Top crypto stories of week 18, 2025
Mon 28 April to Sun 4 May 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 28 April to Sun 4 May 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 14 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, warpcast.com, blog.ethereum.org.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- running fast nowhere (eshitanandini.substack.com)
Crypto projects that build for attention and an eventual token launch tend to stagnate after launch, the author writes, with the team's focus shifting to price rather than product. The piece says builder culture ranks novelty above usefulness because attention, and ultimately the token, is the end product. It adds that building for everyone signals engagement but ends up building for no one, and that builders who stay through launch are left in insecure positions when teams offer little confidence or transparency. The piece suggests that after a correction, the projects left standing would be incumbents in areas of real need, such as stablecoins, payment rails, wallets and developer tooling.
- Gnosis Pay (dune.com)
- EOF is removed from Fusaka (x.com)
- Simplifying the L1 (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that Ethereum can become much simpler, approaching Bitcoin's protocol simplicity within five years, and that simplicity is as important to resilience and scalability as throughput gains. He states that simplicity lowers the barrier to protocol participation, reduces infrastructure and maintenance costs, and lowers the risk of catastrophic bugs and special-interest capture. For the consensus layer, the 3-slot finality redesign removes separate slots and epochs, committee shuffling and sync committees, and a basic implementation takes about 200 lines of code. For the execution layer, he proposes replacing the EVM with RISC-V, which he says could bring a 100x+ performance gain in many cases based on Succinct data, with a staged migration.
- First zk-rollup with Stage 1 confirmed: What it is and why it matters (x.com)
Scroll has become the first zk-Rollup to achieve Stage 1 status with its Euclid upgrade, which was recently approved through Scroll governance. The upgrade adds a permissionless sequencer mode that keeps the network live if the sequencer fails or misbehaves, and it enforces inclusion of Layer 1 user transactions. The article says Scroll's zk proof system was already fully functional, and that a move to a general-purpose zkVM called OpenVM, co-built with @axiom_xyz, enables continuations so that large or forced transactions take longer to prove rather than breaking the rollup. The Security Council has 12 members with a 75% quorum requirement, and upgrades carry a 3-day timelock.
- Ethereum is for financial market infrastructure: a guest thread by@malekanoms (warpcast.com)
- Ethereum R1: The Neutral Rollup for Ethereum (ethereum-magicians.org)
Ethereum R1 is a proposed rollup project that its founders present as a public, neutral alternative to L2s they say have become controlled by small groups of insiders. The project is described as fully donation-funded with no token or private sales, relying only on public ETH contributions. It is said to launch as Stage 2 from day one, with permissionless proving, a long upgrade delay, and a multisig with broad representation across the Ethereum ecosystem. Proportions of base fees would fund R&D and app development until 2030, after which they would be burned. A draft roadmap is published, and discussion is taking place in Telegram channels.
- The Ethereum Foundation’s Vision (blog.ethereum.org)
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) restates its vision, role and priorities as a steward of the Ethereum ecosystem, with the stated aim of stepping in where only it can act and stepping back where others can lead. It names two goals: maximizing the number of people who use Ethereum in ways that benefit from its underlying values, and maximizing the resilience of Ethereum's technical and social infrastructure. Examples of EF work include funding client diversity, coordinating core protocol upgrades such as The Merge and Dencun, hosting Devcon, and operating ethereum.org. The post says these priorities are not a rigid plan and are reflected in the strategies of EF's Co-EDs.
- @polynya: Uniswap v4 marks a milestone in crypto product maturity (warpcast.com)
Uniswap v4 is described as crypto's first complete product, with its core purpose now seen as finished for the foreseeable future. The author, identified in the title as @polynya, notes that v3 was already nearly complete, and that v4 took about four years to build compared with roughly one year for earlier versions. Future additions such as unified liquidity and responses to infrastructure changes like quantum-resistant zkVMs could still justify a v5, while remaining work is said to lie in governance and social areas. Aave v4 is named as the next likely complete product.
- @punk6052: EU AML regulations threaten privacy coins on centralized exchanges (x.com)
The EU's anti-money laundering regulations would bar centralised crypto-asset providers from serving anonymous accounts or accounts that allow increased obfuscation of transactions, including through anonymity-enhancing coins. The author, @punk6052, says this could lead to privacy coins such as Zcash and Monero being delisted from EU centralised exchanges and no longer custodied by those providers. The prohibition does not reach hardware and software providers or self-hosted wallets that lack access to or control over users' wallets, so wallets such as Metamask, Rabby, Zashi and Monero's wallets are not technically banned from enabling peer-to-peer transactions. The author calls this a regulatory own goal that conflicts with the EU's stated position that data should be fully anonymised, and argues it will deter software developers and reduce tax revenue.
- The Ethereum Foundation's Next Chapter (blog.ethereum.org)
Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz, the Ethereum Foundation's new Co-Executive Directors, use a blog post about their first month in the roles to set out the organization's direction for the next 12 months. Their stated priorities are scaling Ethereum mainnet, scaling blobs, and improving UX, including L2 interoperability and the application layer. Tomasz says the Foundation will communicate more openly and focus on speed of execution, accountability, and measurable metrics, while the values of open source, censorship resistance, privacy, and security remain unchanged. Hsiao-Wei says her near-term priority is strengthening the Foundation's operations to support ecosystem growth.
- Why will readers buy coins? (paragraph.com)
Paragraph's long-term success depends on encouraging ongoing commerce between readers and writers, and the article argues that coins are a worthy experiment for this, though it remains unproven whether readers will buy them. It contends that utility-based coin purchases have low speculation but offer no clear advantage over paid subscriptions, while patronage and self-expression hold more potential. The author says speculation should be a secondary or tertiary motivator, since leaning on it too hard risks short-lived, zero-sum outcomes. The article also suggests coins could act as a visible signal of value for ideas and media, something paid subscriptions cannot do.
- The Most Profitable Business Per Employee in the World (piratewires.com)
- @vitalik: Two core missions for ethereum's future growth (warpcast.com)
- The group chats that changed America (semafor.com)
Private group chats centered on venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Silicon Valley figures are described as having shaped a realignment toward Donald Trump and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right. The chats began bubbling up in 2018 and 2019 and accelerated in spring 2020, when Sriram Krishnan launched a WhatsApp group called "Build" with about a dozen elite figures, followed by dozens more within a year. Krishnan wrote that the chats are "the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion."
- How we identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken (blog.kraken.com)
Kraken says its teams identified a North Korean hacker who applied for an engineering job and then used the hiring process to gather intelligence on the candidate's tactics. The company says industry partners had tipped it off about North Korean hackers applying to crypto firms, and an OSINT investigation found one email tied to a larger network of fake identities, one of which was a known foreign agent on a sanctions list. Rather than tipping off the applicant, the security and recruitment teams advanced them through multiple rounds, and during a final interview with Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco, they slipped in verification prompts that the candidate could not convincingly answer.
- @horsefacts: iterated reciprocity & the social dynamics of crypto interactions (warpcast.com)
The author observes iterated reciprocity, a pattern of giving and getting back that repeats, in two crypto settings: collecting on @rodeodotclub and receiving rewards back before collecting again, and sending tips, receiving tips back, and tipping again. The post says watching a balance drop and return is satisfying, but argues that such exchanges are less common than they should be, since many crypto exchanges are one-way, impersonal, or zero-sum. The author also guesses that the appeal of iterated reciprocity may stem from it being the evolutionary basis of human social coordination.
- Official reason to remove EOF from Fusaka (github.com)
The author, a participant in the Ethereum protocol process, argues that EOF should be removed from Fusaka despite several client teams supporting it. Their reasons are risk to the Fusaka timeline, since debating EOF variants delays shipping PeerDAS, which all client teams see as the top priority; uncertainty about the Option D variant, whose implications some participants did not understand on the call; and failures in ACD's prioritization process, where objections from community members were not adequately addressed. The post suggests EOF's champions could make their case for Glamsterdam, and it notes that PAY was left marked as CFI'd because people wanted it included in Fusaka regardless of EOF.
- No One Wants to be the Reserve Currency (x.com)
Despite its perceived privilege, the dollar's reserve role is unsustainable, and no nation wants to take it on. The article cites the Triffin Dilemma, named after Belgian economist Robert Triffin, under which supplying dollars requires persistent U.S. trade deficits that erode manufacturing, which fell from about 25% of GDP in the 1960s to below 12% today. It says export powers such as Germany, Japan and China avoid reserve status because it would raise their currencies' value and hurt exports, with Japan's Plaza Accord experience cited as a warning. Trump's 10% baseline tariffs on all imports signal America's reluctance to keep bearing these costs, and any transition would likely be turbulent.
- Quadratic Acceleration (q-acc.giveth.io)