Top crypto stories of week 23, 2025
Mon 2 to Sun 8 June 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 2 to Sun 8 June 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 32 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The end of the foundation era in crypto (a16zcrypto.com)
The author argues that crypto should move away from the foundation model toward ordinary for-profit companies, which the article presents as better at aligning incentives, deploying capital and responding to market forces. The article says foundations were once a legal route to progress but now add friction, citing the SEC's efforts-based decentralization test and the cost of setting up a foundation, which it puts at upwards of $500,000 and several months. It contends that foundations lack clear accountability and feedback loops, and that proposed U.S. market structure legislation, which focuses on control-based decentralization, makes foundations unnecessary.
- @timdaub.eth: Kiwi News mini app adds haptics, notifications, submissions (farcaster.xyz)
- @hellno.eth: timdaub.eth shuts down Kiwi News Telegram after years of community (farcaster.xyz)
timdaub.eth shut down the Kiwi News Telegram group on a Thursday at 13:37 UTC+2 by posting "Retiring this chat…", after which write access was removed and hundreds of members could only read. The group had been used for years for price alerts, wedding RSVPs, and a honeymoon crowdsourced in Dogecoin. The article notes that some memes in the chat were a decade old.
- Seed poem tool (seed-poem-tool.netlify.app)
- Bitcoin distribution over time (augmentedcoin.io)
- Announcing Protocol Ethereum Foundation (blog.ethereum.org)
Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Research & Development group is restructuring and renaming itself "Protocol," reorienting around three strategic goals: scaling the L1, scaling the blobs, and improving UX. The announcement says the changes aim to make the group more responsive and effective, and that some PR&D members will not continue with the Ethereum Foundation. Each goal now has named leads: Tim Beiko and Ansgar Dietrichs for scaling L1, Alex Stokes and Francesco D'Amato for scaling L2, and Barnabé Monnot and Josh Rudolf for improving UX. Dankrad Feist will serve as strategic advisor across all tracks, and the group is recruiting a UX Lead and a Performance Engineering Lead.
- Academic Paper: Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky (arxiv.org)
Researchers Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg and Alexandre Bovet report that scholar migration from Twitter/X to Bluesky is driven by peer influence, with simple rather than complex contagion. They linked 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their new profiles among 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to December 2024. Using Brazil's court-ordered suspension of Twitter/X as exogenous variation, they find treatment effects are short-lived and dose-dependent. Adoption concentrates among users deeply embedded in Twitter's social graph, public political expression predicts migration, and early reconnection with prior contacts predicts longer tenure on Bluesky.
- @maurelian.eth: The demand for uber for murder is unsettlingly high (farcaster.xyz)
- @timdaub.eth: Kiwi News mini app adds cast link previews (farcaster.xyz)
- Cogs in the Crypto Machine (paragraph.com)
The author, who spoke at a crypto event under the title "Marx for Crypto Bros," argues that crypto has adopted the same growth-at-all-costs playbook as Big Tech, turning users into addicted, mindless "cogs" through frictionless design, automation, gamification and incentives. Drawing on Marx's concept of alienation, the piece identifies three forms in crypto: alienation from the industry's original values, from one another (illustrated by a debate over tokenizing a screenshot of a woman from a dating app on Zora or pump.fun), and from human dignity. It closes with advice for humanist builders: avoid enslaving users to the product, offer real user agency, and respect user dignity.
- @ferran: leaving Farcaster due to over-financialization vs Web3 social vision (farcaster.xyz)
- Why Crypto Needs a Better Society (research.auditless.com)
Crypto's main value lies in coordination, and it could suit a production-focused society better than a consumption-driven one. Crypto lets entities make conditional commitments to each other, reducing coordination costs; it adds value today in assets such as DeFi and in open organizations, while using it to architect better societies remains untested at scale. Marko Jukic's Palladium article "The Megaproject Economy" argues that industrial society is powered by consumerism and proposes a public works economy that maximizes production instead. The argument is that crypto could help bootstrap such an economy, and it closes by asking whether crypto founders should aim to update society too.
- @nilesh: orb has been acquired by @masknetwork, stepping down as ceo (orb.club)
Nilesh announced that Orb has been acquired by @masknetwork and that he is stepping down as CEO. He says Orb started as a side project in his apartment during grad school, first as a flashcard app for learning web3, and grew after he built a simple mobile app for web3 social, which he says drew tens of thousands of testers within weeks. He reports that the project raised a few million dollars, reached hundreds of thousands of users, and that his cofounder @kipto and the team are joining Mask to continue the mission. Nilesh says he is staying in SF and exploring consumer AI, robotics and hardware.
- AI Trend report (bondcap.com)
- Into the mind of an AI skeptic (news.ycombinator.com)
- @LinusEkenstam: ChatGPT knows everything about you - data security briefing (xcancel.com)
- DappCon 2025 Agenda (vibes.dappcon.io)
- @cryptogirls: FWB scammed their investors (farcaster.xyz)
- @SchorLukas: How 100 ETH was recovered from Safe wallet cross-chain exploit (x.com)
- Web3 Privacy Hacker Manual (github.com)
W3PN HACKS 2025 is a privacy-focused hackathon held June 13-15, 2025, at Engelnest in Berlin, Germany, aimed at building real-world privacy solutions. Projects are evaluated for technical excellence, business logic, practical use cases and long-term impact, with the organizers stating a focus on impact over just bounties. The event offers seven tracks, including Advanced Cryptography, Censorship Resistance, Privacy-First AI and Public Goods, and its tracks are tech-, chain- and protocol-agnostic. Independent mentors are available across the weekend, and the submission deadline is Sunday, June 15 at 16:00 local time.