Top crypto stories of week 16, 2026
Mon 13 to Sun 19 April 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 13 to Sun 19 April 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 48 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Aave Incurs $200M Bad Debt After KelpDAO rsETH Exploit Trigger Umbrella Slashing (ainvest.com)
- Agentic Payments: The Real Money Is Somewhere Else Entirely (x.com)
Agentic payments are real, but the payment layer itself looks structurally weak, and value may instead accrue to settlement layers, orchestration and especially identity and trust infrastructure. Production integrations from Coinbase (x402), Stripe, Visa, Google, AWS and Cloudflare are live, yet x402 volume is about $30 million over roughly ten months across around 3,900 merchants, with the median merchant far below outliers like Felix, which earned $163,686 in one month. Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly is cited as expecting a long adoption curve, with a first purpose-built agentic model from a major AI lab a near-term catalyst.
- @cassie: Farcaster Classic not launching token, Hypersnap token coming (farcaster.xyz)
Farcaster Classic, the fork maintained by Neynar, says it is not launching a token; the token talk instead concerns Hypersnap, a separate fork of Snapchain, and the Hypersnap team calls it a Farcaster token. The post says this has caused confusion because Neynar refers only to its side of the fork as Farcaster, even though it has none of the original protocol dev team. The author defines "farcaster" as the ecosystem and protocol and "farcaster classic" as Neynar's side of the fork, and says the history of ETH and ETH Classic makes this view clear. The post also states that a Farcaster token is coming this month.
- @CoWSwap: frontend issue at swap.cow.fi, do not use CoW Swap currently (x.com)
- vitalik.eth: eth.limo DNS registrar compromised, avoid until resolved (farcaster.xyz)
- The $12.6 Trillion Market Moving to Ethereum That Nobody Is Talking About (x.com)
Institutions including JPMorgan, BlackRock, Apollo, Société Générale and the Banque de France are using public Ethereum as operational financial infrastructure, mainly for repo and tokenized collateral. JPMorgan's Kinexys has processed over $300 billion in intraday repo transactions since launch, and its MONY tokenized money market fund launched on Ethereum mainnet in December 2025 with $100 million in seed capital. In December 2024, SG-FORGE executed the first blockchain-based repo with a Eurosystem central bank, and BlackRock's BUIDL fund, launched on Ethereum in March 2024, peaked near $2.9 billion in AUM by mid-2025.
- @antirez: building a Hacker News replacement with 10-20 moderators and karma (x.com)
- $795 million total hacked in DeFi in 2026 alone (x.com)
DeFi hacks have caused about $795 million in losses in 2026 so far, covering January through mid-April. Roughly $86 million was lost in January to smart contract bugs and executive key compromises, $27 million in February to bridge and oracle attacks, and $52 million in March to stablecoin minting and lending-pool exploits. April's losses of about $630 million are described as the worst month on record. Some have blamed the recent release of Anthropic's Mythos for making sophisticated attacks faster and easier.
- @CoWSwap: Revoke all approvals after DNS hijacking at 14:54 UTC today (firefly.social)
- The Dark Horse of Prediction Markets (tim0x.substack.com)
Technologies and narratives spread because an underlying structural shift, or inflection point, comes first, and prediction markets, led by Kalshi and Polymarket, are presented as the newest one. Earlier examples include AWS lowering software costs in 2006 and the dot-com bust enabling Web2 services. The text says capital in early prediction market positions sits idle, and Gondor, a protocol, would let traders borrow USDC against a Polymarket position and deploy it in other trades. It also notes that Polymarket is capped at a billion-dollar valuation while investment in these applications continues.
- @sterlingcrispin: Polymarket bot that auto-buys "No" on all non-sports markets (x.com)
- @cassie: we don't negotiate with terrorists, there's no allocation for you (farcaster.xyz)
- @mvr: What's your protocol token allocation? (farcaster.xyz)
- Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge apparently exploited (theblock.co)
- A Guide To Crypto Crime (2026) (info.arkm.com)
Crypto crime has grown in scale, with the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recording over 181,000 cryptocurrency-related complaints and more than $11B in reported U.S. losses. Investment fraud is the largest driver, accounting for nearly 49% of scam-related theft according to the report. The article also cites large individual cases, including the $285M Drift exploit on 1 April 2026 and the roughly $624M Ronin Bridge hack in March 2022, which it links to North Korea's Lazarus Group. It further notes that pseudonymity, cross-border settlement and mixers make cryptocurrency attractive to criminals.
- How to resolve the matter of the Satoshi coins without a freeze (murmurationstwo.substack.com)
The author argues that Bitcoin will likely need a protocol response to quantum computing, and that the hardest question will be what to do with about 1.7 million coins in old pay-to-public-key outputs, including those attributed to Satoshi, that never migrated. The article describes a "freeze" camp of institutions and some developers, including Jameson Lopp and Pieter Wuille, who favor confiscating these coins, and a "do not freeze" camp of Bitcoin maximalists opposed to changing the protocol. The author predicts that institutions will win by precommitting to a freeze fork, and proposes a court-appointed US firm recovering the coins as a possible compromise.
- PND (pnd.ripe.wtf)
PND is a platform where artists can launch releases, operate independently, or use the same release, mint, and rendering tools on their own sites. The text says artists control their contracts, sale terms, and payout paths, and that the release does not depend on PND remaining its primary interface. Artists may export or self-host their work, and PND does not claim to monitor or certify what happens afterward.
- Only 15.9% of Polymarket traders are profitable, 2% earned over $1,000 (farcaster.xyz)
Andrey Sergeenkov reports that only 15.9% of Polymarket traders are profitable, with 84.1% in the red, and that just 2% have earned over $1,000 in their trading history. The share of profitable traders has declined because user growth from election hype brought in less experienced traders. Most profitable traders are short-lived: 53% earned their average profit in a single month, and 73% were active for no more than two months. Only 0.033% of traders have exceeded $100,000 in earnings.
- The Artist-Owned Marketplace (x.com)
The author argues that artists will soon be able to build their own marketplaces to control the collecting experience, regain royalty control, and see who their true fans are. The post says NFT communities are fragmented across minting platforms, social channels, marketplaces and custom sites, and that recent X algorithm changes and marketplace closures show the space's fragility. It presents Hyperliquid's planned HIP-4 launch, which will add prediction market and options products, as a parallel for bringing fragmented trading into one application.
- @_jxom: new eips explorer at eips.sh (x.com)