Top crypto stories of week 3, 2026
Mon 12 to Sun 18 January 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 12 to Sun 18 January 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 22 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, xcancel.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @jacek0x: Farcaster acquisition rumors, Base competition, and trading pivots (x.com)
Farcaster may be acquired, according to a rumor the author says they cannot verify. The author notes that Farcaster has pivoted into trading with Clanker, while Base has pivoted into trading with Zora, making them competitors. The author says Base is the bigger player, that a lot of network activity comes from Base (though they are not sure), and that Base app's reception has been less enthusiastic than expected. The author also argues that Coinbase's money and distribution will not settle the outcome alone, and that a Coinbase acquisition would end Farcaster's decentralized social thesis and could push people to fork the protocol.
- @beeple: how to fix your entire life in 1 day (xcancel.com)
- @YourFavoriteCharacter: next Spiderman must be onchain from day 1 (x.com)
Characters, rather than franchises, carry the lasting value of intellectual property, and onchain "character economies" could let fans share in that value from the start. Iron Man, created in the 1960s, was revived by a 2008 film, and the three Iron Man films alone generated roughly $2.4 billion in box office revenue. The piece notes that Japan's production committee model splits rights among multiple parties, making ownership hard to see from outside, and it argues that onchain infrastructure would make existing character value legible rather than create it.
- Samourai Letter #1: Notes From The Inside (bitcoinmagazine.com)
Keonne Rodriguez, co-developer of Samourai Wallet, writes from FPC Morgantown in West Virginia about his first day in federal prison, after surrendering on December 19 to begin a 60-month sentence. He describes intake, which included being issued a uniform, a medical and psychological screening, and gifts of clothing, food and toiletries from fellow inmates, including cellmate Mike and neighbors Dave, Omar and Hasan. The letter also promotes a petition to free Rodriguez and William Hill, another Samourai Wallet developer.
- @VitalikButerin: We stand for human dignity above political teams (x.com)
Vitalik Buterin argues that human dignity should take priority over political team loyalty. He says the bottom line in resolving disputes over individual situations must be a shared commitment to protecting the dignity of all people, and that this matters more than political teams. He also says people on one's own side whose actions show indifference to dignity, such as opportunistic users of appeals to freedom and life, should be opposed too. The post lists conflicts it names, including Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea, and rejects labeling advocacy for these peoples as antisemitic or Russophobic.
- @federalreserve: Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell (x.com)
- How to destroy your life on one day (x.com)
- x402, Agentic Payments and Crypto’s Emerging Role in the AI Agent Economy (galaxy.com)
Galaxy Research argues that agentic payment standards, led by Coinbase's x402 standard, could let AI agents pay for services and data directly with stablecoins and other crypto assets. Coinbase launched x402 in May, and it uses the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code to enable crypto transactions on the web. Coinbase released x402 V2 on Dec. 11, adding a unified payment interface, reusable access sessions, and automatic service discovery. x402 activity surged in late October and early November, driven partly by memecoin minting, and has since tapered off, with agent-to-agent, data and infrastructure uses taking a growing share of transactions.
- Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump's tariffs? (polymarket.com)
- @EleanorTerrett: White House may pull crypto bill support over Coinbase yield (xcancel.com)
The White House is considering withdrawing its support for the crypto market structure bill unless Coinbase returns to negotiations with a yield agreement that satisfies the banks, according to a source close to the Trump administration cited by Eleanor Terrett. The source says the White House is furious over Coinbase's "unilateral" action on Wednesday, which it was not notified of in advance and which it calls a "rug pull" against the White House and the industry. The source adds that the White House does not believe one company speaks for the entire industry.
- @beeple: NIKITA SCROLLING CT (x.com)
- @TheStalwart: Central bankers from ECB, BoE, SNB, RBA, BoC issue statement (x.com)
- @doomerfied: Anthropic to acquire CoinGecko, will launch Claude Crypto AI (x.com)
- Ralph and Coding Agent Escape Velocity (research.auditless.com)
Ralphing, a technique popularized by Geoffrey Huntley that runs the same coding-agent prompt repeatedly in a loop until the task is done, is presented as an effective way to use coding agents on long tasks, such as overnight runs. The author suggests it works because each iteration starts with a fresh context, which avoids performance degradation in large context windows, and because it encourages self-contextualizing code. Steve Yegge's post "Welcome to Gas Town" is cited as predicting that software engineers will become orchestrators of several agents in parallel, and it includes an eight-stage framework for AI-assisted coding, from near-zero AI use to building custom orchestrators. The author expects money to be a key bottleneck, arguing that the coming decade will favor companies and individuals who can earn positive return on their coding credits.
- Against the God Complex: A Philosophy for Designing Emergent Crypto Networks (paragraph.com)
The essay argues that consumer crypto networks should be designed as emergent, evolving systems rather than engineered according to top-down plans, since social behavior cannot be deduced from first principles. It supports this with the claim that identical token mechanisms can produce opposite outcomes depending on social meaning, using a hypothetical comparison of two networks that airdrop tokens, one framed as wages and one as founding-cohort membership. It also names Herbert Simon, John Holland, Stuart Kauffman, Ilya Prigogine, Elinor Ostrom, Matt Ridley and E.O. Wilson as sources for its view that control undermines adaptability. The text ends abruptly before its design questions are given.
- never underestimate the global nerddom (xcancel.com)
- On DeFi, DeFi*, and DeFAI (substack.com)
The article argues that DeFi is having a quiet resurgence and that its enduring product-market fit depends on whether protocols keep cypherpunk properties or compromise them for UX. It distinguishes "DeFi" (or DeFi Classic), which prioritizes decentralization and censorship resistance, from "DeFi*", which accepts compromises for UX, best execution and competitiveness with offchain alternatives. The author's stated intuition is that DeFi represents an opportunity in the trillions, while DeFi* may represent one in the quadrillions. The article also cites newer verticals such as DePIN, stablecoin commerce (NoFi), and DeFAI, with Helium's $HNT and $MOBILE tokens as an example, though it notes that some narratives are running ahead of fundamentals.
- Introducing Freedom (freedombrowser.eth.limo)
Freedom 0.6.0 is a minimalist browser preview for the decentralized web that loads Swarm and IPFS content by connecting directly to peers rather than through centralized gateways. It runs local Swarm and IPFS nodes, and users can enter hashes, CIDs, or ENS names into the address bar. The release is read-only for now, with browsing working but publishing and uploading not yet supported. The codebase is not yet open source, and the next steps are a round of auditing and cleanup before it is released publicly. The stated long-term goal is "read, write, own," adding publishing, wallet and cryptographic identity features, and possibly support for other networks such as Arweave or Hypercore-based systems.
- Read, Write, Gamble (open.substack.com)
Jesse Pollak announced that The Base App will pivot further away from social and deeper into trading, following a similar December 2025 pivot by Dan Romero at Farcaster, and the author concludes that token incentives do not produce sustainable social networks. The article cites Farcaster's DAU falling from nearly 100,000 in July 2024 to 40,000-60,000 by October 2025, with protocol revenue down 99% from its February 2024 peak. It contrasts this with Bluesky, which reports 40M+ users and 3.5M to 4M daily logins without a token, and with Friend Tech, whose $FRIEND token fell 98%.
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Jan 16, 2026 (buttondown.com)