Top crypto stories of week 35, 2025
Mon 25 to Sun 31 August 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 25 to Sun 31 August 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 18 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users Conversations and Reporting Content to Police (futurism.com)
OpenAI's new blog post says it scans users' messages for certain harmful content, routes flagged conversations to a small human review team that can ban accounts, and in some cases refers imminent threats of serious physical harm to others to law enforcement. The company also said it is currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement, citing the privacy of ChatGPT interactions. The article notes that the policy's scope remains unclear and that the rule appears to conflict with OpenAI's privacy stance in its lawsuit with the New York Times and other publishers.
- New contest: Kiwi karma holders get 50 USDC, deletecasts.com sponsors (farcaster.xyz)
- Why we sued X (shaw.wtf)
Eliza Labs has sued X, arguing that X demanded payment and then stalled after extracting technical information from the open source AI agent project. According to the post, X demanded a $50,000 monthly enterprise license, or $600,000 a year, on threat of legal action, though Eliza Labs already paid over $20,000 annually in licenses and fees. The post says that after months of requests for documentation, framework access and usage numbers, X stopped responding to follow-ups, and that X and xAI have since filed a lawsuit alleging Apple and OpenAI engage in similar anticompetitive conduct.
- Beyond stablecoins: The evolution of digital money (cloud.google.com)
Traditional finance can modernize payments by running commercial bank money on shared ledgers instead of adopting stablecoins, without reinventing money. Stablecoin transaction volume tripled in 2024 to $5 trillion in organic transactions, but stablecoins still face unresolved issues including regulation, compliance, fragmentation, and reduced bank lending. The Economist estimates that fragmented payment systems could cost the global economy $2.8 trillion, or 2.6% of global GDP, by 2030. Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL) is presented as a Google Cloud platform for managing commercial bank money accounts and transfers.
- @timdaub.eth: reflecting on "stupid people" 2x2 and founder journey (farcaster.xyz)
- it's a joke how many Web 3 startups we invested in have quietly shut down (x.com)
- Matter (hq.getmatter.com)
Matter is a read-later app for iPhone, iPad, and web, which its page says has earned three Apple "App of the Day" honors. Users can save articles, threads, and PDFs, and turn newsletters, blogs, and articles into audio playlists with a voice the page describes as hard to distinguish from a human. Other listed features include a browser extension, newsletter delivery through Gmail or a unique Matter email address, offline full-text search, tagging, and highlighting. The page also says the app was built by a small team of avid readers.
- kiwistand v0.10.0 released (smart wallet compatible) (github.com)
- Sponsor next rotki release (rotki.com)
Sponsors of the next rotki release can mint a sponsorship NFT tied to the upcoming release, with each tier offering its own perks and directly funding independent, open source development. Sponsors pay from their wallet, then sign in with that wallet to submit a name for the release changelog, along with an image for the silver and gold tiers. Each NFT held counts toward a sponsor's place on the leaderboard, so holding more NFTs raises the ranking. The page does not list tier prices.
- @Quanterty: Everyone left the casino or lost it all (x.com)
- The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays (aeon.co)
Digital platforms now link ordinary individual choices into systems that classify, rank and modulate people, producing a paradox between personal freedom and social control. The IBM Model 650, sold from 1953 to 1962, is presented as an early example, with its first installation at John Hancock in Boston in 1954 calculating sales commissions for about 7,000 insurance agents. Unlike Friedrich Hayek's 1944 warning in The Road to Serfdom that state control would bring tyranny, the danger now may come from platforms that erode the "interstitial liberty" granted by gaps between systems that do not integrate, a road to "selfdom."
- A short history of Uniswap (blog.uniswap.org)
Hayden Adams, who built Uniswap, recounts the project's origins from 2017 to mid-2018 as a personal history of its first version. He describes learning Ethereum after being laid off in July 2017, then building a proof-of-concept automated market maker in late 2017 at friend Karl Floersch's suggestion. Pascal Van Hecke funded a month of research, and by March 2018 a team including Callil Capuozzo and Uciel Vilchis had built a full demo. After Vitalik Buterin suggested a Vyper rewrite, Adams spent two weeks porting the contracts, and the post credits Dan Robinson with a 30% gas efficiency gain on a flight home from Edcon 2018.
- Rekt - BetterBank (rekt.news)
BetterBank, a PulseChain lending protocol, lost about $5 million when an attacker exploited its bonus minting system by creating homemade liquidity pairs that avoided the tax logic applied only to pairs the team had designated as "official." The article says auditor Zokyo had flagged this attack path before launch, but BetterBank downgraded the issue to "Low" after its test used ETH instead of worthless tokens. The attacker later returned 550 million pDAI, and the article notes that about 309 ETH was converted, with some reports suggesting 215 ETH, before funds were sent through Tornado Cash.
- @boldleonidas: Wake up call (x.com)
- ON-365: Onchain Culture (ournetwork.xyz)
- Email as a Wallet (EaaW) | EtherMail (ethermail.io)
EtherMail is promoting Email-as-a-Wallet (EaaW), a service that turns a Gmail or Apple-linked email inbox into a Web3 wallet that can buy crypto, interact with products like OpenSea and Rarible, and send or claim on-chain assets. According to the FAQ, users can set up the account in less than one minute, and a wallet is created automatically even without an existing one. Crypto purchases use EtherMail's integration with the Moonpay Onramp DApplet, and the page says test transfers are off-chain and incur no gas fees.
- Are We Decentralized Yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)
Are We Decentralized Yet? is a dashboard by Rob Ricci that measures how concentrated user data and infrastructure are across decentralized systems, using the Herfindahl–Hirschman and Shannon indices. It tracks the Fediverse (including Mastodon and Pixelfed), the Atmosphere (including Bluesky), Bluesky Trusted Verifiers, public git forges, and email, DNS and certificate authority providers. Web hosting data draws on the Tranco Top 1M list, email data comes from a 2021 study by Liu et al., and network data comes from a SIGCOMM 2025 study by Habib et al. of the 10,000 most popular websites in 150 countries, measured in May 2023. User data is described as only one measure of centralization.
- @kazani.eth: GEO-OSINT exercises for location identification from photos (farcaster.xyz)
- Introducing EulerEarn: Passive yield, professionally curated (x.com)
- Protocol Update 003 — Improve UX (blog.ethereum.org)
Protocol's "Improve UX" track focuses on interoperability as its highest-leverage opportunity over the next 6 to 12 months, aiming to make cross-chain interactions seamless, secure and permissionless. The near-term strategy centres on intent-based architecture and general message-passing, with work split into Initialisation, Acceleration and Finalisation streams. The Open Intents Framework, a collaborative effort including Ethereum Foundation contributors and teams such as Across, Arbitrum and Hyperlane, is slated to complete its open-source solver and crosschain validation module in Q4 2025. Fast L1 confirmation, led by Roberto Saltini and Mikhail Kalinin (Consensys), targets Q1 2026 availability in all consensus clients, cutting confirmation from 13 to 19 minutes down to 15 to 30 seconds.