Top crypto stories of week 26, 2025
Mon 23 to Sun 29 June 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 23 to Sun 29 June 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 26 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz, x.com, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @timdaub.eth: Kiwi Rewards launches with 50 USDC prizes for quality posts (farcaster.xyz)
- Gooning by Design (networkcultures.org)
The essay argues that gooning, a practice of prolonged edging to porn, is becoming a mainstream logic of platform design, with Pornhub Shorties as the clearest example. It says the launch of Pornhub Shorties, a TikTok-style feed that embeds porn in an infinite vertical scroll, made the link between doomscrolling and gooning explicit. The author notes that the feature was first called "the goonscroll" by a Reddit user in the NoFap subreddit. The piece also presents the trend as a continuation of older habits, such as endless searching for the perfect porn video on Pornhub, rather than a new phenomenon.
- @kpk_io: 6,000 ETH swap for ENS DAO generated $2.36M excess value via CoWSwap (x.com)
- Does digital ID have risks even if it's ZK-wrapped? (vitalik.eth.limo)
ZK-wrapped digital ID solves important problems, such as proving age or humanity without revealing legal identity, but it still carries risks. These mainly stem from enforcing one identity per person: applications may use a single persistent ID per user, weakening pseudonymity, and governments or employers can compel users to reveal their secrets. Zero-knowledge proofs do not address non-privacy errors such as statelessness, injury, or spoofed biometrics. Pluralistic identity, where multiple ID types or social-graph links coexist, is presented as the best realistic solution, since proof-of-wealth alone is insufficient for UBI-like uses.
- Top Zora creators by Market cap (zora.co)
- @0xdesigner: 13 prompting techniques for better vibe coding (farcaster.xyz)
This thread lists 13 prompting techniques for vibe coding, presented as small changes that the author says yield large performance improvements. Recommended practices include using "think" keywords with Anthropic models to increase the token budget, spelling out responsibilities rather than relying on titles in role prompts, and putting context at the start of a prompt with the task at the end. The author also suggests asking models to decompose tasks before starting, supplying examples (noting that "one example is good, many examples is better"), and giving the same prompt to every model to find a majority-vote solution. Model and platform strengths are listed by the author based on personal experience, such as o3 for planning and debugging and claude code for refactoring existing codebases.
- The End of Serious Business Models (research.auditless.com)
The author argues that AI makes the traditional business moat of defensible value less reliable, so speed and distribution may become the main sources of advantage. Fast-moving founders could be displaced by "super-aggregators" that build companies with AI agents, while distribution-led businesses risk becoming performative edutainment. The post contrasts this with Craig Mod, who funds book projects through a $10/month subscription called Special Projects, and reports that he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from memberships and more from books.
- Crypto Bombshell: Developer Claims XRP Could Hit $20,000 (tradingview.com)
Developer Chad Steingraber has laid out a theory that XRP could reach $20,000 per coin, a level roughly 10,000 times its price near $2 at the time of the article. His argument, first published in 2022 and recently resurfaced on X, rests on three conditions: growth in tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger, banks holding XRP as a reserve asset, and a shrinking supply on public markets. He says roughly 20 billion tokens remain in public hands, and that institutional lock-ups could cut circulation below 100 million. The article notes that XRP's ongoing SEC court case and competition from Ethereum and Solana present clear obstacles.
- ENS Developer Survey (enslabs.notion.site)
- Crypto Market Recap (investingnews.com)
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued two measures defining prediction market event contracts as federal swaps while excluding casino-style gambling and sportsbook wagers. On October 9 the agency opened a proposed rule for public comment that expands the federal "swap" definition to cover event contracts tied to sports, politics, culture and weather. CFTC Chair Michael Selig said these products fall within the agency's exclusive jurisdiction, and both measures carry 30-day public comment windows.
- How to disappear from the Internet (youtube.com)
- Lens Builder AMA (bloomers.tv)
- AI Models And Parents Don’t Understand ‘Let Him Cook’ (404media.co)
Manisha Mehta, a soon-to-be 9th grader, presented research at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens showing that Gen Alpha slang is hard for parents, professional moderators, and large language models to interpret. The paper compares kid, parent, and professional moderator performance with four LLMs: GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama 3. Kids scored 98, 96, and 92 percent across the three categories, while parents scored 68, 42, and 35 percent, and the LLMs performed about the same as parents.
- Manifesto for Future AIs (youtu.be)
- Using Portal network protocol for history-expiry (ethresear.ch)
The Finalized Chain History subnetwork is proposed as a decentralized storage layer, built on the Portal wire protocol, for finalized historical Ethereum data. It assumes nodes are Execution Layer clients that store all historical headers locally, so headers are not kept on the network. Block bodies and receipts are stored using RLP encoding, and a custom content_id function swaps the 16 least significant and 48 most significant bits of the block number, spreading content across the domain while keeping consecutive blocks close. The author chose CYCLE_BITS=16 because it simplifies implementation and because peers storing at least 1/256 (about 0.4%) of content would hold sequences of at least 256 consecutive blocks.
- Cultural Nihilism and the Rise of The Grifter (youtube.com)
- Coding Agents: zed.dev (paragraph.com)
The author, who writes under the handle papa, argues that AI-integrated tooling, using Zed as the example, lets one developer build full-stack systems in weeks that previously needed a team of five over six months. Two projects are described in detail: MegaVibe, a decentralized tipping platform with Mantle blockchain micropayments and GPS-verified proof-of-presence, which the author says was delivered as an MVP in 1 week for under $500 in infra and tooling costs; and ImperfectCoach, an AI coaching app built on OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, created in under 4 weeks. The article also includes a comparison table claiming Zed starts in under one second and uses about 150MB of RAM, versus 3-5 seconds and about 500MB for VS Code.
- @pcaversaccio: Ledger drops backwards compatibility (x.com)
A tweet by @pcaversaccio criticizes Ledger for dropping backwards compatibility, which the author says effectively forces users to buy a new device and re-enter their seed phrase. The author says many users rely on the Ledger Nano S and that new features are being withheld from it for business reasons. The post links to Ledger's developer news page.
- attention and speculation as primary economic drivers (kyla.substack.com)
The argument holds that attention has become the main source of economic and political value, with speculation converting it into funding, elections and policy. Examples include Trump announcing Iran strikes on Truth Social, Zohran Mamdani winning the NYC Democratic mayoral primary over Andrew Cuomo after polling at 1% about 4.5 months earlier, and Cluely raising $15 million led by a16z. Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 that information abundance creates a scarcity of attention, and Robert Shiller coined narrative economics, arguing that stories drive economic behavior.
- Ripple eyeing ‘multiple acquisitions,’ Ethereum-like upgrades to XRP Ledger (dlnews.com)
Ripple is in talks for multiple acquisitions, according to Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz, who told DL News that the company has "multiple potential acquisitions in various different stages." Ripple bought prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in April and previously acquired crypto custody firms Metaco for $250 million and Standard Custody for an undisclosed amount. Schwartz also said the XRP Ledger is being made more "programmable," and Ripple is building a lending protocol for the ledger that is set to debut in the third quarter of the year, pending validator approval.