Top crypto stories of week 41, 2025
Mon 6 to Sun 12 October 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 6 to Sun 12 October 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 10 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Reclaiming Europe’s Digital Sovereignty (noemamag.com)
Francesca Bria argues that Europe's dependence on foreign digital infrastructure is a political failure rather than a cultural one, and that building sovereign technological capacity is necessary. She writes that just 4% of global cloud infrastructure is European-owned, and that European governments, businesses and citizens depend on systems run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which are subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act. Bria also disputes Benjamin Bratton's charges that Europe's regulation-first approach and critical intellectuals cause its paralysis, arguing that the problems are weak enforcement, no industrial policy at scale and decades of market fundamentalism.
- Railgun cracks new privacy feature requested by Ethereum Vitalik Buterin (dlnews.com)
Railgun contributors have built a working prototype of a private multi-signature wallet on Ethereum, a feature that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had called for at a Web3Privacy Now meetup in Tokyo. Alan Scott, co-founder of the Railgun Project, told DL News that the wallet hides which users control it and uses the same zero-knowledge proof technology that underpins the Railgun protocol. The design implements Flexible Round-Optimised Schnorr Threshold Signatures (FROST), a method originally created for Bitcoin. The team plans to build a user interface next and demo the wallet at the Devconnect Argentina conference in Buenos Aires.
- Against Token-gating (gokhanturhan.com)
- On The Crisis of Cool (sceneswithsimon.com)
This is a newsletter-style roundup, so the summary covers its main pieces. Its lead item is Chris Marino's article on the perceived "crisis of cool," which argues that in 2020s New York the performance of being an artist has taken precedence over the production of art. The newsletter's author adds that younger people are trying to counter perceived cringeness by labeling sincere activities "performative," and predicts that offline coolness will return in a new form. Other items cover Sachin's piece on gambling's changing meaning across cultures, drawing on McLuhan and Geertz, and a ranking of the four main US cities that puts San Francisco and the DMV (DC and Baltimore) closely at fourth and fifth.
- @0xDesigner: "this is the worst thing i've ever seen" about EthereumPhone (x.com)
- @MacroCRG: This is likely the largest liquidation event in crypto history (x.com)
- Eco's New Contribution to Chain Abstraction: Permit3 (research.auditless.com)
Eco has introduced Permit3, a cross-chain approval contract that the author describes as a promising iteration on Uniswap Labs' Permit2 and an effort to bring multichain UX forward. Permit3 lets a user sign one signature covering approvals for multiple tokens, applications and chains, such as approving Uniswap to spend WETH on Unichain and Aerodrome to spend USDC on Base. It uses Merkle trees so each chain only needs its own approvals plus a Merkle proof, and it uses a salt per operation, an "async nonce" system, instead of Permit2's linear nonces. The author notes that users must still manually approve tokens for Permit3 on every chain, and that Permit3 will need time before its safety is assured.
- @pugson: Just quit my job (farcaster.xyz)
- making erc-721 great again (paragraph.com)
The author argues that ERC-721 was dropped too quickly after the digital art boom and remains an elegant, useful standard that is worth building on again now that conditions have improved. Mirror is cited as an early platform that had the right idea of onchain collecting but was held back by high fees, clunky infrastructure, and stigma around tokens. The text says stablecoins, better wallet UX, and a friendlier regulatory posture now make simple NFT products easier to launch, and it points to Courtyard's Pokémon card work and NFTStrategy as examples. It also presents permanence and provenance as the core strengths of onchain assets.
- Programmer’s Attempt to Hack Satoshi’s Billion Dollar Wallet w/ Elliptic Curves (open.substack.com)
- Farcaster OG NFT Bridge to Base (hellno-fogstr.vercel.app)
- @ted: why would you notify the platform about my trades but not show my casts (farcaster.xyz)
- The Ethereum Foundation’s Commitment to Privacy | Ethereum Foundation Blog (blog.ethereum.org)
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) says privacy must be a core part of Ethereum, and it is expanding its privacy work into a new Privacy cluster coordinated by Igor Barinov. The cluster has 47 researchers, engineers, coordinators and cryptographers, and includes PSE projects such as Private Reads & Writes, Private Proving and Private Identities, along with the Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) and Kohaku, a privacy-preserving wallet and open-source wallet SDK. The EF states that PSE has supported privacy research since 2018, building over 50 open-source R&D projects, including Semaphore, MACI, zkEmail, TLSNotary and Anon Aadhaar.
- @itsbasil: Base pushed Zora too aggressively, FC coins getting rekt as DAUs go (farcaster.xyz)
@itsbasil argues that Base pushed Zora too aggressively, integrating it without validation into the app of an $80b public company, and that the "base app" brand has since been lost barely a year in. The post says Farcaster spent over two years building against its core market, damaging its public perception, and that a token is now the only way out for both Farcaster and Base, which pushed creator coins from the top. It concludes that the long-term sustainability of TBA and Farcaster does not depend on net-new creators, and that both should have built for developers, who would do much of the work if supported.
- 0xDesigner: how stablecoins will transform everyday payments for everyday people (x.com)
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Oct 10, 2025 (buttondown.com)
- @vrypan.eth: Farcaster's shift from p2p protocol passion to DAU growth focus (farcaster.xyz)
vrypan.eth writes that Farcaster has shifted from the passion for its peer-to-peer protocol that drew him in to a focus on daily active user (DAU) growth. He says he joined in July 2022 and began running his own hub in August 2023, shortly before Farcaster opened signups to everyone in October, when it had previously been invite-only. He questions whether the protocol would feel as exciting to a newcomer today as its September 2023 version did. He says the project's ethos now centers on DAU growth rather than extensibility, data ownership and censorship resistance, and that its roadmap appears to be a list of feature requests ranked by a DAU metric.
- Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist? (frieze.com)
- Agregore (agregore.mauve.moe)
Agregore is a browser and authoring tool for the distributed web, letting users load and create content from peer-to-peer protocols without a constant server connection. It loads sites from Hypercore, BitTorrent and IPFS the same way it loads HTTP pages, and stores sites locally for offline use. Agregore automatically reshares P2P sites with others, so the more popular a site is, the faster it loads. Its feature list also includes a built-in ad blocker, support for Gemini and web3:// URLs, and APIs for uploading data through the browser's fetch() function.
- x402scan • x402 Ecosystem Explorer (x402scan.com)