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)
- 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)
- @niftygateway: Nifty Gateway closing February 23, 2026, now withdrawal-only (x.com)
- Care to Cowork with Claude? (research.auditless.com)
- 2Fiat — Crypto In. Swipe Out. (2fiat.com)
- a16z investments in startups that are/were building a bleak vision of the future (modelrepublic.substack.com)
- Cyborg Upgrade (isthisanart.substack.com)
- @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)
- 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)
- Saga becomes latest victim in DeFi hacking spree (protos.com)