Top crypto stories of week 12, 2026
Mon 16 to Sun 22 March 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 16 to Sun 22 March 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 41 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, firefly.social.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- DFOS Protocol (protocol.dfos.com)
DFOS is an open protocol for identities, signed records, and delegated permissions that any compatible application can verify independently. Identities are anchored in a signed history rather than a central directory, and the did:dfosidentifier stays the same as keys and services change. Signed content records name documents by hash, so attribution can be checked without opening the document, but the protocol does not encrypt, and a relay operator can read every blob it stores. Verification shows who signed a record, not whether the claim is true.
- x402 vs MPP vs ACP vs UCP: Same problem. Different floors. One missing. (x.com)
The author's central claim is that x402, ACP, UCP and MPP are not competing but occupy different layers of machine payments, and that the layer for hierarchical spending delegation between agents does not yet exist. x402, shipped by Coinbase in May 2025, handles simple per-call payments in USDC on Base, with 75 million transactions and $24 million in volume reported. ACP, co-authored by OpenAI and Stripe, and UCP, built by Google and Shopify, cover checkout for physical goods and subscriptions, while Stripe and Tempo's MPP adds rail-agnostic settlement and launched the day before. The article says no protocol defines how a parent agent delegates a sub-budget to a child agent with cryptographic enforcement.
- EU Inc. a digital-by-default European corporate framework (ec.europa.eu)
- did:cow (cow.watch)
did:cow is a proposed decentralized identifier intended to give stronger guarantees for identities used in ATProto. A did:cow ID pairs a pointer to a did:web or did:plc ID with an Ethereum network address that can update that pointer. Creating an ID requires no blockchain transaction, while a transaction is needed to point it at a different did:web or did:plc ID or to change the controlling blockchain address.
- @fileverse: dDocs adds ZK-encrypted folder sharing with ENS-based permissions (x.com)
- @LefterisJP: Who cares about words anyway (x.com)
- Resolv Labs' USR Stablecoin Exploit Leads to $25M Loss and Severe Depeg (threatcluster.io)
- A Government Guide to Open Protocols (protocolized.summerofprotocols.com)
Public institutions adopting open protocols should treat protocol governance as a core infrastructure responsibility, because protocols evolve through distributed processes that procurement contracts do not cover. France's digital directorate, DINUM, runs Tchap, a secure messaging platform for the French public administration, on the Matrix protocol, and in 2025 became the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a formal member. The Matrix for Public Sector forum, launched in October 2025, brings together representatives from six EU Member States and the European Commission to coordinate deployments. Governance influence is unevenly distributed, and key security functions may depend on very few individuals.
- ETHSKILLS (ethskills.com)
ETHSKILLS is a collection of knowledge packs meant to help AI agents build correctly on Ethereum, and its page presents it as a way for anyone to ship onchain, expert or not. The page says it works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any agent, and it asks agents to read its SKILL.md file before writing Solidity or deploying anything. The skills cover topics such as Ethereum's upgrades, Layer 2 networks, gas costs, security patterns, contract address checks, and smart contract testing. Setup instructions are provided for Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenClaw, and shell scripts.
- ClawCharts Leaderboard (clawcharts.com)
ClawCharts ranks 11 tracked repositories by stars, with OpenClaw in first place at 391,575. The tracked repositories hold 928,844 stars in total, which grew by 4,804 (+0.5%) over the past seven days. Hermes Agent ranks second with 252,424 stars, and PaperclipRising shows the fastest growth at +2.9% over seven days. The page also reports 478 active contributors and 5,605 commits across all projects in the last seven days.
- Now available: AgentKit, proof of human for the agentic web (world.org)
World has launched AgentKit beta, a developer toolkit that lets verified humans delegate their World ID to AI agents so that websites can check that a unique human stands behind each agent. The article argues that micropayments alone, such as the x402 protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, do not reveal how many distinct people control a set of agents, and that proof of unique humanity fills that gap. AgentKit is built as an extension to x402 v2 and is available in limited beta, with examples including restaurant reservations on Resy or OpenTable, news curation, and capped free trials of five requests per unique human.
- Tally Is Shutting Down (x.com)
Tally, a governance tooling company for decentralized protocols, is shutting down after more than five years and has cancelled its planned ICO. Dennison Bertram writes that the company could not build a viable business because the venture-backed market for governance infrastructure the company expected has not developed. He says Tally's infrastructure handled over $1 billion in payments, protected at one point over $80 billion in value, and had over a million users, with the governance application winding down at the end of the month. Enterprise clients are being moved to continuation plans with major partners, and the team is exploring new opportunities.
- @thefireflyapp: Bluesky's $100M Series B validates decentralized social (firefly.social)
- @Polymarket: Reddit CEO says company considering Face ID to crack down on bots (x.com)
- @Flynnjamm: passkeys are devslop, confusing for users, don't make it standard (x.com)
- CryptoSlate x402 pay-per-article (proofivy.com)
CryptoSlate has launched what it calls the first production deployment of x402 pay-per-article, through which AI agents pay for its content via Proofivy infrastructure. When an agent requests an article, the request goes through an x402 payment endpoint, and the agent pays a small amount in Base USDC to receive the article content. The article presents this model as an alternative to publishers either blocking bots or letting them scrape freely, and says publishers can keep access free for humans and approved bots while charging AI traffic. The listed price for both the article list and article fetch endpoints is 0.01 USDC.
- @tulipking: AI devs will ignore payment protocols and optimize for price alone (x.com)
Tulipking argues that AI agents will ignore payment protocols such as MPP, x402 and AP2 and optimize for price alone. The post claims that these agents will be driven by consumer preference, which it says will come down to price in 99% of instances. It also predicts that the winning protocol will be the one that drives price and friction as low as possible, even by lying, cheating or stealing.
- @MartyBent: read Sovereign Individual as AI makes proof-of-life unfalsifiable (x.com)
- @bonafidehan: Shape launches as NFT-focused network during bear market (firefly.social)
- @GALLERY: Gallery is winding down, transitioning to read-only mode April 12 (firefly.social)
Gallery, a digital curation app, is winding down as a company and will move to read-only mode on April 12, 2026. Until then, users have a 30-day window to make final edits to their galleries, though the app's maintenance mode may cause bugs or performance issues. After that date, users can no longer add, delete, or edit content, but their galleries remain viewable as a digital archive. The Gallery mobile app will be sunset, and the company is open sourcing its code repository while exploring ways to keep the app's history preserved long term.