Top crypto stories of week 32, 2025
Mon 4 to Sun 10 August 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 4 to Sun 10 August 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 18 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz, paragraph.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @DegenerateNews: Base stopped producing blocks per Basescan data (x.com)
- @chaskin.eth: Most of Farcaster doesn't care (about Roman Storm) (farcaster.xyz)
- Everything is Fine, Exit Though the Casino (thejaymo.net)
- sharp rise in phishing scams specifically targeting Trezor users (r.mailing.trezor.io)
- Gift Economics Channel Roundtable: On Value Creation and Speculation (paragraph.com)
Studio Slowcore's Gift Economics Roundtable, hosted in the /gift-economics channel on Farcaster, argues that speculation should stay secondary to value creation for creative work. Mike (@abundance) says speculative "creator economy" experiments mainly benefit good speculators rather than creators, and Trigs argues that speculation and extraction run against supporting creators. Trigs proposes that free gifts, unlike investment or speculation, let creators pay their bills and explore their creativity, making gift-giving the necessary precursor to market activity for creative content. Danica agrees that gift economies should complement markets rather than serve as an alternative to them.
- Introducing GPT-5 (youtube.com)
- @horsefacts.eth: 1215 unique FC users donated $12481 to defend Roman Storm (farcaster.xyz)
- The Case for the Curated Feed (fountain.ink)
- @DU09BTC: SOL founder spends $30k/night on hotel, Vitalik hand-washes clothes (x.com)
- @sidshekhar24: Topped up Gnosis card with single prompt to @askginadotai (x.com)
- @df: decentralized social is neutered without transparent algorithms (farcaster.xyz)
- AI and Cognitive Over-the-Counter Transhumanism (shoal.gg)
AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are presented as an emerging form of "over-the-counter" transhumanism, offering consumer-grade boosts to memory, creativity and problem-solving without clinics or implants. The argument builds on Andy Clark and David Chalmers's 1998 paper "The Extended Mind," which holds that tools can become part of a person's mind when they meet "glue and trust" conditions. By 2011, Chalmers noted that his iPhone satisfied at least three of the four criteria in skilled users' hands. The piece also warns that over-reliance can cause cognitive atrophy, citing the "Google effect," and that users may accept AI hallucinations uncritically.
- Lens Token Distributor (lens.xyz)
Lens has built a Token Distributor for gasless token distribution based on real user value rather than surface-level activity, and it is now in early testing, distributing GHO directly to qualifying users' Lens Accounts with no claim process. The first phase focuses on GHO, though the system supports any ERC-20 token. Users are ranked on behavior such as engagement frequency, how others respond to their content, trust and network connections measured by PageRank, onchain financial activity, and steady engagement over time. An ML model filters out bots, spam, and low-value accounts, and the initial phase uses heuristic scoring that the team plans to refine through testing.
- kiwimcp-client (npmjs.com)
- fcmcp-client (npmjs.com)
- @zinger: @popfi built mini app and community just to rug a pumpfun token (farcaster.xyz)
- @MikeIppolito_: Top creator coin on Zora is a porn company (x.com)
- @PhiMarHal: The onboarding experience on Lens is catastrophic (x.com)
- The Code Is Law, But Apparently Also Criminal (paragraph.com)
Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of running an unlicensed money transmission business, while jurors could not reach a verdict on the money laundering and sanctions charges. The article argues that prosecuting a developer over how people use privacy software sets a worrying precedent for open-source development. It cites the government's claim that bad actors, including North Korean hackers, used Tornado Cash to launder over $1 billion, a figure later revised to $660.5M, and notes that the Ethereum Foundation has pledged up to $500,000 toward Storm's legal defense.
- Laura Lotti - "Junk value" on Lo Squaderno n.71 (losquaderno.net)
