Top crypto stories of week 31, 2025
Mon 28 July to Sun 3 August 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 28 July to Sun 3 August 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 31 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @sterlingcrispin: Low liquidity AMM coins are shitcoins regardless of branding (x.com)
Sterling Crispin argues that low-liquidity coins on automated market makers with exponential price curves are shitcoins regardless of whether they are branded as Creator Coins, Culture Tokens, Music Tokens, AI Tokens or Memecoins. He says these tokens form a zero-sum game in which retail buyers get picked off by snipers, bundlers, coordinated pump-and-dumps and autonomous trading bots. He states that 99.99999% of such tokens go to zero quickly, and that any that survive more than a year are rare exceptions. He directs the critique at launchpads that repeat the same product and at buyers who expect their token to be different.
- @vrde: Etherium Foundation launches 10th anniversary NFT that fades in 100 years (x.com)
The Ethereum Foundation has launched a "Happy Birthday Ethereum" NFT to mark the blockchain's 10th anniversary, and the artwork is designed to fade over 100 years. The NFT is a fully on-chain generative SVG that slowly fades with each passing day, and a video shows the simulation over time. It can be minted for 0.001 ETH (about $3.75) during a 24-hour public window that opens exactly 10 years after the genesis block, with the next window set for July 30, 2035, and new windows every 10 years until 2125. The artwork is by @ilyakazakov.
- gtUSDa (app.gauntlet.xyz)
- Farcaster Dry Powder (dune.com)
- Self-Hosting AI Models After Claude's Usage Limits (steipete.me)
The author, writing about switching from Claude Max's weekly-limit change, concludes that self-hosting large coding models is not economically worth it today, and that paying per token is the saner choice. They recommend Claude Code as the main terminal tool, opencode with Qwen 3 Coder hosted on Alibaba as an alternative for simpler tasks, and Gemini for debugging. They report that an 8x H200 rented rig on DataCrunch costs $15/h, roughly $11,000 a month if run 24/7, while Alibaba was slightly faster than their optimized rig in their tests. The post also includes a setup guide for running Qwen3-Coder-480B on Vast.ai.
- The best risk-adjusted USDC yield across DeFi (gauntlet.xyz)
Gauntlet USD Alpha is a DeFi vault strategy that automatically rebalances USDC into a mix of stablecoin yield opportunities across chains, with the stated main goal of maximizing risk-adjusted, real yield. The strategy is built on Base and draws from over 200 stablecoin vaults across more than 10 networks and dozens of protocols. According to the page, its backtest weighted yields from vaults.fyi averaged 4.5% as of June 2025, after ranging from 5% to 15% over the prior year. The page says the strategy caps risk-on stablecoins at a 40% parameter, and that individual users can deposit USDC non-custodially through The Gauntlet App.
- Signet – A pragmatic Ethereum rollup (signet.sh)
Signet is a rollup for Ethereum that settles cross-chain transfers within the same Ethereum block, without proofs or withdrawal waits. The project says it removes a decade of accumulated complexity, such as proving systems and state roots, by using market-based asset swaps between chains instead of proofs. It states that same-block cross-chain transfers either complete entirely or revert entirely, that block production uses round-robin assignment to prevent auction dynamics, and that existing Solidity contracts can be deployed unchanged with tools like Foundry, ethers.js and viem. The page lists Signet inclusion at about 12 seconds compared with about 5 minutes for other rollups.
- Free Market Friends with Naomi Oba (theblockchainsocialist.com)
Naomi Oba discusses problems with crypto culture, including its obsession with quantification and financialization, and argues for learning to feel emotions instead. In this podcast episode, the host says Oba's Dappcon presentation, "Crypto Culture and its Discontents," set the stage for his own talk on Solidarity Primitives, which Bread Cooperative has been building. The episode also covers the Sapphire Punk manifesto, which Oba helped write, as a post-cypherpunk politics that rejects the extreme individualism rooted in the original cypherpunk movement.
- @pcaversaccio: Infostealers are crypto's biggest problem, weak OS design enables (farcaster.xyz)
Pcaversaccio argues that infostealers are probably the biggest problem facing the crypto ecosystem, based on a review of the last months' SEAL 911 tickets. He says weak OS design, including weak data compartmentalisation and permissive default trust models, is the major enabler, especially on macOS and Windows. He calls for prioritising security-first OS choices, such as QubesOS, over UX, while acknowledging that moving most users there is not realistic.
- @aeyakovenko: Sounds like the fundamental value is zero (x.com)
- @ETHZilla_ATNF: ETHZilla launches as NASDAQ-listed Ethereum treasury vehicle (x.com)
- @vgr: Protocols as skeletal horror vs AI's flesh horror - crypto's dual nature (farcaster.xyz)
Vitalik Buterin's (no, the author is @vgr, Vitalik Buterin is not named in the text) — correction: the text is a short social media post by @vgr, and it argues that crypto protocols should be framed as a skeletal horror, the counterpart to AI's flesh horror. It contrasts protocols' fixed shapes, barriers and deterministic constraint with AI's shape-shifting, ooze-like nature. The post says normies find crypto cringe and that crypto people wrongly try to make it "Fun," and it suggests the real task is to make crypto a dual horror to AI, characterized by mindless, crystalline determinism and a sharp split between absolute freedom and absolute constraint.
- @vrde: Technical breakdown of fully on-chain SVG cat for Ethereum 10y (x.com)
The thread by @vrde explains how the cat artwork made for Ethereum's 10th anniversary is built fully on-chain, with the SVG generated and stored inside the Ethereum mainnet smart contract and no external dependencies. It describes two contracts: HappyBirthdayEtherium.sol, an ERC-721 that sets the minting rules and assigns each token a random seed, and RenderCat.sol, which generates the SVG and JSON metadata, encodes them in base64, and places them in a data URI. According to the thread, the artwork is deterministically rendered from that seed.
- @keikreutler: Kernel KB11 mentorship program now open for crypto builders (x.com)
- AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic (open.substack.com)
Chris Dixon's essay argues that AI is best understood as polytheistic rather than monotheistic, with many strong models from different factions converging on similar capabilities, so no single dominant AGI is likely. The text presents AI as constrained rather than omnipotent: it is economically constrained by costly API calls, mathematically constrained by its inability to solve chaotic, turbulent or cryptographic equations, practically constrained by the need for prompting and verification, and physically constrained by its reliance on humans to supply context. The article also claims that AI is better suited to visuals than text because interfaces and images are easier for humans to verify, and that AI is empirically decentralizing.
- @joeyiny: Viral.fun launches music bulletin board with song coins for discovery (x.com)
- BlobKit is Live (ethcf.org)
- @officer_cia: iOS 18.6 emergency update fixes Safari/Chrome vulnerability (x.com)
Apple has released an emergency iOS 18.6 update to fix a serious security vulnerability in Safari and Chrome browsers, which the article says hackers are already exploiting. According to the article, simply visiting a website can trigger the malicious code, and no download is required. It also states that all iPhones from the XS model onward are at risk, and that attackers could access passwords and banking information or enable hidden surveillance.
- Money on the Mind (empower.com)
Empower's "Money on the Mind" survey of 2,206 Americans aged 18 and up, conducted June 10-12, 2025, finds that over a third (36%) lose sleep over financial worries, rising to 44% of Millennials. Over half (53%) say they feel financial stress more acutely than ever, yet 35% say they actively work to improve their finances when such thoughts arise. The most common steps reported are cutting back on dining out (53%) and buying fewer non-essentials (46%), while 47% say they feel confident they will reach their financial goals.
- @js_horne: Zora is the new onramp for crypto (x.com)