Top crypto stories of week 1, 2026
Mon 29 December 2025 to Sun 4 January 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 29 December 2025 to Sun 4 January 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 11 comments in total. Most-shared sources: farcaster.xyz, gokhan.substack.com, x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Happy new year!
- @suji: Porn is the best use case for SocialFi creator coins, Base can't deliver (farcaster.xyz)
- Crypto Gaming Collapses as Funding Dries Up (decrypt.co)
Crypto gaming's boom has faded in 2025, with many games shutting down as venture capital funding dried up, according to Decrypt's reporting. Developers of shuttered titles often cited a lack of funding, and Robby Yung, CEO of investments at Animoca Brands, said "Venture capital funding in gaming has been dry for years." Chris Heatherly, former CEO of Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, said crypto funds stopped deploying and writing checks in mid-to-late 2023, and that The Mystery Society shut down in February due to lack of funding. Gunzilla Games' GUN token was down 89% from its March all-time high as of December 15.
- No Notetaking Apps will Make It into the Near Future (gokhan.substack.com)
The author describes how they manage personal notes through Cursor, coding agents and Obsidian, and argues that preserving the database and the portability of the file system matters more than any particular notetaking app. They say coding agents can turn local machines into a living memex, and they cite Simon Willison's claude-code-transcripts, a Python CLI tool that converts Claude Code sessions into readable HTML transcripts that can be published online. The author also says coding agents make on-demand lifelogging possible and expects these practices to shape agentic market infrastructure.
- Koinly Warning: Third-Party Breach Exposes User Emails – Is Your Tax Data Safe? (cryptonews.com)
- @kazani: Food delivery apps use "desperation scores" for algorithmic serfdom (farcaster.xyz)
- @kazani: what iPhone private browsing actually does vs what people assume (farcaster.xyz)
Private browsing on iPhone mainly protects local privacy, not anonymity online, according to this explainer. Private mode generally stops the browser from saving history, search history, cookies, and form data on the device, and cookies do not persist between sessions. It does not change what websites or the internet provider can see, since websites can still see the IP address and the provider can still see that traffic comes from the device. The article also notes that some tracking does not rely on cookies, so private tabs alone do not stop it.
- Mac's bookmarks (t.me)
- @KobeissiLetter: US gains control of Venezuela's $17.3T oil reserves (x.com)
Trump says the US now controls Venezuela's oil reserves, and KobeissiLetter calculates them to be worth $17.3 trillion. That figure multiplies 303 billion barrels of crude by an oil price of about $57 per barrel. KobeissiLetter also says that even at half the market rate, the reserves would be worth $8.7 trillion, more than the GDP of every country except the US and China. The text says oil markets will first react to the news on Sunday at 6 PM ET.
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Jan 02, 2026 (buttondown.com)
- @PolymarketMoney: Odds of US bank failure spike to 71% on collapse reports (x.com)
- Lightly technical walkthrough of Trust wallet extension supply-chain attack (slowmist.medium.com)
The SlowMist Security Team reports that version 2.68 of the Trust Wallet browser extension contained malicious code that stole users' mnemonic phrases, after Trust Wallet's official X account confirmed a security risk and told users to disable it and upgrade to version 2.69. According to the analysis, the injected code iterated through wallets stored in the extension, retrieved encrypted mnemonic phrases, decrypted them with the user's password or passkeyPassword, and sent them to the domain api.metrics-trustwallet[.]com, which was registered on 2025-12-08. SlowMist estimates losses of about 33 BTC (roughly USD 3 million) on Bitcoin, and roughly USD 3 million on Ethereum mainnet and Layer-2 networks, with stolen funds moved through centralized exchanges and cross-chain bridges.
- @harmvddorpel: Mutant Garden Seeder Mutation Minter releases Jan 7, 2026 (xcancel.com)
- A Newly Created Polymarket Account Made $436,759.61 on Nicolás Maduro’s Capture (gizmodo.com)
A newly created Polymarket account reportedly made $436,759.61 on bets about Nicolás Maduro leaving power, according to Axios's Herb Scribner. The account reportedly placed $30,000 on the toppling of Maduro on Friday, and by the next morning, after Maduro was taken from Venezuela by the U.S. military, the winnings had reached that amount. An archive.ph snapshot circulating on social media puts the figure at $407,920.12, and the article notes the source of the figure is not specified. The Wall Street Journal reported that $56.6 million was bet across six contracts on the Maduro-leaves-power issue, with $40 million tied to him leaving by Nov. 30 or Dec. 31.
- Playing with Turmites: better than crypto/rand? (blog.vrypan.net)
The author, who describes themselves as an amateur, argues that a 4-color LLLR turmite image on a 96x54 toroidal grid after 200,000 iterations scores higher on entropy measures than images from random generators. The Shannon entropy is 1.999576 for the LLLR image, against 1.999581 for Go's math/rand and 1.999600 for crypto/rand, with the maximum being 2. On the mutual information measures, the LLLR image scores lower, for example 0.000515 for horizontal versus 0.001167 for math/rand and 0.001158 for crypto/rand, which the author reads as less predictable. The author suggests this may reflect a flaw in the measures or that math/rand is less unpredictable than commonly assumed, and links the topic to Silvio Micali's work on pseudorandomness.
- Meet the onchain crypto detectives fighting crime better than the cops (cointelegraph.com)
Crypto security investigators, many working under pseudonyms and often outside formal law enforcement, trace stolen funds across wallets, mixers and bridges, sometimes faster than authorities, according to this Cointelegraph feature. 0xSaiyanGod, a security researcher who works a day job, built Doom Bot, a Discord-based phishing detection bot, and helped identify wallets tied to North Korean-linked activity during the $1.5 billion Bybit incident. Heiner Garcia, a former security analyst for Colombia's Ministry of Defense who now works with Telefónica's security division, uses human intelligence methods and fake profiles to track suspected North Korean IT workers. SlowMist founder Cos says incident war rooms open within minutes of a breach, and that the field remains understaffed.
- MIT releases free course on AI agents covering RAG, MCP, and production use (farcaster.xyz)
The text reports that MIT has released a free, comprehensive course on AI agents covering fundamentals and applied use cases, and it links to a GitHub repository for the material. Listed topics include what AI agents are and how they differ from chatbots, planning and task decomposition, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for grounding agents in external knowledge, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for structuring context, memory, and tool access. The course also includes examples and case studies of real implementations and is described as a practical base for building agentic systems in production.
- @kazani: Opus 4.5 + GLM 4.7 prompt for vibe-coding with plan-first workflow (farcaster.xyz)
This is a system-style prompt for coding assistants (shared as tuned for Opus 4.5 and GLM 4.7) that sets a plan-first workflow for vibe-coding. The assistant must give a detailed implementation plan covering steps, files, risks, testing and impact, and must not output code until the user explicitly approves. The prompt also requires modular, Domain-Driven Design structure, heavy documentation answering where, what, how and why, and a closing question asking whether any questions remain. It further asks for a self-review "deslop" pass after generating code, plus linting and type checks, and leaves project-specific details such as language, test framework and build commands as bracketed placeholders for the user to fill in.
- @kazani: Google's 2026 developer verification will end F-Droid on Android (farcaster.xyz)
Google's developer verification requirement will stop apps from unverified developers installing on certified Android devices, starting September 2026 in select countries and globally in 2027. Registering requires a $25 fee, a government ID, personal details submitted to Google, and registered signing keys. F-Droid says the requirement will effectively end its project, since it cannot force open source developers to register with Google. Google promises an "advanced flow" for experienced users but has not detailed how it works, and non-certified operating systems such as GrapheneOS are not affected.
- What Consumer Crypto Products Get Wrong #01 (gokhan.substack.com)
The author argues that most consumer crypto apps will soon be replaced by AI-driven, infrastructure-level products, and that current app builders are misreading what users want. The piece says users have already mastered investing, saving and derivatives and want liquid, accountable market networks that feel like cash, not gamified apps. It cites the World chain app store and Farcaster mini apps as examples of low-quality app marketplaces, and names Aave and Morpho as examples of lending protocols it considers significant. The piece is largely unsourced and loosely argued, and it frames its claims in informal, sometimes hyperbolic language.
