Top crypto stories of week 51, 2025
Mon 15 to Sun 21 December 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 15 to Sun 21 December 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 25 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz, xcancel.com, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @yonfrula: every app is a wallet now, but nobody has money anymore (farcaster.xyz)
- @lookonchain: Victim lost $50M in address poisoning attack after test transfer (xcancel.com)
A victim lost $50 million in USDT to an address poisoning attack after copying a fake address from their transaction history. The victim, identified only as 0xcB80, first sent 50 USDT as a test to their own address, 0xbaf4b1aF...B6495F8b5. The scammer then created a wallet with the same first and last four characters, and the victim sent the remaining 49,999,950 USDT to that fake address. The article notes that many wallets hide the middle of addresses with "...", so users often check only the start and end.
- Non-Custodial Wallet Key Management (opensigner.dev)
OpenSigner is an open-source, self-hostable key management system that issues non-custodial keys to users. Keys are split 2-of-3 using Shamir's Secret Sharing, so no single party can sign alone. The full key exists only in memory inside a sandboxed iframe and is discarded after every operation. Users can recover keys with a password, passkey, or automatic recovery using OTP, without seed phrases. The project is licensed under MIT and can be run with Docker or split across independent operators.
- Distribution Advantage: how to set up GTM for your crypto product (without bs) (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The article argues that crypto products win through go-to-market (GTM) execution, not only product quality, and that founders should first choose the right market, segment and channel. It cites Uniswap, where Hayden ran one-to-one promotion at conferences, offices and via DMs for about a year before its launch at Devcon 4 in Prague. Coinbase's early focus on Bitcoin and Blur's focus on pro NFT traders, who generated over 90% of OpenSea volume, are presented as examples of picking the right market. The article also recommends starting with a beachhead market, citing Satoshi's early launch of Bitcoin to a cypherpunk mailing list.
- A Practical Guide to Decentralized Websites | ENS Blog (ens.domains)
This ENS blog guide argues that teams can reduce outage and DNS-hijacking risk by hosting websites on decentralized infrastructure, and that this architecture is production-ready today. It cites a Cloudflare outage in November and December that affected around 28% of all HTTP traffic, and an October AWS US-EAST-1 DNS-resolution failure that took hundreds of apps and websites offline. The guide describes a stack in which ENS maps a name to an IPFS content hash, Filecoin provides persistence, eth.limo serves as a gateway, and a Safe multisig controls updates. It walks through deploying a static site with the Omnipin CLI in a GitHub workflow.
- Epstein Library (justice.gov)
- Gnosis Hard Fork to Recover Balancer Funds Sparks Debate on Immutability (thedefiant.io)
- @EtherRock: EtherRock 38 purchased for 90 ETH (xcancel.com)
- @thumbsup.eth: Mirror collects earned me $5-150/article, now shitcoins earn $0 (farcaster.xyz)
The author, posting under @thumbsup.eth, says that writing on Mirror with collect enabled once earned $5 to $150 per article, but that writing now earns nothing. Earlier articles were usually capped at 420 editions on Optimism or Base, priced at about 0.0042 ETH, which was then roughly $5 to $15, and typically one to five readers collected each one, sometimes ten or more. The author says the shift came from the current token, described as a worthless shitcoin that exists only to earn Zora trading fees, and says no income has come in for a year.
- The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
The author argues that Hacker News moderators suppress posts critical of Y Combinator-affiliated projects, pointing to their own experience. Their post about Element, a project they say is linked to Y Combinator through Protocol Labs, reportedly dropped from the front page's top ranks to fourth page within minutes after a sharp, non-organic traffic decline. A second post, which reached the top five and gained over 40 upvotes, was flagged for no apparent reason, then quietly unflagged hours later after its upvotes rose from about 50 to over 100. The author notes Element's CEO disputed the Y Combinator link, but says Protocol Labs was founded as part of the Y Combinator S14 program.
- @White_Rabbit_OG: Kamala Harris casually dropping a truth bomb on the nation (x.com)
- @horsefacts.eth: old NFT pfps from 2022 broken due to OpenSea CDN change (farcaster.xyz)
- Crypto is Dead (x.com)
Crypto as a self-contained industry is dying, and the underlying technology will dissolve into fintech, payments, markets and other sectors until the "crypto" label stops being useful. The old playbook of liquidity mining, points and airdrops mostly moves the same capital between slightly different interfaces, while real adoption appears among merchants in Lagos or Buenos Aires settling invoices in USDT and savers holding USDC in high-inflation economies. It also says regulation and KYC arrive as projects try to grow beyond crypto-native users, and that the bottleneck is now intent rather than UX.
- Backing up Spotify (annas-archive.li)
- I Don't Get ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents) (research.auditless.com)
The author questions the value of ERC-8004, a new Ethereum standard for onchain agent registries that has gained popularity since the Trustless Agent Day at DevConnect, arguing that its messaging is vague and that the registry is too early for people to choose agents from it. The standard has three parts: an Identity Registry where each agent is an ERC721 NFT pointing to a registration document, a Reputation Registry where clients submit 0-100 scores and tags, and a Validation Registry with hooks for validators to return 0-100 scores. The author argues that open registries remove the network effect moat, that the registry neither hosts agents nor holds developers accountable, and that feedback cannot be verified. The author also notes that token-curated registries from earlier in crypto saw no adoption in practice.
- stephancill/eth-config-resolver (github.com)
- A Debt-Driven Credit Crisis May Be On The Horizon (seekingalpha.com)
- @Eli5defi: crypto splits into institutional and agentic spheres in 2026 (x.com)
The article argues that in 2026 crypto splits into two parallel spheres, one built for institutions and one for AI agents and machines, rather than acting as a single market. It attributes this split to the failure of the speculation-first model, pointing to the Low Float / High FDV era of 2024–2025, when inflated token launches, emissions and points programs failed to retain users. The institutional sphere is described as regulated and permissioned, with tokenized Treasuries, ETFs and compliant yield products, and examples named include BlackRock's BUIDL, Ondo Finance and Franklin Templeton's BENJI. The agentic sphere is described as permissionless and machine-native, with examples including Arcium, Allora Network and Infinit Labs.
- @1OF1_art: Chromie Squiggles and CryptoPunks acquired by MoMA's collection (xcancel.com)
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has acquired Chromie Squiggles and CryptoPunks for its permanent collection, according to a post from the @1OF1_art account. The post thanks a group of collectors and contributors, including @larvalabs and @squiggleDAO, for their donation. It also credits MoMA's Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo for their support and curatorial vision.
- Staying Private in Crypto: Your Guide to Keeping Things Under the Radar (paragraph.com)
This is a how-to guide on keeping cryptocurrency activity private, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and DeFi. It recommends hardware wallets such as GridPlus Lattice1 and Keystone, peer-to-peer trading to avoid ID checks, a new address for each transaction, and a VPN such as Mullvad. For Ethereum, it names Railgun and Aztec as tools for shielding transactions, and it asks readers to donate to the author's crypto addresses.