Top crypto stories of week 19, 2025
Mon 5 to Sun 11 May 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 5 to Sun 11 May 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 33 comments in total. Most-shared sources: nitter.net, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Farcaster Flywheel (philmohun.com)
The article, a blog post adapted from a FarCon 2025 talk, argues that the best time to build on a social network is when it is still small, because early builders can shape its growth curve while later ones only ride it. It says Farcaster's growth depends on crypto, Ethereum and L2s compounding together, with distribution as the payoff. The author's tactics include keeping distribution strategies flexible while keeping products durable, building mini-apps daily users will open, and planning to move to other platforms such as Telegram or World once growth plateaus.
- Crypto founder faked own death. We found him alive at his dad's house (sfstandard.com)
Crypto developer Jeffy Yu, who appeared to take his own life in a video on Sunday, was found alive by The Standard at his parents' Crocker-Amazon home on Wednesday. Yu is the developer of Zerebro, a token with a market capitalization of $44 million, and a memecoin called $LLJEFFY was released the same day as the video. Bubblemaps, a crypto analytics platform, showed accounts linked to Yu moved up to $1.4 million in cryptocurrency after his supposed death, and Wonderland CEO Daniele Sestagalli claimed Yu had faked his death. Yu declined to discuss the false report of his death.
- European Decentralisation Institute (eudecentralisation.org)
The European Decentralisation Institute presents itself as a think tank for the decentralised economy, arguing that decentralisation is now a strategic necessity for Europe rather than a technological curiosity. The site says decentralised technologies can address systemic challenges in energy resilience, supply chain transparency, digital identity and AI governance that centralised control alone cannot solve. Its stated work covers data sovereignty, decentralised finance, decentralised physical infrastructure (DePIN) and citizen-centric digital identity, which it engages with policymakers, elected officials and industry leaders. The page does not provide dates, figures or named policy outcomes.
- @timdaub.eth: Kiwi News pivots to focus on core content feed (warpcast.com)
- Turning physical objects into wallet's private keys (xcancel.com)
- Clanker and Gabagool story (nitter.net)
- Democrats want to introduce the End Crypto Corruption Act (axios.com)
- When will OP stack chains support EIP-7702? (perplexity.ai)
- Pectra Mainnet Upgrade Livestream | May 07, 2025 (youtube.com)
- @coinmetrics: Are Layer 2s extracting $94M from Ethereum's security? (x.com)
Coinmetrics researcher Tanay Ved, interviewed by Cointelegraph, argues that Layer 2 rollups extract value from Ethereum's security. He says the March 2024 Dencun upgrade cut L2 data-posting costs, letting Base generate about $98 million in transaction fees while paying only $4.9 million to Ethereum, roughly $94 million in net gain. The post notes that the Pectra hard fork doubles blob capacity, from 3 to 6 per block with a maximum of 9, which could enable greater L2 fee pass-through. It also frames as an open debate whether Ethereum should impose a "tax" on L2s or rely on market-driven fee discovery.
- Pectra lets hackers drain wallets with just an offchain signature (cointelegraph.com)
Security researchers Rudytsia and Usman warn that Ethereum's Pectra upgrade opened a new attack vector that lets hackers drain user wallets using only an offchain signature. Rudytsia says hardware wallets are now at the same risk as hot wallets for signing malicious messages, and that if a malicious signature is completed, "all the funds are gone in a moment." Usman says EIP-7702 delegation messages may appear as 32-byte hashes that bypass normal wallet warnings, and that EIP-7702 signatures with chain_id = 0 can be replayed on any Ethereum-compatible chain.
- @elyx0: first Pectra-based whitehat rescue from wallet drainer (nitter.net)
- Interview with Jony Ive (youtube.com)
- CZ on life in prison (youtu.be)
- Farcaster RPGF (app.farcaster-rpgf.com)
- EIP-7702: A Game Changer for Ethereum's Onchain Culture Scene (bankless.com)
EIP-7702, an Ethereum proposal that lets any externally owned account temporarily act like a smart contract account, went live today with the Pectra upgrade, according to the article. It works by letting wallets delegate control to smart contract code through authorization data, so users can access features such as sponsored gas, custom gas tokens and session keys without migrating assets to a new account. The article names Privy, an embedded wallet provider used by apps including Blackbird, OpenSea and Zora, as offering day-one support, and it links a Dune dashboard that tracks EIP-7702 usage.
- x402: An open protocol for internet-native payments backed by Coinbase (x402.org)
x402 is presented as an open, neutral standard for internet-native payments that lets clients and servers pay each other directly over HTTP. The page says servers can require payment with a single line of middleware, and that an unpaid request receives an HTTP 402 response prompting the client to pay and retry. It states that x402 has zero protocol fees, requires no accounts or personal information, and is not tied to any specific network. According to the FAQ, the protocol is production-ready, has processed millions of transactions, and has been audited for security.
- @wagmiAlexander details on @proxystudio.eth (nitter.net)
- Den: End-to-end wallet for teams (onchainden.com)
Den is a digital asset wallet platform for teams that manages treasury operations, payments, stablecoin and RWA issuance, and embedded customer wallets. Its marketing page says every transaction passes three independent security layers: validation on the mobile app or SDK signer, a network-isolated Guardian co-signer, and onchain smart contracts. The FAQ says the contracts are open-source and were independently audited by Certora and yAudit, and that Den supports EVM networks and offers Den Cloud, Your Cloud, or on-premise deployment. The page also states that Den sponsors network fees so teams do not need gas balances for each account.
- The math of when stage 1 and stage 2 make sense (vitalik.eth.limo)
Under a simplified model, stage 0 rollups are almost never justified, and a rollup should launch at least directly into stage 1. The model assumes each security council member has an independent 10% chance of breaking, which gives a stage 0 rollup a fixed 0.2728% chance of failing with a 4-of-7 council. To address concerns that slow 6-of-8 signing could delay fixing a critical bug, the text suggests letting any single council member delay withdrawals by one or two weeks. It also cautions against rushing to stage 2 at the expense of hardening the proof system.