Top crypto stories of week 46, 2025
Mon 10 to Sun 16 November 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 10 to Sun 16 November 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 13 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, xcancel.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- open source self-hostable Farcaster Graphql API (github.com)
Charon is an open-source set of Docker Compose extensions that adds PostgreSQL storage, Redis caching, and a GraphQL API to a base Snapchain node, which is a Farcaster Hub deployment managed by the snapchain.sh installer. PostGraphile auto-generates the GraphQL API from the PostgreSQL schema and serves a GraphiQL interface on port 5000. Waypoint, a Farcaster Hub API client, subscribes to hub events and stores them in PostgreSQL, while optional backfill workers populate historical data. The stated requirements are at least 8GB of RAM (16GB recommended) and 100GB or more of disk space for the database.
- What is New Media? | Andreessen Horowitz (a16z.com)
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has built a New Media team to give portfolio founders the media capabilities they need to win the online narrative, positioning it as a turnkey operation rather than a traditional VC service. The team's offerings include owned channels such as a podcast and newsletter that each ship five times a week, "timeline takeover" launch services, and an ecosystem team that builds talent networks. The article also describes an eight-week a16z New Media fellowship for operators, creators and storytellers, starting in January 2026, to train people who will be placed at portfolio companies.
- China Accuses U.S. of Stealing 127,426 Bitcoin Worth $13 Billion (bitcoinmagazine.com)
China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) accuses the United States of stealing about 127,426 Bitcoin from the LuBian mining pool in a 2020 hack, which it calls a "state-level operation" allegedly orchestrated by U.S. intelligence. The U.S. Department of Justice says the action followed standard legal procedures and has filed forfeiture actions, claiming the seized bitcoin represents criminal proceeds. The article says the coins, valued at about $3.5 billion when taken, were worth roughly $13.3 billion at the time of reporting, and it ties the case to Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodia's Prince Group, who faces U.S. charges for alleged crypto fraud.
- Should You Buy the Memethology Card Game? (research.auditless.com)
Memethology is a digital and physical trading card game about internet memes, and the author says it is worth watching despite skepticism about crypto-based TCGs. The author notes that Devfolio reports over $70k in sales across two sold-out drops, about 10,000 digital packs, and more than 300 unique cards. Founder Colton open sourced the game, and the author praises the project as a solo grassroots effort, though the author also states that the rules are not public and that the value of the packs is hard to predict.
- @haydenzadams: Uniswap proposal to enable protocol fees (xcancel.com)
Hayden Adams announces his first proposal to Uniswap governance, made on behalf of Uniswap alongside Devina Walsh and Kenneth Kang (Labs). The proposal turns on protocol fees to burn UNI, sends Unichain sequencer fees to the UNI burn, and burns 100M UNI from the treasury. It also introduces Protocol Fee Discount Auctions and "aggregator hooks" for Uniswap v4, and has Labs stop collecting fees on its interface, wallet, and API. The article states that Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in governance for the past five years, and that the regulatory environment has since shifted.
- McDonald's Exec Stirs Up Bitcoin Crowd With McRib Return (decrypt.co)
McDonald's Senior Marketing Director Guillaume Huin noted on X that the McRib's return has become linked with Bitcoin's price movements, a correlation that social media picked up after the sandwich's U.S. return on Tuesday. Huin said some claim Bitcoin and the S&P 500 tend to perform well after the McRib returns, and that Bitcoin hit a new all-time high when the McRib returned in December 2024. The article notes the trend is not solid: Bitcoin fell to $3,250 in 2018 and $15,500 in 2022 after the sandwich's returns. Bitcoin was around $105,600 on Monday, up 6% from $98,800 at the last McRib season start, according to CoinGecko.
- @lens: Yogi has chosen to go a different path, but @hey remains open source … (hey.xyz)
- What is a Slidedoc? (freshspectrum.com)
Slidedocs are visual reports built in presentation software such as PowerPoint, designed to be read and referenced rather than projected. Nancy Duarte defines them as visual documents intended to act as stand-alone reports, not presentations. The article lists advantages including familiarity with PowerPoint, easier visual work than in Word, and the wide format suited to computer screens, and disadvantages including weaker track-changes support than Word. It also gives tips such as using takeaway-message headers, breaking the document into sections, and reducing font size when building one in Canva.
- @WallStreetApes: NYC restaurants hiring virtual cashiers from Asia at $3.25/hr (x.com)
- What To Do About Distribution (sceneswithsimon.com)
Simon, a creator, writes that he feels torn between the importance of distribution and his preference for life away from screens, describing online venues as gamed, algorithmic and noisy. He argues that canon is overplayed and that studios and fans should let it go, and he is wary of Disney's plan to let fans remix its media with AI. He says the Disney plan could strengthen mega-IP's dominance and leave less room for new creators.
- Monad Faces Community Backlash After Unveiling Tokenomics (thedefiant.io)
- @33b345: crypto holders are walking honeypots, real builders avoid conferences (x.com)
Anonymous poster @33b345 argues that crypto holders who carry large amounts of value are walking honeypots, since crypto offers a much lower threshold for being targeted than a bank account does. The post says even strong wallet security does not mitigate physical "hammer-to-the-head" risk. It also argues that real crypto participants avoid conferences and side events, which they use mainly as an excuse to meet in the same city, and that most meaningful interaction happens outside them. According to the post, events mostly attract career farmers and self-marketers, which pushes out the genuine participants.
- Trustlessness manifesto (trustlessness.eth.limo)
The Trustless Manifesto, by Yoav Weiss, Vitalik Buterin and Marissa Posner, argues that Ethereum-based systems must be designed so that correctness and fairness depend only on math and consensus, not on intermediaries. It sets out three laws: no critical secrets, no indispensable intermediaries, and no unverifiable outcomes. The authors say decentralization erodes gradually through convenience, pointing to hosted RPCs, centralized sequencing in many rollups, upgrade keys, and solvers and relayers acting as gatekeepers in cross-chain interoperability. The document ends with a pledge that signers affirm, which will be recorded on Ethereum mainnet in the Trustless Manifesto contract.
- What is the 'First NFT'? (x.com)
The article examines the contested question of which asset was the first NFT, arguing that the answer depends on whether one applies a technical or cultural definition and that records are incomplete. Its technical contenders include d/bitcoin, registered on Namecoin by David Parrish on April 21, 2011, and OLGA, minted by JP Janssen on Counterparty on June 12, 2014. Cultural candidates discussed include MyFirstCoin, the first name registered via Linagee's Name Registrar on Ethereum on August 8, 2015, and Etheria v0.9 tiles by Cyrus Adkisson from October 19, 2015. The article notes that each candidate faces objections, such as Namecoin names being treated as "burned" on expiration or Counterparty not being fully trustless.
- @exgrasia: v0 release of εxgrasia, an on-chain RPG sandbox game (xcancel.com)
- Ethereum and Prividiums: Incorruptible financial infrastructure for institutions (linkedin.com)
Anthony Rose of ZKsync argues that privacy has been a barrier to institutional adoption of Ethereum, and that ZKsync's Prividiums, private blockchains anchored to Ethereum, can address this. Each batch of transactions is proven with zero knowledge cryptography and verified on Ethereum, giving institutions a verifiable audit trail without exposing proprietary data. The article says Prividiums can move tokenized assets between systems in about one second and that ZKsync's Airbender proof system generates proofs for a Prividium batch in about one second. The first production deployment is Memento, a compliance-focused chain built with Deutsche Bank.
- Wanderer (wanderer.leegte.org)
Wanderer is an autonomous net art project by an artist that roams the map of the physical world on OpenStreetMap, choosing each turn from the hash of a 0 TIA blockchain transaction sent to itself at every junction. The work premieres at Paris Photo 2025 at the Grand Palais, with the walk beginning at 5 PM on 11 November 2025 and continuing for as long as the technology allows. Each junction can be minted once as an NFT for 1 TIA plus gas fees, as an open edition with no cap on the number of NFTs. The system was developed by Jasper van Loenen and Bram de Groot.
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Nov 14, 2025 (buttondown.com)
- Understanding neural networks through sparse circuits (openai.com)
OpenAI researchers argue that training language models with sparse weights makes their internal computations easier to interpret, and that this is a promising complement to analyzing dense networks after training. In their sparse models, most weights are forced to zero, so each neuron connects to only a few others. For simple algorithmic tasks, the researchers found small circuits that were both understandable and sufficient to perform the behavior. For example, a sparse model that closes a Python string with the matching quote type used a circuit of five residual channels, two MLP neurons in layer 0, and one attention query-key channel and one value channel in layer 10. The authors say the work is an early step, since their sparse models are much smaller than frontier models.
- AI World Clocks (clocks.brianmoore.com)
AI World Clocks is a project that displays a new analog clock every minute, each generated by a different AI model, with nine to fifteen models taking part. Each model receives the same prompt asking for HTML and CSS of an analog clock showing the current time, with a responsive design, a white background, and an animated second hand, and is limited to 2000 tokens and its lowest supported thinking level. The project was created by Brian Moore, and the idea was inspired by Matthew Rayfield.
