Top crypto stories of week 28, 2025
Mon 7 to Sun 13 July 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 7 to Sun 13 July 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 21 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz, vitalik.eth.limo.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Ethereum 10 Year Anniversary (ethereum.org)
Ethereum is marking its 10-year anniversary with the Ethereum Torch, a one-of-a-kind NFT meant to embody the decentralization and community that defined its first decade. The NFT will be passed from wallet to wallet among carefully selected community members, developers and builders who have shaped Ethereum over the past 10 years. Each holder keeps the torch for 24 hours before passing it to the next guardian. On July 30, the NFT will be burned to celebrate the anniversary.
- A TON of BS (rekt.news)
Max Crown, CEO of TON, announced on July 6 that anyone staking $100K worth of TON tokens plus a $35K processing fee could obtain a UAE Golden Visa after a three-year lock-up. Within 48 hours, the UAE Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security, the Securities and Commodities Authority and the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority denied any such program, and VARA said TON was not licensed to operate in the UAE. The article notes that real Golden Visas require at least 2 million AED ($544k) in real estate or public investment, and Crown later apologized, saying the messaging was unclear and the initiative "leaked" before it was ready.
- @GrapheneOS: European media misrepresents GrapheneOS and Pixel phones (x.com)
GrapheneOS says European authoritarians and media outlets are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as something for criminals. It states that it opposes the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone. A Spanish-language Xataka Android article is linked alongside the statement, and its URL suggests it discusses Pixel phones as a possible tool for drug traffickers and criminals. No specific cases or figures are given.
- Comparing ChatGPT and McDonald's (open.substack.com)
- No golden visa for digital currency investors in UAE, authorities clarify (wam.ae)
- the jackpot age (x.com)
The essay argues that a culture of chasing jackpots, driven by linear and exponential wealth preferences, is spreading through finance, work and everyday life, and that it damages median outcomes and social cohesion. It cites a coin-flip simulation in which almost all of 25,000 people flipping a thousand times end up near zero despite a positive expected value per flip. It names SBF and Su Zhu of Three Arrows Capital as examples of linear and exponential wealth preferences, both of whom lost ten billion dollars. The author, who says they have made a living trading crypto, proposes that a modern equivalent of religion is needed to offer dignity and purpose to people who might otherwise chase jackpots.
- Before the Collective (substack.com)
Optimism's grant programs grew out of Plasma Group, a nonprofit research team that struggled to fund public goods work through patchwork donations and grants before reforming as Optimism in 2020 with $3.5 million from Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures. The article argues that this experience with unsustainable funding led to the "Impact = Profit" principle and the idea of funding public goods from protocol revenue. Plasma Group raised $1,593 from 126 small donors on Gitcoin Grants Round 1, and it closed on January 9, 2020. RetroPGF Round 1 in October 2021 distributed $1 million to 58 projects, and the OP token launched in April 2022 with 45% of supply dedicated to ecosystem funding.
- @deeberiroz: critical backdoor in thousands of smart contracts (xcancel.com)
VennBuild reports that it discovered a critical backdoor affecting thousands of smart contracts, leaving over $10,000,000 at risk for months. With help from security researchers dedaub and pcaversaccio and the seal_911 team, the group says it rescued the majority of the funds before the attacker could act. The post is a thread that describes how the attacker, whom the author suggests may be Lazarus, placed backdoors in thousands of contracts.
- @pichi: The Unwritten Rules of Farcaster: Curate > Tolerate (farcaster.xyz)
Writer @pichi argues that Farcaster users should actively curate their feeds rather than tolerate what the default algorithm shows them. The post recommends switching from the "Home" feed to "Following," which shows a reverse chronological feed of followed accounts. It says the "show less" button on the Home feed did nothing in the writer's experience, and that they followed no one for two months to test the Home feed and disliked the result. The writer also recommends muting topics, channels, people, and mini apps/frames, noting that mutes are private and reversible.
- The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity (newdesigncongress.org)
Digital identity systems are fragile and enable exploitation, exclusion and social engineering, and their architects cannot claim ignorance, according to Cade Diehm of New Design Congress. Diehm cites Estonia, where fraud cases rose 25% year-on-year in 2023 with losses of €21.5 million, despite a 2014 claim by Helar Laasik that there had been no fraud in 12 years. He also points to a US national citizenship database unveiled by DOGE in late June 2025, built with DHS and Palantir, and to digital identity's role in mass deportation, Israeli military targeting and the war in Ukraine.
- The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF (blog.ethereum.org)
The Ethereum Foundation is significantly expanding and reorganizing its Ecosystem Development (EcoDev) efforts into four areas, aiming to grow the number of people using Ethereum and to strengthen its technical and social infrastructure. The first area, Ecosystem Acceleration, adds four new teams for enterprise relations, developer growth, app relations and research, and founder success, with long-standing members such as Austin Griffith joining Developer Growth. Ecosystem Amplification includes the Digital Studio, which replaces the ethereum.org team, along with Strategic Events, Ethereum Everywhere, and a new EcoDev Automation team. The remaining areas are Ecosystem Support, covering grants and co-funding, and Long-Term Ecosystem Unblocking, covering policy, institutional and academic work.
- Stealth Addresses (nerolation.github.io)
Stealth addresses are a method for protecting recipient privacy in cryptocurrency transactions, letting a sender non-interactively generate a new address for the recipient so the transaction looks like it went to a random account. The approach is based on ERC-5564, which outlines a basic framework for implementing stealth addresses. A recipient publishes a stealth meta-address made of a spending public key and a viewing public key, each compressible to 33 bytes. The article notes that the viewing key can be shared with trusted parsing providers, while the spending key must stay private, and it says stealth addresses have been implemented on Ethereum mainnet and some L2s by ScopeLift under the name Umbra.
- @paragraph_xyz: Launching Coins on Paragraph - tradable ERC20s for writers (x.com)
Paragraph is launching Coins, a feature that lets readers support posts they like and gives writers a new way to earn from their work. According to the announcement, Coins are instantly tradable, fairly launched ERC20 tokens backed by a writer's writing, and the feature involves no paywalls, no gating and no recurring subscriptions. The announcement says the launch is next week and that early access is being rolled out today through direct messages.
- Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft (vitalik.eth.limo)
The author, Vitalik Buterin, argues that copyleft licenses now deserve preference over permissive ones, reversing his earlier stance. He previously favored permissive licensing, using the WTFPL for his blog, to maximize adoption and to avoid copyright altogether. His change rests on three points: open source is now mainstream, crypto has become more competitive so openness can no longer be assumed, and economies of scale risk power imbalances that copyleft can counter by encouraging diffusion of progress. He concludes that projects choosing permissive licenses 15 years ago should at least consider copyleft today.
- Solidity Celebrates 10 Years (ethdaily.io)
Solidity, the most widely used language for writing smart contracts on the EVM, marks 10 years since its 2015 release, with the Solidity team aiming to simplify the core language and move more complexity into standard libraries. Alternative compiler Solx launched its LLVM-based compiler to beta to mark the milestone. The same roundup reports that GMX suffered a $40 million exploit on its V1 instance, in which an attacker manipulated leverage-enabled functionality and inflated the vault's AUM, and that tokenized real-world assets surpassed $25 billion in market capitalization. SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce also issued a statement saying tokenized securities remain subject to federal securities laws.
- @WatcherGuru: Bitcoin reaches new all-time high of $112,000 (x.com)
- @phil: AMA with @nayafia on open source democracy and self-censoring ideas (farcaster.xyz)
- @martin: few days away from social media and you realize how dumb it is (farcaster.xyz)
- My response to AI 2027 (vitalik.eth.limo)
Defenses in biosecurity and cybersecurity could make the AI 2027 scenario's path to human extinction far less certain than it portrays. Air filtering, UVC, real-time viral sequencing and immune enhancement could together cut airborne disease transmission by perhaps 10-20x, enough to stop existing airborne diseases, even measles, from spreading. The critique also notes that AI 2027's own infographic expects cancer and aging to be cured by 2029, and that cybersecurity's endgame is likely defense-favoring given the rapid technology development the scenario assumes.
- Vibe Coding Casino (evrim.zone)
The author argues that vibe coding with AI agents exploits the same compulsion loops as gambling, and that the companies selling these tools profit from it. Using a reworked version of the Wikipedia compulsion loop chart, the author describes how a coding agent's quick results can keep users iterating, with each unfinished bug or project prompting another prompt. The post links this to gambling industry tactics, such as free credits that turn into paid subscriptions, and compares the marketing to crypto and sports betting campaigns. It also says startups like Windsurf are being valued in the billions partly because of retail investors chasing the next "jackpot" project.