Top crypto stories of week 4, 2026
Mon 19 to Sun 25 January 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 19 to Sun 25 January 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 16 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @dwr: Neynar is acquiring Farcaster protocol, app, and Clanker (farcaster.xyz)
Neynar is acquiring the Farcaster protocol, the Farcaster app, and Clanker from Merkle, with ownership transfers planned over the next few weeks. Varun & Dan (Varun and Dan) announced the change, saying Neynar will run and maintain everything going forward and will take over leadership of Farcaster. According to the announcement, some Merkle team members, Varun, and Dan will step back from day-to-day Farcaster work, and the FAQ says the Clanker team is continuing with Neynar. The authors state that after five years, Farcaster needs a new approach and leadership, and that Neynar will share its builder-focused vision soon.
- I'm making an RSS reader (john.onolan.org)
The author is building an RSS reader called Alcove, a project they describe as a terrible idea done mostly for fun. They say existing readers do not work the way they want, their current RSS app has not been updated in about 10 years and has a poor reading experience, and Twitter links and YouTube subscriptions are hard to keep up with. Their goal is a quiet single place to catch up on things they care about, without noise and engagement farming. Progress updates are shared on Twitter and on social web platforms such as Ghost, Mastodon, Flipboard and Threads.
- vitalik.eth: In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social (farcaster.xyz)
Vitalik Buterin says he plans to be fully back on decentralized social in 2026, arguing that better mass communication tools need more competition, which decentralization enables through a shared data layer that anyone can build clients on. He says he has already used decentralized social this year, reading and posting through Firefly, a multi-client covering X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky. He criticizes crypto social projects that treat adding a speculative coin as innovation, citing Substack as proof that money and social can mix well when it means subscribing to creators rather than creating price bubbles. He praises the Aave team for stewarding Lens and says the incoming team is genuinely interested in the social side, and he encourages others to spend more time on Lens, Farcaster and the wider decentralized social world.
- Mask Network to Steward the Next Chapter of Lens (lens.xyz)
Mask Network will become the new steward of Lens, taking over the next phase of the decentralized social platform from the original Lens team, which will move into an advisory role. The announcement says Mask has the product expertise to move Lens from infrastructure to everyday consumer use, with the goal of a unified social experience built on Lens Chain. Lens launched V1 in May 2022, went live on Polygon mainnet in April 2023, and launched Lens Chain and V3 in April 2025, with all user data and connections migrated in the largest migration to date. The text names Suji Yan as leading Mask's involvement.
- @niftygateway: Nifty Gateway closing February 23, 2026, now withdrawal-only (x.com)
- Care to Cowork with Claude? (research.auditless.com)
Claude Cowork, released as a research preview for Claude Max users, brings Claude Code-like agentic capabilities to a Mac app, opening up autonomous agent use to non-technical users. The article notes that the first iteration took 1.5 weeks to build, according to Felix from the Anthropic technical team. It argues that Cowork lacks the composability of CLI-based tools like Claude Code, notably the ability to programmatically invoke agents, which it cites as the reason "Ralphing" is impossible in Cowork. The author also suggests that coding's determinism explains Claude Code's strength and that other domains may progress more slowly.
- 2Fiat — Crypto In. Swipe Out. (2fiat.com)
2Fiat is a service that offers virtual prepaid Mastercard cards which users can fund by instantly converting Bitcoin, Monero, USDT or other cryptocurrencies to fiat currency. The page says cards can be loaded with amounts from $10 to $10,000, support 3D Secure, and can be added to Apple Pay or Google Pay for online and offline use. It also states that cards can be used anywhere Mastercard is accepted and that users can order unlimited cards.
- a16z investments in startups that are/were building a bleak vision of the future (modelrepublic.substack.com)
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has invested in startups that The Midas Project describes as building a bleak vision of the future, including products built on mass deception, cheating, and gambling loopholes. The Midas Project's survey covers 18 of the firm's most notorious investments, which the article says reflect a pattern involving hundreds of millions of dollars. Doublespeed, funded by a $1 million Speedrun investment, sells phone farms that run fake accounts posing as humans to promote products, and a December 2025 hack exposed more than 1,100 phones and over 400 TikTok accounts. Cluely, which led by a16z raised a $15 million Series A in June 2025, markets AI tools for cheating on dates, interviews, and tests. A16z did not respond to a request for comment.
- Cyborg Upgrade (isthisanart.substack.com)
The author, who was diagnosed with diabetes in 2021, describes receiving an upgraded insulin system in 2025: Omnipod Dash and Dexcom G6 hardware run with open source software acting as an artificial pancreas. The essay argues that open source tools give patients more freedom and agency than paternalistic diabetic technology, and that freedom and community are not opposed. It also draws on Jillian Weise's essay "Common Cyborg" and a Donna Haraway quote to argue that the author's own dependence on technology rules out a retreat from technology and calls for rethinking personhood.
- @alifarhat79: China is going to war (x.com)
- @Bitcoin_Teddy: imagine a police bodycam leaks your seed phrase (x.com)
- @Private DeFi: Gnosis Guild tests RAILGUN_connect on CoW Swap frontend (x.com)
Gnosis Guild has tested the next stage of RAILGUN_connect, a universal DeFi connector for private 0zk addresses, on the CoW Swap frontend. RAILGUN_connect uses Mechs, which are NFTs with 0x addresses embedded in them, so a 0zk address can interface with DeFi frontends as if it were a regular 0x address. Gnosis Guild's Zodiac Pilot tool connects a Mech to a frontend, simulates and bundles the on-chain calls, and executes the transaction. A prototype in Terminal Wallet, a CLI wallet integrated with the RAILGUN SDK, can already connect, simulate, and execute a transaction on CoW Swap.
- GitHub - xai-org/x-algorithm: Algorithm powering the For You feed on X (github.com)
This GitHub repository contains the core code that determines which posts appear in the For You feed on X. It combines in-network posts from accounts a viewer follows with out-of-network posts found through ML-based retrieval, filters them using a range of inputs, and ranks them with a transformer model. The August 13, 2026 release added key configuration parameters, visibility filtering code, and the Phoenix model's training code with synthetic data generation. The September 18, 2026 update adds reports showing whether posts were withheld in a country after a legal demand, and the August 14, 2026 notes say the Brazil2026ElectionFilter removes posts from accounts reported to Brazil's Electoral Court, unless the viewer follows the account.
- @rainbowdotme: Running permissionless Uniswap CCA for $RNBW price discovery (x.com)
- @balajis: Free speech is open borders for ideology (x.com)
- @rainbowdotme: $RNBW airdrop snapshot on Jan 26 at 4:20pm EST, drop Feb 5 (xcancel.com)
- @kazani: Mullvad VPN passes X41 D-Sec security audit with no critical flaws (farcaster.xyz)
Mullvad VPN published a new security audit report by the German firm X41 D-Sec, which found no critical flaws or risks to user privacy. The white-box audit covered backend services for accounts and payments, including the public API, authentication, device registration, payment processing, and WireGuard key distribution. It identified 3 medium-severity issues, which Mullvad fixed during the audit, and the auditors also recommended strengthening mutual TLS configuration, cryptographic signatures in VPN relays, and concurrency management. The audit noted Mullvad's minimalist data management, including separation of user identities from VPN keys and regular key rotation.
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Jan 23, 2026 (buttondown.com)
- @BorrowUSDC: Uranium is now onchain as collateral, powered by Etherlink (x.com)
Users can now borrow USDC against tokenized uranium on Etherlink, using the xU3O8 token from uranium_io as collateral in Morpho markets on Oku. The post describes depositing xU3O8, which represents a digital claim on physical uranium held in a facility, and borrowing USDC while keeping ownership of the underlying uranium. It outlines steps that include bridging USDC to Etherlink for gas, swapping into xU3O8, and borrowing on Oku, with an optional offramp to a bank account through Bridge.xyz after KYC.
- Saga becomes latest victim in DeFi hacking spree (protos.com)
Saga has paused its Saga EVM blockchain after a hack drained close to $7 million. The scaling solution describes itself as a "gasless EVM environment that gives you the full Ethereum experience," and its wider ecosystem reportedly includes web3 gaming, DeFi and AI agents. Blockchain security firm Decurity said the attacker "minted D tokens (Saga Dollar) out of thin air" using a helper contract that abused IBC mechanisms, while "Onchain Investigator" Specter suggested a private key compromise. The stolen funds were bridged to Ethereum as USDC and swapped for about 2,089 ETH, worth just over $6 million.
