 20 April 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 14 to Sun 20 April 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 50 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, xcancel.com, warpcast.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Why I support privacy (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that privacy is essential to decentralization and freedom, and that the Ethereum ecosystem should support it more explicitly, particularly in the digital realm. He cites the rise of AI-driven data collection and analysis, and the rise of corporate personalized pricing, as reasons privacy is becoming more urgent. He rejects government backdoors as a workable alternative, pointing to insider abuse, such as Twitter employees convicted in 2019 for selling dissidents' data to Saudi Arabia, and to hacks of sensitive government and telecom data in 2024 and 2025. He also notes that the average 19th-century conversation was never recorded, making full privacy the long-standing historical norm.
- @evan_van_ness: why I'm moving assets back to Ethereum mainnet from rollups (x.com)
- Stani on EURC yield on Aave (xcancel.com)
- @jessepollak: Contentcoin (x.com)
- New phising attack vector using Google vulnerabilities (xcancel.com)
- Tour a Venice Craftsman Compound (architecturaldigest.com)
Tech entrepreneurs Julia DeWahl and Daniel Romero moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and bought a Venice compound of four structures across two adjacent lots, then hired the firm Electric Bowery to renovate and redesign it in a modern take on Craftsman style. Electric Bowery founders Lucia Bartholomew and Cayley Lambur say the goal was a coastal compound that took the best of Venice Craftsman design and made it old-world, timeless, sophisticated, and moodier. The project took the team three years to complete across the main house, guest house, treehouse, and office studio, with the restored original Craftsman details and custom finishes throughout.
- @neodaoist: Base's roadmap for Q2 2025 (x.com)
Base's Builder product org has published a partial quarterly product roadmap for Q2 2025, which it says shares what the team is focused on shipping while leaving room for surprises. Planned chain goals include scaling blockspace throughput from 30 to 50 Mgas/s, achieving Stage 1 decentralization, and launching 200ms effective block times on mainnet, led by product lead @AnikaRaghu. Other pods cover privacy-preserving onchain account verifications (@leanthebean), Sub Accounts onboarding (@WilsonCusack), and toolkit goals for OnchainKit, MiniKit and Base MCP usage (@fkpxls and @nickprince). The post states the roadmap is not a binding commitment and that features and timelines may change.
- @LefterisJP: The funding challenge for principled, aligned apps in web3 (xcancel.com)
Lefteris, an ex core developer and builder of the app Rotki (@rotkiapp) since 2017, argues that the biggest limit facing aligned apps (open source, privacy-first, decentralized, self-hosted and non-capturable) is raw capacity, meaning funding and talent rather than ideas, demand or product-market fit. He says aligned apps build more slowly because they refuse to compromise on their values, and they are poor venture investments because their non-extractive design leaves nothing to extract. Without funding, these teams cannot iterate fast enough to respond to feedback and fall behind projects that cut corners. He notes that public goods funding attempts such as grants and retro PGF often fall short because of insufficient money, too many projects, or grifters draining the pool.
- interested.fyi matcher is matching (x.com)
- @dwr.eth: Warpcast may rebrand to Farcaster to reduce user confusion (warpcast.com)
- Chinese Android Phones Shipped with Fake Apps Targeting Crypto Users (thehackernews.com)
Doctor Web reports that cheap Android phones from Chinese manufacturers were found with trojanized WhatsApp and Telegram apps pre-installed, containing cryptocurrency clipper functionality as part of a campaign active since June 2024. The malware, dubbed Shibai, is built with the open-source LSPatch project and reportedly modifies about 40 applications, including messengers and QR code scanners, to swap Ethereum and Tron wallet addresses in chats. The malware also uploads WhatsApp messages and images from device folders to the attacker's server, where the images are scanned for wallet recovery phrases. Doctor Web says the attackers have received more than $1.6 million over the last two years across nearly two dozen wallets.
- Pump.fun Debate — Game-Changer or Grift? (nftnow.com)
- Strategic ETH Reserve (strategicethreserve.xyz)
- Bitwise crypto market review Q1 (s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com)
- Enscribe - ENS for Smart Contracts (enscribe.xyz)
Enscribe is a platform for naming and managing smart contracts, wallets, and agents under a single ENS namespace, designed for teams. It supports both .eth names and DNS domains, which both resolve onchain via ENS. Features listed include multi-user workspaces with access control, native Safe and multisig integration, one-click execution of staged changes, API keys and a CLI with MCP, and an activity log that records who changed what and when. Testimonials from Cork Protocol's CTO Baptiste Florentin and Giveth's Product Lead Lauren Luz say the platform helped them standardize contract naming, and Nouns is also cited as using it to identify its contracts.
- Node announces $25M grant to build the future of digital art (nodefoundation.com)
- PMFers with Martin Koeppelmann (youtu.be)
- Media Must Evolve (paragraph.com)
This essay argues that online media should become dynamic, "Smart Media" that evolves through user interaction rather than staying static, and it presents Bonsai, a project that launched its first templates on Lens, as an early step toward this. The author says generative AI and onchain tools such as Farcaster Frames and Lens Open Actions make this shift practical. Bonsai's "Adventure Time" template, for example, lets creators run text-based stories that unfold through feed comments, shaped by the community. The author also discloses being a Bonsai tokenholder who has supported the project through We3.co.
- @quincredible: Unpacking the meaning of 'onchain' art storage (warpcast.com)
- SuperStacks: A New Approach to Rewards on the Superchain (optimism.mirror.xyz)