Top crypto stories of week 52, 2025
Mon 22 to Sun 28 December 2025
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 22 to Sun 28 December 2025, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 7 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz, x.com, xcancel.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Coinbase's System Update Raises Questions (research.auditless.com)
Coinbase's System Update release raised concerns from the author, who is a Coinbase shareholder, that the company is moving toward monetizing users aggressively through subscriptions, fees and low yields. The article cites the Coinbase Advisor, an AI app that gives investment recommendations and lets users trade directly, as an example. It says the advisor's sample portfolio of Coinbase-held BTC (0% yield), ETH (1.7% staking yield with a 1% withdrawal penalty) and USDC (0% yield unless on Coinbase One) is largely a repackaging of Coinbase's products, and that it recommends prediction market positions. The article also praises technical advances such as stock tokens and the Base App, and notes that Coinbase and M0 will compete in distinct but overlapping stablecoin niches.
- @VitalikButerin: Europe should take Pirate Party approach, not totalitarian (xcancel.com)
Vitalik Buterin argues that European governments should take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment rather than pursue an environment free of disliked content, which he calls totalitarian and anti-pluralistic. He says a free society must accept that some people will sell products and voice views others consider dangerous or false, and that the real goal is to keep such content from dominating, not to remove it. He supports incentives for social platforms to be more open and transparent, including his proposal that algorithms be published with a one- to two-year delay alongside zk-proofs that the live algorithm matches the published one. He also says Taiwan has done something similar, as @audreyt has described, and opposes banning anonymity for individual posters.
- @chriscocreated: Building Sopha, a Farcaster client for depth over trading (farcaster.xyz)
Chris Coc is building Sopha, a Farcaster client intended as a place for depth, reading, thinking, and conversation rather than trading. The post says Sopha focuses on sense-making, culture, and ideas that take time, aimed at people who value signal over reach. It states the client and a mini-app are already in production with 350+ casts curated, and the author is asking Purple DAO for a small amount of support to cover core infrastructure costs.
- A Call for New Aesthetics - Patrick Collison call artists, designers, architects (newaesthetics.art)
Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are offering grants of $5k to $250k to artists, architects and designers working to define a new aesthetic for the twenty-first century. They say the Bauhaus shows how deliberate artistic ambition can shape a century, and they ask what the aesthetic of the present era will be and what new directions are beautiful. The grants focus mainly on visual arts and architecture but are open to all mediums, and the funders are neutral on AI use, though they will not fund work that is already ubiquitous. Applications are to include examples of work and a rough plan for the grant, and an update says the applications far exceeded expectations and grantees have been contacted.
- @pierrepauze: Long caster (farcaster.xyz)
- After the Art World, Part 1 (outlandart.substack.com)
Brian Droitcour argues that the art world is contracting and that digital collectibles are reshaping cultural value, so the post-internet model of seeking institutional legitimacy through online visibility no longer defines the field. He points to Evil Biscuit's Drifella III, a 2025 NFT work that merges collectibles and art and mobilizes the installation view used in post-internet art. Droitcour cites the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which reports that young high-net-worth individuals rank collectibles as equal to or more important than fine art. He also references Ben Davis's concept of "quantitative aesthetics," which Davis describes as an elite culture organized around numbers and metrics rather than connoisseurship.
- Opinion: Why Has China Decisively Halted Stablecoins? (wublock.substack.com)
Wang Yongli argues that China has decisively halted stablecoins, prioritizing digital RMB development while suppressing virtual currencies, and that promoting RMB stablecoins offers little advantage. He points to a November 28 joint meeting of the PBOC and 12 other departments, which stated that stablecoins are a form of virtual currency and that their issuance and trading are illegal. Wang, who previously served as Vice President and Executive Director of Bank of China, says U.S. dollar stablecoins dominate over 99% of the global stablecoin market, leaving little room for non-USD stablecoins. He also argues that U.S. stablecoin legislation, which took effect July 18, may ultimately undermine the stablecoin industry itself.
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Dec 26, 2025 (buttondown.com)
- @web3privacy: Web3Privacy Now Awards 2025 are live (xcancel.com)
The Web3Privacy Now Awards 2025 are live, and a submission from @aisconnolly and @TACEO_IO names @fileverse, Las Comadres ZK and @Zcash among its favourite projects. The submission states that privacy is now broadly considered a major need in decentralised systems, and it lists the DC Privacy Summit (from @projectglitch_) and the Cypherpunk Retreat by @web3privacy and @protocollabs as key 2025 privacy events. It names @aztecnetwork Ignition and @iptf_updates as the most exciting privacy innovations and nominates Chat control as Doxxer of the year.
- @flyosity: TikTok users copying redacted text from Epstein file PDFs to read it (x.com)
- @toly: It's only free speech if it comes from the gdpr region of the eu (x.com)
- Delete. Silence. Abolish:How Europe’s Digital ServicesAct Threatens Free Speech (t.co)
- OpenFront x EigenCloud: How a game night turned into Verifiable Tournaments (blog.eigencloud.xyz)
OpenFront and EigenCloud ran the first verifiable tournament on the game, using EigenCompute to compute match results that anyone can verify, with payouts settling onchain automatically when a match ends. The collaboration aimed to enable real-money tournaments without changing gameplay, which runs offchain with the same latency and player experience. OpenFront, which has over 800,000 monthly active users, ran a live Winter Championship Finals with 5 teams and 30+ players, where players bought in with USDC and received payouts automatically. OpenFront founder Evan Pellegrini said that paid tournaments were previously impossible because payment processors froze accounts, international transfers took weeks, and manual payouts took hours.
- $AAVE token alignment (governance.aave.com)
Ernesto Boado, co-founder of BGD Labs, has posted an Aave Governance proposal asking AAVE token holders to take control of Aave's brand assets, including domains, social handles, naming rights and GitHub organisations, through a DAO-controlled legal vehicle with anti-capture protections. He argues that private parties should not have unilateral control over these assets or be able to attribute the name "Aave" to themselves, and cites concerns that the brand is being used for private monetisation. The proposal states that it does not concern Aave Labs' contributor status, is not tied to the previous swap features thread, and includes no executable payload, with an on-chain vote proposed.
- @kazani: GLM-4.7 open source model improves coding and reasoning benchmarks (farcaster.xyz)
Z.ai has launched GLM-4.7, its newest flagship model, with a focus on stronger coding, reasoning, and multi-step task performance. The model enhances interleaved thinking, a mechanism that lets it plan ahead before responding, and adds preserved and turn-level thinking for more consistent long conversations. It is claimed to significantly improve real-world coding metrics and reasoning benchmarks over its predecessor, GLM-4.6, with especially large gains in agentic and tool-use scenarios. The model is fully open source and accessible through APIs and platforms including OpenRouter and PPQai.
- @CupOJoseph: decentralization doesn't mean never coordinating to fight back (x.com)
- @fileverse: ZKovery social account recovery with 2-of-3 trusted contacts (farcaster.xyz)
- @gnosis_: Gnosis leadership AMA on Jan 7 covering 3.0 vision and 2026 roadmap (x.com)
- Runtime Art on an Always On Computer (paragraph.com)
Terraforms, a generative artwork deployed on Ethereum in late 2021, is presented as an example of runtime art: a continuously running program rather than a stored image. The article describes it as 9,910 animated, text-based parcels forming a three-dimensional structure called the Hypercastle, with visuals generated on chain. Parcels can enter a Daydream state where Unicode glyph drawings are written on-chain, an irreversible change, and the article says the structure erodes over millennia unless enough parcels stay in active states. The article argues that public blockchains can host long-duration, interactive artworks, a point it says the work's creator, 0x113d, also describes as runtime art.
- Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Further Shifts Scaling for Mass Compute (medium.com)
Takens argues that Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade, which went live in early December 2025, continues a shift away from treating data as cheap and toward making transactions fast and affordable while managing data availability more carefully. The upgrade raises blobs per block from 9 to 15 later that month and 21 in early 2026, and EIP-7825 caps transactions at about 17 million gas. The article also cites EIP-7951, which adds secp256r1 signature support that could enable device-native signing, and notes that an artist, diid, stored a 10-megabyte video on-chain across 191 transactions.