Top crypto stories of week 34, 2025
Mon 18 to Sun 24 August 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 18 to Sun 24 August 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 32 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @freakyfawi: Apple zero-day exploit targeting crypto wallets via images (x.com)
- Aave tumbles following rumors regarding World Liberty token allocation (cointelegraph.com)
Aave's AAVE token fell more than 8% on Saturday after rumors that the DeFi protocol would receive a different token allocation from World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi platform backed by members of Donald Trump's family. Blockchain reporter Colin Wu said the WLFI team told WuBlockchain that the claim that Aave will receive 7% of the total WLFI token supply is false. The rumor referenced an October 2024 WLFI community proposal that would give the Aave DAO 7% of the WLFI governance token's circulating supply and 20% of protocol revenues from the WLFI deployment on Aave v3. Aave founder Stani Kulechov called the proposal "the art of the deal" and signaled its terms were still valid, and the token fell from about $385 to a low of $339 before rebounding to about $352.
- Top crypto apps on Ethereum (ethereum.org)
- @0xBalloonLover: most crypto usage metrics are extremely cheap and easy to fake (x.com)
- @timdaub.eth: New Kiwi submission contest with 100 USDC for top 20 holders (farcaster.xyz)
- Epoch 9 - Ethereum Stories (blog.octant.build)
- EU Accelerates Digital Euro Plans After US Stablecoin Law (cryptotimes.io)
The European Union is intensifying efforts to introduce a digital euro after the United States passed the GENIUS Act regulating stablecoins, according to the Financial Times, as reported in the article. Sources in the talks say the law has created urgency among EU officials who fear falling behind in the race to develop central bank digital currencies. The article reports growing openness to running the digital euro on a public blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana rather than a private system, and it notes that dollar-backed stablecoins make up 99% of the global stablecoin market. The European Central Bank says it is still weighing centralised and decentralised technologies and has not decided on the final structure.
- Apple Patches Zero-Day in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Exploited in Targeted Attacks (thehackernews.com)
Apple has released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS to fix a zero-day vulnerability that it says has been actively exploited in the wild. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-43300 with a CVSS score of 8.8, is an out-of-bounds write in the ImageIO framework that can cause memory corruption when a malicious image is processed. Apple said it was aware of a report that the issue may have been used in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals, and that it was fixed with improved bounds checking. With this update, Apple has fixed seven zero-days exploited in real-world attacks so far this year.
- The Whale of Mass Destruction (asomo.co)
Bitcoin has no rational fundamental pricing model, so its market has been driven largely by guesswork and hype rather than real-world assessment. Unlike shares or bonds, which are legal contracts paying dividends or interest, a bitcoin token gives its holder no income or voting rights and is described as a limited edition digital object capped at 21 million. A 34% rise followed by an 18% crash the next week was, according to the text, mostly random, driven by guesswork and hysteria rather than real-world events. Its dollar use depends on countertrade, which would stop working if the token's price fell to $0.
- AGENTS.md (agents.md)
AGENTS.md is a simple, open Markdown format for giving coding agents the project context and instructions they need, and it is used by over 60k open-source projects. It is meant to sit alongside README.md, which stays focused on human contributors, while AGENTS.md holds build steps, tests, and conventions that might clutter a README. The format is stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, and the page notes that OpenAI Codex, Amp, Jules from Google, Cursor, and Factory were among the collaborators behind it. Nested AGENTS.md files can be placed in subprojects, and the closest file to an edited file takes precedence, though explicit user chat prompts override everything.
- KOL Wall of Shame List (x.com)
- Ethereum Monetizes Open Source (bankless.com)
The article argues that Ethereum's open source foundation makes it the strongest home for open source financial software, using a cycling analogy: the largest group, or peloton, wins because it coordinates effort and conserves energy, and there is no finish line. It says Ethereum's inclusive design, including its comprehensible specification, multiple clients written in different languages, and multiple L2 implementations, keeps more participants in the pack. It also describes ETH as the native asset that flows through, secures, and coordinates this ecosystem, serving as both fuel and collateral, and says its value comes from network effects rather than profit margins or revenue.
- girl markets (complimentary) (tooonline.beehiiv.com)
Boys Club argues that prediction markets should expand beyond traders and elite gamblers to attract women, proposing a product called POPMARKET designed for "girl" markets around culture. The post says culture markets make up only 5% of markets on Polymarket and that women are projected to control about 75% of U.S. discretionary spending by 2028. Boys Club says it emailed Shayne of House Polymarket and Tarek of House Kalshi about the concept but had not received a reply, so it is sharing its thoughts publicly.
- The World’s Largest ETH Holder - Tom Lee on Treasuries, Ethereum Dominance (youtube.com)
- tokens are getting more expensive (ethanding.substack.com)
The author argues that flat-rate AI subscriptions cannot be sustained because cheaper models are offset by rising token consumption. The argument rests on the idea that demand concentrates on the newest frontier model, which costs about the same per token over time, while agentic tasks now run far longer: the article says task length has been doubling every six months and that Anthropic's Claude Code consumed 10 billion tokens in a month. It cites Claude Code rolling back its $200/month unlimited tier and Windsurf being sold for parts as evidence. The author concludes that no flat subscription price works in this environment and suggests switching costs or vertical integration as alternatives.
- USDC Base active users (90d) (dune.com)
- THE END OF TRENDS (open.substack.com)
Emily, a founder of Nemesis, argues that trend forecasting has become unreliable in an age after trends, when unexpected connections are constant rather than rare and early adopters no longer reliably lead to the next trend. She draws on Justin Pickard's 2012 Gonzo Futurist Manifesto, which mapped sensitivity to weak signals onto the OODA loop, but says the Observe stage is now compromised by contaminated, overloaded media. Her talk, given at FWB FEST 2025, also recalls the GPT-3-generated DOOM Report from five years earlier, whose prediction of "the end of trends" she describes as prescient.
- @kazani.eth: Germany's Supreme Court suggests ad blockers may be illegal (farcaster.xyz)
- Optimism airdrop 5 (app.optimism.io)
- The Performative Male Summer That Wasn't (getthemelt.com)